On February 15, Microsoft will release to testers first beta releases of three Office Live small-business subscription services.

Office Live is a family of add-on services designed to complement Microsoft Office, the same way that the growing stable of Windows Live services will extend Microsoft Windows.

The LiveSide.Net Web site on Monday posted details on Office Live Beta 1's availability, as well as some screen shots of the pending Office Live beta releases.

The Office Live beta bits will be downloadable by testers starting at 6 a.m. PST on Wednesday, Microsoft officials said.

As expected, Microsoft is unveiling test versions of three different Office Live offerings: Office Live Basics, Office Live Collaboration and Office Live Essentials. The trio of services will be supported by online advertising and should be commercially available by the end of 2006, Microsoft officials said.

According to LiveSide, "Beta testers will require a product key in order to access the beta program. ... As will be visible when the portal finally opens on Wednesday, Office Live Collaboration and Essentials are expected to be available from $29.95 once the beta finishes."

The target audience for all three families of Office Live services are small business customers with 10 or fewer employees, "which typically lack in-house technical resources or the budget to keep an IT person on staff," according to Microsoft.

As Microsoft outlined last November when it went public with its Microsoft Live strategy, Office Live will come in three flavors.

Office Live Basics, a collection of free services, will include a company domain name; five e-mail accounts using that company domain name, each with 2 GB of storage; a Web site with 30 MB of file storage space; a drag-and-drop design Web-site design tool; and the Microsoft Office Live Site Reports tool for monitoring and analyzing Web site traffic.

Office Live Collaboration is a set of services designed for small businesses that may already have a Web site. These services are Internet-based business management tools, based on Windows SharePoint Services, that are managed and maintained by Microsoft. Among the offerings in Live Collaboration are password-protected online workspaces (intranets and extranets); customer management; project management; sales and marketing management; employee management; and company administration.

Office Live Essentials is a set of services for establishing and managing a small business online. Services include a company domain name; 50 e-mail accounts using that company domain name, each with 2 GB of storage; a Web site with 50 MB of file storage space; the same Web design tool as Microsoft Office Live Basics, plus Microsoft FrontPage support for advanced Web design; more advanced Web site analytics; and a set of Internet-based applications for automating daily business tasks, such as management of customers, projects and documents.

Individuals interested in testing Office Live can sign up for beta consideration on the Office Live Web site. Currently, the beta is open to U.S. participants only. Microsoft plans to add Office Live beta programs in other countries later this year.