Bill's Excellent Adventure

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Office and Business Center provide benefits to companies with multiple PCs hooked up only through the Internet or what's known as the "sneaker net" -- people simply walking around, a likely scenario for a start-up. But as the business grows, even greater opportunities can come from setting up a PC network with a separate machine dedicated as a server.

About 7 million of America's 8 million small businesses still don't have a server, according to Microsoft. It charges $599 to license its Small Business Server software for five users, and Dell and HP both sell the hardware with this software already installed for under $1,000. (Customers can later expand by licensing up to 75 users before they have to switch to a more capable product.) The investment usually pays for itself quickly. A server makes it easier to back up data that might otherwise reside on isolated PCs. It lets employees look at each other's calendars and contacts, hook up to the network remotely, and share software for business functions such as accounting and inventory.

Having a server enables a company to host a SharePoint intranet, which is how the Fischer Group changed the way it did business. The 23-person, $10 million Orange, Calif., food manufacturer representative firm had relied on old-fashioned paper files for purchase orders, contracts, contact information, and memos. They were often misplaced. Worse, employees could only get to the files during business hours. "Our biggest problem was wasting time and money physically handling job documents," says Gene Austin, the company's general manager. "It was like putting $100 bills in a pile and setting them on fire." Once Fischer digitized this material, finding information and responding to customers became easier and faster. Small Business Server also provides security for a company's network, an area where many small businesses are turning to Linux, including Timbercon, which runs its firewall on an open-source software server.

Even though Microsoft still relies on its partners, it's trying much harder to make direct contact with its customers. The company now offers free seminars for small businesses in 160 cities, many of them far-flung rural outposts like Casper, Wyo. Cynthia Bates, Microsoft's general manager for U.S. small business, says that everyone on her team has to spend one day a month working for a customer's company to see what daily life is like. "We want to humanize Microsoft rather than be the company in the backroom," says her boss, Darren Huston.

Meanwhile, our intrepid cultural anthropologist Nelle Steele has begun a new two and a half year study called Small Business Better Together, which is applying technology to three small companies in the Seattle area. The owner of one of the three didn't want customers to wind up with voice mail; he insisted that an employee take a message. But these employees relied on sticky notes applied to computers or chairs. When these fell off, the customer's needs would go ignored. Microsoft responded by buying new hardware and donating software. Now, Steele reports, "people are taking messages for each other in Outlook." The notes haven't gone away entirely. Some things stick for a long time, and no amount of technology will change that.

Sidebar: Microsoft a la carte

Info-tech options for your small business

Small Business Center (formerly bCentral)

• What It Is: Online services for hosting e-commerce websites, processing customers' orders, developing sales leads, and launching e-mail marketing campaigns
• Pros And Cons: Microsoft rents many useful Web-based services on a monthly or annual basis, though the other options -- especially eBay -- are popular with small merchants and with customers.
• Alternatives: Amazon, eBay, Yahoo

Office Small Business Edition 2003

• What It Is: Tools for creating and editing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and marketing materials; managing e-mail and calendars; and tracking contacts and leads
• Pros And Cons: Everyone's already trained on Microsoft's excellent suite, the global standard with 400 million users, but OpenOffice is a viable option -- and it's free.
• Alternatives: OpenOffice, Sun's StarOffice

Small Business Server

• What It Does: Runs and provides security for PC networks
• Pros And Cons: It's a good product. But Microsoft charges $599 for five users, while open-source rivals like Apache are free -- and critics say they offer lower maintenance costs and better security.
• Alternatives: Apache, EmergeCore IT-100, Novell's Small Business Suite, Red Hat Linux

Alan Deutschman is a writer living in San Francisco and Roanoke, Va.

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