bCentral and the .NET Experience

Like an iceberg, 90 percent of the Microsoft .NET initiative is hidden from view, seen internally only at Microsoft or exposed to developers through Microsoft Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET) and the Microsoft .NET Framework. (For a good overview of the .NET Framework, go to http://www.microsoft.com/net/whatis.asp.) The remaining 10 percent consists of customer-facing software that provides users with rich, personalized services that XML enables by facilitating the transmission of character-based data between platforms. As Microsoft moves its applications and servers toward enabling .NET, the company is providing three Web sites that illustrate the .NET experience:

• VS.NET (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/default.asp)—A Web site for .NET developers who use the Visual Studio (VS) tools
• MSN (http://www.msn.com)—One of the top three Web sites on the Internet
• bCentral (http://www.bcentral.com)—A portal for small-business services

With the bCentral site, Microsoft brings the .NET experience to small businesses by providing a collection of Web Services designed to help you get your business ready for the Web.

bCentral Services
Microsoft's bCentral offers small businesses (i.e., businesses with fewer than 100 employees) the opportunity to quickly and easily create and manage a hosted Web site. bCentral provides Web Services as an integrated suite of products that users can access from one portal. Microsoft has been steadily introducing elements of this Web portal strategy, including

• Commerce Manager (November 2000)—Services for e-commerce
• Customer Manager (December 2000)—A customer relationship management (CRM) package
• Finance Manager (March 2001)—An integrated transactional accounting package
• SharePoint Team Services (May 2001)—Microsoft's workgroup intranet-collaboration software
• Appointment Manager (July 2001)—An appointment calendar that lets customers schedule appointments

Business Web Services provides a portfolio of services that support your Web site, including

• Site Manager—The Site Builder Wizard walks you through basic Web site creation, offers you several different templates, and posts the files you create to the hosting service. The wizard also lets you access and modify your site.
• Traffic Builder—This tool helps you register your site with 400 search engines and directory services (Submit It!), manage bulk email messages (ListBuilder), and participate in Web site banner advertising through a free trading system (LinkExchange).
• Communications Center—This service provides email, file storage, and calendaring functions. The Communications Center administration page is a central communications hub from which users can add contacts to the system and manage contact information such as addresses, phone numbers, titles, and business information.
• SharePoint Team Services—With SharePoint, you can create a Web site that lets a group of people work collaboratively on documents, essentially creating a hosted intranet for a group. Share-Point Team Services is a Web version of the highly regarded SharePoint Server software.
• bCentral Business Card—Microsoft registers the user's domain name and creates a business card that it posts on MSN and other services.

Table 1 lists bCentral's components.

Microsoft is targeting these services at beginners, so ease of use is important. We found the bCentral site easy to navigate and the screens easy to understand. We were particularly impressed with some of the articles and white papers that Microsoft has posted on the site.

You register with bCentral once to enter your company and personal information and to establish an account for basic service access. After you register, bCentral recognizes you from information stored in a cookie; thereafter, you can log on automatically when you visit the site. (For users who have security concerns about using cookies, automatic logon and bCentral will be problematic. However, for novice users, automatic logon is a great convenience.)

The bCentral Mission
Figure 1, page 32, shows the bCentral home page as of September 13, 2001. In creating bCentral, Microsoft's goal was to provide an easy-to-use framework that even technologically unsophisticated business users can use as a primary business tool. Microsoft's mission statement for bCentral is "Making everyday business processes easy any time, any place, on any device." As bCentral Product Manager Marcus Schmidt told us, "We want to reinvent the way in which small, medium, and large businesses do business with customers and other businesses. We think customers are very interested in complete solutions that they can access from a single place." According to Microsoft, the original design goals for bCentral were

• Make it easy for small businesses to self-manage a comprehensive business Web presence.
• Build a foundational service that helps small businesses use the Web to run key business processes, such as customer relationships.
• Integrate with FrontPage 2000 and later in particular and Microsoft Office in general to extend site-creation capabilities.
• Develop effective, easy-to-use Web-based sales and marketing tools.
• Create an e-commerce package that users can manage from one console.
• Account for sales and revenues efficiently and securely through the Web.

Microsoft has organized bCentral around a task-oriented scheme that the company feels will make navigation easy for novice users. We initially found moving about the site confusing; however, with experience, we think that this organization won't be a major problem.

The bCentral Partnerships
With bCentral, Microsoft is both innovating and partnering with a small number of companies in key business segments. Some services, such as the accounting and calendaring functions, are home grown. Some services, such as the postage facility offered through Stamps.com, are partnerships. And Microsoft is acquiring some functionality, such as in the case of the bulk email program ListBot. The current partnership categories that Microsoft has defined are

• Commercial Aggregators—This category includes Compaq, Stamps.com, Office Depot, and CDW.
• Internet Utilities—Current partners include Office.com and Rivio.
• Breadth Consultants—This category includes Microsoft.
• Verticals and Marketplaces—bCentral uses the capabilities of Bizjournals.com, VerticalNet, and eBay to provide services such as listing and auctioning.