bCentral Integration
The Yankee Group estimates that there are about 8.8 million very small businesses (2 to 19 people) and 783,657 small businesses (20 to 99 people). According to a Forrester Research study, 15 percent of small businesses had Web sites in 2000 and 91 percent of those Web sites were outsourced, hosted sites. According to the Forrester study, the number of outsourced small business Web sites is expected to grow to 99.7 percent by 2003, and essentially all those sites will be outsourced. Assuming that each site costs $600 per year to maintain, as the Forrester study asserts, the nearly 10 million very small and small businesses will create an annual hosting market of $6 billion.
In the near future, when you create an envelope in Microsoft Word, you might have the opportunity to print a stamp on that envelope from bCentral. When you search for services online at MSN, you'll be browsing catalogs of bCentral vendors. When you power up a Compaq desktop, you might see an icon for bCentral. When you purchase an item at a Web site, the Web server will use Microsoft Passport (a .NET service) to validate your credentials and your credit card transactions will flow through bCentral without you ever realizing it.
Although much is made of the integrated nature of the bCentral services and the value of Web sites' growing ability to personalize those services for individual businesses, businesses might find themselves drawn to bCentral because of its integration with other Microsoft products. Currently, FrontPage integrates with Commerce Manager, Customer Manager, Traffic Builder, and Site Manager. Microsoft Excel integrates with Commerce Manager.
The value of the bCentral site is its ability to pass along services at low prices because of massive economies of scale. We became interested in bCentral when we were considering services for emailing newsletters to clients and wanted to process credit card sales from a catalog built on a site we'd created with FrontPage's Corporate Presence Wizard. In both instances, bCentral was far cheaper than the other alternatives we considered.
bCentral started out with its own authentication server. However, the site is due to use Passport, the user-credential technology from .NET My Services. (.NET My Services is Microsoft's set of basic .NET services that includes email and authentication. For more information about .NET My Services, go to http://www.microsoft.com/net/netmyservices.asp.)
Because bCentral is browser based, you can use your account name (usually your email address) and your password to log on to the bCentral site from anywhere. Figure 2, page 35, shows the bCentral logon screen.
Microsoft has a long history of software integration, dating back as far as the company's introduction of Microsoft Works for Macintosh. This tradition continues with bCentral, which provides interconnected business services from one interface. With the assistance of bCentral, small businesses can maintain one integrated view of their customer information, including Commerce Manager's posting of orders for products and services, Finance Manager's listing of accounts receivable based on posted transactions, and Customer Manager's nontransactional customer information such as tasks, faxes, meetings, customer history, email messages, and telephone calls.
The integration between Commerce Manager and Finance Manager lets orders automatically become accounting transactions. Users don't need to reenter data between the commerce system and the accounting system. Whether orders come from a company's Web site or from a Web marketplace in which the company has items listed, all orders are available in one integrated place, a central sales console.
Currently, all accounting data from sales must reside on Microsoft's hosted site. bCentral doesn't yet let users import sales data to their own accounting package, although Microsoft says that a feature to do so is in the works. Thus, if you need to combine Web sales data with data from other sales channels or if you feel uncomfortable storing your company's financial information on Microsoft's servers, you might want to pass on Finance Manager for now. However, you can still use Commerce Manager and dump order information into an Excel spreadsheet.
A Site Manager—created Web site also integrates with other modules. Forms that say Contact us link to Customer Manager and Commerce Manager's product catalog and shopping cart features. At the moment, the functionality for small businesses to change prices, apply discounts, and test other marketing techniques is limited. However, users who can live with these limitations in their e-commerce package can realize a significant benefit by getting basic functionality at a low cost.
Site Manager
Now, let's focus on a few of bCentral's services. Microsoft developed Site Manager to support three fundamental objectives that let small businesses leverage the power of the Internet:
- Deliver an easy-to-use Web site building and hosting service.
- Provide a single point of contact for small-business Web sites.
- Deliver seamless integration with the bCentral Web marketing service.
Compared with other Web site generators and hosting services, Site Manager's Site Builder Wizard is easy to use. Users who've already developed their Web site's content can build a basic site in fewer than 30 minutes, which many users will find appealing. The trade-off is that Site Manager is also somewhat limited in functionality. The same is true with many other bCentral modules, such as Finance Manager and List Builder.
Users who want a more customized site but can't create it themselves can pay $499 for a Microsoft designer to create the Web site for them. For an additional fee, the designer will also edit and maintain the site to users' specifications.
More experienced users can import FrontPage-generated Web sites into Site Manager or use FrontPage to modify Site Builder-created sites. Hosting services aren't unique, and most of the larger services support FrontPage. However, the price of Site Manager is competitive with other leading vendors' offerings.
