Microsoft has created out there to a select set of private beta testers new commerce performance that it ideas to add to its Workplace Reside providers.Workplace Reside Shop Manager appears to be a new set of features/functionality that Microsoft is arranging to add to 1 or far more of its existing Office Reside Little Organization SKUs. Shop Manager is presently in personal beta check having a “few of our select small business customers,” blogged Microsoft Technical Specialist James Senior.“The shop manager portion of Office Reside enables this tiny small business to have an online shop tightly incorporated within their website with the minimum of fuss. Prior to this they had integration with Paypal and had some complicated ASP pages to get around the problem of selling online - hardly something a modest organization wants to become doing! This encapsulates what Microsoft is trying to achieve with Workplace Reside: a one-stop-shop for all online activities for modest organization following the mantra of easy to use,” Senior explained.1 of the testers of Office Live Shop Manager, according to Senior;s post, is Larouex Gourmet Foods.Office Reside, in spite of its name, is not a Web-based, hosted version of Microsoft Office. Workplace Reside are a set of Web-based add-ons to Microsoft Workplace and SharePoint aimed at small- to mid-size company customers. In October 2006, Microsoft rolled out its first three Workplace Reside companies: Workplace Reside Basics (free and ad-supported); Office Live Essentials ($19.95 a month per business) and Office Reside Premium ($39.95 a month per enterprise). (A fourth member of the family, Workplace Reside Collaboration, never created it out the door and remains in beta check.In July, Microsoft quietly repositioned its existing set of Office Reside services as “Office Reside Tiny Company.” Microsoft officials have said the company has ideas to go both up and down marketplace with Workplace Reside by rolling out extra enterprise-focused Workplace service add-ons, as well as new Workplace Live solutions aimed a lot more directly at individual consumers. So significantly,
Microsoft Office 2010 Key, Microsoft has made no official announcements on either end of that spectrum.Microsoft has some serious ambitions for Workplace Live. In July, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said:“We fully believe and expect in two or three years Office Reside will be 1 of the most deployed, most utilized of all the products that we have in the Microsoft portfolio. Certainly it won’t be as big as Windows in a couple of years, but we do believe it will reach our top three or four largest deployed applications that we have around the world.”I;ve asked Microsoft for much more specifics on Office Reside Store Manager, including a date when it will be accessible to a broader audience. Stay tuned.Update on September 18: A Microsoft spokesperson sent back the following responses to my questions:“Microsoft Workplace Live is committed to providing little businesses a single, easy-to-use solution that addresses a range of small enterprise pain points - core IT solutions, sales and marketing companies and productivity services. As we mentioned last fall with our V1.5 announcement, we see e-commerce as a natural addition to our suite of solutions. Shop Supervisor is presently in a limited beta and we expect it to go reside in the coming months.”