Moving Business Contact Manager to Pro Plus, dropping Accounting

[Concerned Office Champ to Small Business]

Seriously? Are small businesses not a target customer? First you drop Money
and Accounting because "online banking is good enough" (no, it's not), and
now you're saying Business Contact Manager will only be available through
volume licensing. With less than 10 employees, volume licensing is not an
option, and yet many small businesses who have been paying full price for
Office Pro off the retail shelf will have to go find a different solution for
managing business contacts AND go through the pain of migrating off the MS
solutions in place. And no, CRM won't do, either, because it is also a
solution for something larger than a few employees and requires too much
additional expertise to implement. Nor is building some giant SQL solution
to manage accounting a solution. Accounting and Business Contact Manager
were a perfect fit, but now Microsoft will be forcing these plentiful small
customers to competitive solutions, and sending the message that only the big
enterprises and larger small businesses are worth the effort. I know this
isn't the intent, but will certainly be the result.

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov // SBS Expert]

Seriously? Are small businesses not a target customer? First you drop Money
and Accounting because "online banking is good enough" (no, it's not), and
now you're saying Business Contact Manager will only be available through
volume licensing. With less than 10 employees, volume licensing is not an
option, and yet many small businesses who have been paying full price for
Office Pro off the retail shelf will have to go find a different solution for
managing business contacts AND go through the pain of migrating off the MS
solutions in place. And no, CRM won't do, either, because it is also a
solution for something larger than a few employees and requires too much
additional expertise to implement. Nor is building some giant SQL solution
to manage accounting a solution. Accounting and Business Contact Manager
were a perfect fit, but now Microsoft will be forcing these plentiful small
customers to competitive solutions, and sending the message that only the big
enterprises and larger small businesses are worth the effort. I know this
isn't the intent, but will certainly be the result.

You are right. The product mix needs to change. However, I believe this
to be a temporary situation reflecting the availability of Beta product
mixes.

I wanted to clarify that volume licensing is actually an option with 5
employees or even with one employee if the customer uses Windows Server
2008. I am going to clarify whether enrolling Server Foundation 2008
into Software Assurance is possible, in which case that would be the
minimum requirement for a volume agreement as it technically comes with
15 CALs.

Further, BCM was actually previously omitted from Pro Plus and
Enterprise (officially, even though it is perfectly legal to use it if
you want to and have the bits). As I recall from Beta 2007, we also used
Pro Plus SKU as the beta SKU.

My understanding is that this is a Beta stage product mix limitation to
simplify testing scenarios. Once the product is released, I expect
Microsoft to continue offering BCM in SKUs ranging from Standalone to
Small Business and above. The reason being is that Office Small Business
2007 is available through volume license and carries Software Assurance
benefits including new versions of this software, and Microsoft would be
in trouble if it were to abruptly discontinue the product.

Why are they testing Pro Plus first? Volume customers get the new
release in advance of retail and OEM channels. Hence, it makes sense to
test that release first.

I opened an inquiry with Microsoft's partner support group to obtain a
policy statement to this effect.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Crashproof Solutions
510-282-1008
Twitter: @wiseleo
http://crashproofsolutions.com
Microsoft Small Business Specialist
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