bCentral Drives Small Business E-Commerce Strategy

Microsoft is adding several significant new services to bCentral, its small business portal, in hopes of promoting the .NET vision and attracting more small-business dollars. A new competitively priced package, Business Web Services, offers site hosting and management, Internet-based marketing, and outsourced e-mail through the Outlook Web Access (OWA) function of Exchange 2000. In addition, the portal is expected to add other services such as product cataloging and customer management in the near future. Apart from making bCentral more appealing to very small businesses—defined as those with 25 or fewer employees—these new services are also intended to showcase .NET Enterprise Servers and validate.NET concepts and technologies, such as the BizTalk Framework and “anytime, anywhere” access to Web-based services.

Testing the Small Business Market

bCentral was launched in Sept. 1999, combining several disparate Microsoft services geared toward small businesses, including the LinkExchange cooperative advertising service, MSNBC business news, and the business travel section of Expedia. Microsoft boasts that bCentral now has a million members, and independent auditor MediaMetrix consistently rates it as the most popular small business portal.