Crain’s Chicago Business cited the cost at $500 million, with the datacenter occupying eight football fields in size. The facility should be open for operation by mid-2008.

The added infrastructure, along with similar projects varying in size and scope, give Microsoft the ability to compete with Internet powers Google and Yahoo on web services. Offering products like Office Live requires Microsoft to create a platform that won’t have a single point of failure.

The demand for web services like Software as a Service will abate if companies can’t satisfy demand reliably. This is what happened in the early days of client/server applications in the 1970′s, leading to the growth of the PC industry.

By spreading out capacity, Microsoft can ensure uptime and service availability, the competition has similar aims. While infrastructure doesn’t grab all the hype among tech industry observers, its importance along with companies spending big dollars on it shows the seriousness of the initiatives and the firms behind it.

The Office productivity suite represents a significant portion of Microsoft’s annual revenue. No one in Redmond would willingly take a sharp blade to the throat of that golden cash cow, but Microsoft had to do something to appeal to people who have embraced software as a service concepts for, among other things, productivity applications.

Office Live Workspace represents a compromise. All the document sharing, none of the cannibalization. A Microsoft spokesperson said the service will be available at no charge later this year.

Each of the following screenshots are clickable; even I’m not mean enough to make you squint for details. The first one shows an event list date and calendar view, with the ability to create and manage schedules:

Here is a view of shared workspace projects and programs, with a listing of documents and files in the workspace and the status of each:

The last screenshot shows the ability to preview Microsoft Office files, in this case a PowerPoint slide, within the browser:

The first service, TSA Learn, consists of three online training modules that teach the essentials of SEM and search engine optimization (SEO). Next is TSA Launch, a selection of more than 20 one-off, a la carte SEM and SEO services. For example, a user can fill out a questionnaire about their business and get a list of potential keywords to use in their search campaign, or enter their existing keywords and get a list of expanded keywords to consider. The third offering is TSA Grow, which is a full-service option where The Search Agency manages all search marketing activities for the subscriber.

(via LiveSide)

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The IPWalk domain tracking site reported how the Office Live service from Microsoft has seen a brisk pace of domain name registrations since the site’s debut.

Office Live offers three levels of website services for customers. A free, ad-supported version allows a customer to register a domain name and set up a small website with email addresses at no cost at the Live Basics level.

Free has been a selling point for Microsoft. Yahoo Small Business has been offering discounted prices on the first year of registration for a domain name, for a price of US$2.99. Yahoo and Microsoft both use Melbourne IT for their domain registrations.

The two companies have been competing in earnest for the small business market, especially with the imminent debut of Microsoft’s AdCenter network for advertisers. That service will go head to head with both Yahoo’s Publisher Network and the dominant ad network, Google AdWords.

Microsoft may be catching up to Yahoo already, IPWalk contends:

This growth could increase for Microsoft. IPWalk cited comments from Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Office Live, who noted the beta of Office Live should be finished by the end of 2006.

At that time, Microsoft will expand availability of Office Live internationally. That should provide a boost to the number of registrations taking place. The number of domains currently registered through Office Live may be viewed at IPWalk’s website.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

That’s a pretty sweet pace for a beta service with relatively little publicity, and represents a pretty good start.

Considering Office Live, with its full-features web design system, free domain name and email accounts (completely free in the basic package), all puts anything Google or Yahoo offers to shame, when Microsoft puts the finishing touches on this service, it could wind up pretty popular.

(via Digg)

Here’s something interesting: Office Live gives you a free domain, but what if you just want to take Microsoft’s kindness and use the domain for your own purposes?

MS isn’t going to help you with a simple option to change the nameservers, but they did do two things good enough that you can do it yourself: They registered the domain through Melbourne IT, not by themselves, and they register all the domains in the name of the Office Live user.

That means you can contact Melbourne IT’s San Francisco office (510.595.2003), register an account with them, add the domain to your account, unlock it, and change the nameservers. Tada! Free domain from Microsoft, at least for one year.

This solution was written by Bob Henry over here, but he also says:

Thanks Microsoft! Their product rules, and it’s great to see they are willing to give back to their users ; )

I couldn’t have put it better myself. It’s nice and all that we are getting all these great web services, but more companies need to understand that holding onto our data only makes their services harder to use. The more open you are, the more we’ll want to sign up with you. Microsoft could have done more here, but at least they didn’t do less.

(via Digg)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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