I’ve never been a huge fan of Microsoft’s offerings for small business owners, but a positive review from the New York Times tech guru David Pogue persuaded me to check out the latest version of Microsoft Live Small Business. As Pogue mentions, this suite of applications now works for Firefox users like me, which means that I can access all of my info on either a Mac or PC.
While some of the stuff MLSB offers small business owners—like easy website creation—is probably best done the old-fashioned way (i.e. by paying an expert to make one for you), some of the other free or cheap offerings are pretty awesome. The customer newsletter organizer and tracker is almost comparable to (my favorite) Campaign Monitor, and there are plenty of straightforward apps to let you do things like: create internal wikis, set up a store, and keep website stats. If you’re a small business owner who falls into the savvy-but-not-too-techie group, this is definitely worth playing around with.
