As part of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud platform, SharePoint Online drastically reduces the cost of entry to SharePoint as a collaboration tool. It also offers the capability to create a simple public facing website within the Office 365 environment. I set out to reproduce my web site using SharePoint Online and along the way faced the challenges to build a SharePoint publishing site in a sandboxed hosted environment.

Customizations include master page, page layouts with supporting resources and custom web part. They are installed using SharePoint featues packaged in a sandboxed solution.

You can browse my SharePoint Online public site HERE. It is not without limitations though. At the time of writing (2011.08), mobile browsing is not supported in SharePoint Online public facing site.