bCentral Joins the Team

bCentral was created by Microsoft in late 1999 as a Web site for small businesses, offering everything from news and information to travel services. However, bCentral moved away from this general interest model, and now focuses on hosted services for businesses of 25 or fewer employees.

Today, bCentral includes the following services, presented in the approximate order they were introduced:

Business Web Services provides templates for building and maintaining simple e-commerce sites with shopping carts (SiteManager); Web site hosting; domain name registration; marketing tools like SubmitIt (which submits a small business’s URL to major search engines) and ListBuilder (which enables targeted mass e-mailings); and e-mail access through Outlook Web Access.

Commerce Manager builds an e-commerce catalog from items in inventory; displays these catalog items on a FrontPage-created e-commerce site (including, but not limited to, sites hosted on bCentral); tracks sales orders from a Web-based console; and “pushes” these catalog items to participating exchanges, such as MSN eShop and bCentral auctions. Eventually, Commerce Manager will allow businesses to display catalog items on eBay and other Web sites, including any business-to-business exchange created with technologies from Ariba, Clarus, CommerceOne, or VerticalNet.