Since its beta launched in February this year, Microsoft Office Live has accumulated more than 100,000 users, despite several factors limiting the amount of users that have been able to join.

Microsoft is very pleased with the demand for the service and has plans to take it out of beta at the end of 2006.

As of Wednesday, July 5, Microsoft Office Live has more than 100,000 users.

"We are super excited about the positive reaction and demand from our customers," says Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Office Live at Microsoft, in an interview with Ipwalk. "As you know we are still in our beta phase and are collecting feedback from customers to continuously improve our products."

Internet statistics company Ipwalk has tracked the growth of Office Live since the start of the beta in February. At first, Microsoft used a wait list to restrict the influx of new users, only sending out a limited amount of product keys every week. Another factor that has limited the amount of users is that the Office Live beta is only available to US residents.

When Microsoft removed the wait list early in April, registrations went up significantly.

"Our goal is to come out of beta by late 2006," says Cetinok. "We will improve our services which will again give another push to the existing momentum we have. In addition, we plan to launch in additional countries alongside the US late 2006, which will result in a larger number of customers on Office Live."

By tracking the number of domain names tied to the Office Live service, Ipwalk is able to give an accurate estimate of the number of Office Live users, as a domain name is included in the package. At the time of this writing there are 100,268 domain names tied to Office Live. Up-to-date information about the number of users that have joined Office Live can be found at Ipwalk's Office Live Watch Page: www.ipwalk.com/general/show_news/id/11.

Microsoft Office Live can be found at officelive.microsoft.com.

For more information, please contact:
Peter Alguacil,
Ipwalk AB,
+46-21-124248,
peter@ipwalk.com

About Ipwalk:
Ipwalk is a global information company providing statistics based on a continuously updated database. Ipwalk is processing and analyzing more than 60 million domain names and 50 million IP addresses on a daily basis. This information is provided through the Ipwalk.com website and through customized trend reports. Ipwalk also runs GIGRIB, a community-based, distributed service for monitoring web sites. Find out more at www.ipwalk.com.