Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Microsoft Office Live Websites Transitions to Office 365

Attention all Microsoft Office Live Website users. 
Microsoft Office Live websites are now being transitioned over to Office 365. Many of you are getting emails about the mandatory move. This has upset many website users who have their websites hosted at Microsoft Office Live (Melbourne). The reasoning is because Microsoft hosting was a free service and all we had to do is pay for our yearly custom domain name renewal. Now they are making this transition to office 365 and going to be charging each website user an additional $6 or more a MONTH for hosting their website. Plus, we will need to pay for the normal domain name renewal. At first, I didn't worry too much about it because I figured they would offer free transitioning so that beginner website owners didn't have to manually transfer all their files, images, contacts, email ect.. But no they say that every thing must be manually transferred by the Administrator or owner of the website. This is bad news for people like myself who have close to a hundred website pages and thousands of email contacts. A lot of website work is in store for myself and many others. 

So instead of transferring all website content and email files over to Office 365 and paying a lot more a year for hosting, I am going to be transferring my Office Live Websites over to a more affordable hosting company. I will be using Siteground Hosting where it is only $9.95 a year (special I am offering) instead of $6 a month which equals an additional $72.00 a year plus domain name renewal. If any Microsoft Office Live Website owners want to follow me and transfer your website contents to a new hosting company and need help, I am going to be offering my transfer and website help services for a reasonable fee. Considering we will have to transfer our websites no matter what or lose them.
Please contact me here at this blog or comment below. 
Below is a copy of a support ticket from Microsoft Office Live!
Subject: SRX1170591719ID - Microsoft Office Live: Concern related to transition
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 08:59:50 +0000


Hello Tammy,

Thank you for contacting us at Microsoft Office Live Support.

My name is Rajendra Kumar and I have updated the Service Request # 1170591719 to track your concern.

I understand that you have two domain names and need support on getting the promotional link to start the transition. You want to know, if you do not do the self transition on your own, will your website will get transferred automatically to Microsoft Office 365. I value the importance of your concern and I am here to provide you with all the relevant information.

Tammy, I am sorry to say that there is no automated mechanism available to transfer your business to Microsoft Office 365. You will have to transfer it manually by following the simple procedure mentioned below:

1.     Create your Office 365 account
2.     Create accounts for your users
3.     Move all email, contacts, and calendars
4.     Move your website to Office 365
5.     Save your business applications
6.     Move your custom domain. 

Find out more at: Microsoft Office Live Community website. Also, I would like to assure you that we will help you if you face any problem while following the above mentioned procedure.

You are our valued customer and we appreciate your business with us.

For your convenience, our support staff is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you have additional questions, concerns or need further assistance, please be sure not to change the subject line while replying to this email, so that we can urgently address any remaining concerns.


February 4th Update!- Transitioning Office Live Website to Office 365
This is an update since my post above....YES. I did it. I transitioned one out of my 3 Microsoft Office Live Websites to Office 365. Well I should say....I transferred my custom domain name to Office 365. My shopping Website needed Re-designed anyway so I didn't transfer all the content, just the domain name, some text and hopefully the email account and contacts are all transitioned. We will see. My website help site is not yet transitioned....I wanted to make sure I was able to transfer my other site to Office 365 first. For those of you who would like to know what Office 365 is like, well it is the same sitebuilder as office live website. Nothing much different other than we will have to pay more now. I would like to say that the Website transition was easy but nope...I was shaking my head through out the whole process. I am glad I had my shopping website to do the testing transfer. Well if anyone needs help transitioning your website to Office 365, you need to contact me REAL soon because it is a process and it is time consuming. The more content and pages you have, the longer it will take.

10 comments:

  1. Yes indeed, MS has made this a more difficult transition. Perhaps they're not truly interested in this end of the business?

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  2. Tammy: I would LOVE help in transferring my Office Live website to Siteground Hosting. Would be great to get an estimate from you. Site is: www.1972e3usma.org. I chose OfficeLive suz it was so simple to build the site. Too bad the chose not to continue.

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  3. Tammy, I want to transfer my website to Siteground hosting, but they say that their hosting based on Linux based, so this is not possible to transfer officelive website, I have to make new one with them.
    Do you know any other hosting company which transfer my website as same as it.
    please reply...

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  4. @Anonymous I haven't found a hosting company yet that transfers the Office Live Website Contents...even if we transfer to Office 365, we will manually have to transfer (copy, paste or re-design) the web page contents. I am going to be transfering to siteground and re-designing my website there. Let me know if I can offer my services to you.

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  5. Tammy,

    I'm confused. I have a very simple website with Office Live (about 10 pages total) and do not want to go with 365 but want to use a different web host. I don't have associated files with my website and it hopefully should be easy to move. Do I need to save the content of the website prior to moving it and then "give the content" to the new host? Will they be able to use the same files I already created as web pages and will I still be able to update pages? Could you assist me with this or should I be able to complete this function without assistance? Please help.

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  6. @Anonymous, Please contact me at owner@helpwithyourwebsite.com. I need to know if you have a custom website domain name and you will also need to copy, paste and save any info from your website to lets say Notepad so that you can re-create the pages at your new hosting company. If you have a custom domain name, you will need to either transfer the domain name to your new hosting company or show ownership of the domain name. Your domain name is registered at Melbourne it once you move your domain name from Office Live.

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  7. Hello Tammy.
    did you transferred your website to the siteground or not yet
    i want to follow you by transferring my website so plz give me more info about that.
    thanks. Hisham

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  8. @Hisham Alsanea: Yes I transferred my Help website to Siteground and I installed Wordpress where I have more control over templates, coding graphics ect... For your website I recommend you transferring domain name and website contents to siteground and installing either Wordpress or Joomla. Let me know if you need any help. Please email me at tammyjofrost@hotmail.com my other email isn't working properly right now. Best of Luck, let me know how it turns out.

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  9. Sounds like this process is a real pain. Totally frustrated and unsure as to where to turn.

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