Free Ads in Office Marketplace

The Office Marketplace Web site enables vendors to advertise Office add-on services and software for free on Microsoft.com. The Marketplace, which was given a major facelift at the launch of Office 2003, is designed to promote upgrades and deployments of recent Office versions, but it could also generate Web traffic and some leads for vendors.

The Office Marketplace organizes Office-related products and services by category; clicking on a category brings up a list of product offerings, and clicking on those offerings provides a description and a link to the vendor’s Web site. (See the illustration “Office Marketplace Categories“.)

The Marketplace is part of the Office Online site, which provides online Office documentation, templates, and add-ins at Microsoft.com, and which gets up to 25 million unique users monthly.

Most Marketplace participants are small companies that offer specialized add-in software for Office, such as an Outlook add-in for synchronizing calendars (from Soft Solutions) or a financial model for valuing oil and gas companies (Spreadsheet Store). However, some larger organizations advertise on the site, including Avis (rental car booking from Outlook), McAfee (virus scanning for e-mail), the U.S. Postal Service (digital signatures for documents), and VeriSign (digital certificates for e-mail).