A picture is worth a thousand words
In my earlier postings I explained the vision of the small business suite and our focus on breaking software boundaries. The diagram below shows this visually.
The key design concepts of the Microsoft small business application suite revolve around 3 main pillars:
1) Providing access to the right information - to the right person - at the right time within a small business organization. This translates to deep and native integration of data across front office (CRM, productivity & communication) and back office processes (accounting, payroll, credit processing)
2) Helping small businesses reduce administrative overhead for complex tasks like payroll & credit card processing by managing changes to tax tables, filings, credit authorizations etc via services from partners like ADP and Chase Manhattan Bank
3) Proving access to new functionality via the web eg email marketing linkage to business contact manager
This unique implementation now allows small businesses to reduce a ton of non value added time and effort in finding and re-entering data that is already in a application somewhere within their organization. A few examples that this suite now opens up:
- Enabling a sales person to create an invoice or sales order from an opportunity within outlook with BCM
- Enabling a sales person to view customer sales history, accounts receivables, payment patterns etc all within outlook with BCM
- Enabling a service professional to bill a calendar or task performed for a customer from within outlook with BCM
- Enabling a business owner - office manager to view all sales activities, receivables, cash flow and communication activity across the company in a single dashboard within SBA
- Enabling a marketing person to create a email marketing campaign and track conversions using the Microsoft ListBuilder service with contacts in outlook with BCM
- Enabling a small business to have access to all payroll tax table changes (via ADPs web service) without having to manage and maintain these manually
- Enable a small business to process credit card transactions directly from within SBA at a competitive transaction fee and without the need for a dedicated phone line and separate credit card terminal
