Peter's Technology Trumpet

I found myself incapacitated this week when the dreaded lurgy swept through Chateux Ferry. For 3 whole days I could not drag myself into work, and languished in bed with a serious case of man-flu.

But being blessed with a guilt-driven protestant work ethic, I can't remain idle for long and soon found myself bored and thinking up new money-making schemes to fund the 3 cost centres growing demands for life's essentials i.e. tennis club fees, expensive foreign holidays, fast moving consumer goods, and hats.

This work ethic is clearly something which is not shared by a significant fraction of the population of Scotland.  An enlightening example of this is that 1 in 6 of working age adults in Glasgow are currently claiming Incapacity Benefits. This is compared to a national average of about 1 in 14.

Now, clearly the majority of people claiming IB are unfortunate enough to be limited in what work they can do, and are fully entitled and deserving of these benefits. But one could easily extrapolate from these figures that the concentration of work-dodging benefits cheats is especially high within Greater Glasgow area.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to some missionary work in Glasgow's Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre to speak at the New Start Scotland event about starting a new business and taking it online.

However, I was very pleased to experience real entrepreneurial spirit amongst the audience of people who had recently started, or planning to start a new enterprise. They in turn were very pleased to learn that building an online web presence with Office Live is FREE. Even a subscription to Office Live Premium, with full access to the Applications any small business needs to function, at £22.95 a month makes a small impact in the Incapacity Benefit giro.

So what is Office Live, I hear you ask?

You may have heard of Live services from Microsoft (Interesting online services for the consumer, like Live Mail, Live Favourites, Live Local mapping services, etc). In the consumer world, we use online services for and expect them to be really easy and to pay nothing.

Office Live extends the concept to startup and small businesses, and lets that business put up a professional-looking website within 2 hours, using a mycompany.com domain name for the website and email addresses. Gratis!

I've experienced small business startup at 1st hand. Entrepreneurs starting a business need a simple way to address the technology issues of building a web presence, getting it noticed by the search engines and keeping it interesting and up to date.

Often IT is a most confusing, expensive and unsatisfactory aspect to business startup. These IT decisions and issues occur just when the business owner should  be focused on key factors of business planning, funding, recruitment, etc.

Office Live offers all the services a new company needs in a single place, at low or no cost, and can expand as the business needs grow. You can see a successful Office Live site at www.houseinestonia.com which has generated 800 unique visitors per month since it was created in 2 hours 3 months ago.

Office Live is a compelling offering which saves time, hassle and money for small business, but also presents an opportunity for Microsoft's business partners. This opportunity comes through Business Applications.

Starting a business is hard work - it demands commitment, hard work and long hours to manage costs and achieve forecast revenues in the crucial 1st months of operation. Business applications support activities such as customer contact managment, timekeeping  and expenses, sales and billing and are key in providing an environment of order, co-ordination and automation which any business needs to flourish and expand.

Office Live cheaply provides a basic set of Business Applications (hosted and accessed online, rather than purchased, planned and installed on-premise), and helps make the business more productive by opening the doors to automating business process and collaboration (like sharing proposals with business partners). Anyone familiar with the Windows Sharepoint Services platform, upon which Office Live is built,  will be familiar with its information management and workflow capabilities.

The partner opportunity is that Microsoft are building a marketplace of value-added solutions for Office Live which address specific needs of different industries. For example, Solution Canvas a Glasgow-based Gold Certified Partner have built Justia. Justia extends Office to meet the exacting time management requirements of those professional services industries such as Solicitors.

Solution Canvas solution is built on Office Live, and is offered to small professional services business for a monthly subscription fee. Any customer can come along and try before they buy. As its a hosted solution accessed over t'internet, they typically need no help from expensive IT professionals to procure, install and commission the software. If they like what they see, they can sign up.

This has made it possible for Solution Canvas to open up a whole new potential market for their application and industry expertise. Whereas before  these smaller companies would have bought a software package and each needed assistance with set up, install, and support, now these customers have a much smoother and less expensive path to meet their needs - and Solution Canvas have a model which allows them to serve small business IT business application requirements and generate recurring subscription revenue.

If any reader has an idea for a business application, and would like to understand how to deliver it on Office Live, I suggest you take a look at my chums Christian Longstaff and Tim Kimber chatting about Office Live.