Earlier today an invitation to Microsoft Office Live arrived. For those who haven’t heard yet, this is not a version of Office on the web as some had speculated. Instead, it’s a webhosting deal targeted at small and medium-sized business.

I signed up for this beta invite just like a lot of other people did around the time it was announced. Who else got one and is checking this out? This is how the signup email looks, in case you want to check your spam bin for a false positive:

The email asks to visit a page and enter in a key (is blanked from screenshot above). When you first arrive at the page, you are treated with the following three choices: Office Live Basic (free before and after beta), Office Live Collaboration (free beta, starting at $29.95/month after beta) and Office Live Essentials (free beta, starting at $29.95/month after beta):

I decided to learn more about each plan. The basic plan seemed understandably anemic and would be ad-supported. Why would our business want to show ads? No thanks.

Next, the collaboration plan allows keeping track of being able to share information across a managed websites with employees, this was mildly intriguing, but the 20+ “simple business apps” made me curious. Alas the price of “starting at $29.95″ is the same as the Office Live Essentials and you get more with the Essentials? Who would choose only the Collaboration plan?

We have multiple dedicated servers and don’t need more web hosting or email accounts but I decided to demo this for our offline business and use the most sensibly looking plan: Office Live Essentias. I figured this was at least worth taking a look at during the beta and see if it is something we might be willing to expense 30 bones a month thereafter. We could always cancel.

Onto the Essentials signup. First thing enter in the key sent in the email. Next, select a domain to use. I figured we would use something sales oriented and decided on: leadsarentweak.com which was available (but probably wouldn’t stay that way, keep reading). Then I needed to link this to our existing Microsoft Passport account which was linked to the AdCenter Beta that we have also been checking out.

Seems like the credit card we had on file — for AdCenter — wasn’t validating in the Office Live account so I entered a new one despite the balance due showing as $0. Why not get our plastic when the beta is over if there is no need to charge anything?

Unfortunately this is where the Office lights went dark.

No matter what we did we couldn’t get any of our credit card numbers to work with this form submission process. Something is haywire here because these cards are valid. The process sort of just fell apart here. Yeah, it’s beta, guess they need to get these kinks out, but this is one area — the financial part — that is very important to get right. Was this just me?

Any other readers get invites and get stuck at the CC part?

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