There are two things in business that never change: the need to create and the need to communicate. Letters, presentations, brochures, and emails are just a few of the things that keep you busy every day. As a small business, you may sometimes have to compete with larger companies in order to grow and stay competitive. The great news is that Microsoft has products that can help you create content, react, stay in touch, and get the word out.  With Microsoft email, document management, and document sharing solutions, the world will never have to know you’re running a small business.

Email As You Grow  

For a small business, missing an important email can mean the difference between taking two steps forward or two steps backward. You need email that’s affordable, reliable, and available from wherever you may be. From the cloud to on-premise, there is a set of solutions that will help you take control of your email.

For small businesses with one or two employees, Windows Live Hotmail is a free service that includes smart tools that help you organize, filter junk mail, and work with the other Microsoft Office applications you use every day, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—even if you don't have Microsoft Office installed on your PC.
 

Microsoft Office 365 for small businesses offers an easy-to-use set of web-enabled tools for small businesses, independent consultants, and professionals looking for business-class productivity services. Working with the tools people know and use today, Office 365 provides anywhere access to email, important documents, contacts and calendars on almost any device.

As your business grows and you look for more robust features, Microsoft Outlook 2010 enables you to keep your email, contacts, and calendar all in one place. Managing your email is easy, because you can condense, categorize, or even ignore entire conversations with a few clicks. You can also combine multiple email accounts, calendars, and address books, and easily manage them from a single, centralized view. With Microsoft Exchange, you can achieve new levels of reliability and performance with features that simplify your administration, protect your communications, and make your users happy by meeting their demands for greater mobility.  You can choose from on-premises deployment with Exchange 2010, a hosted service with Exchange Online, one of many service-provider partners, or a seamless mix of both.

Document Sharing & Management

You’ve just created a masterpiece of a proposal. You now need to share it securely with your sales team who need to share it with a customer. Windows 7 Professional HomeGroup is a feature that enables workers to connect up to five Windows 7 Professional computers, with or without a server, to create a password-protected mini version of a distributed network. It’s an easy way to share data more securely while working in or out of the office. For a faster and easier way to locate files, folders, and applications, enter a few letters of a keyword or title and Windows Search will search your computer as well as the network to locate what you need. You can consolidate frequently-used or related files into a Library to give you easy access, regardless of the file’s location on the network.

Depending on the level of document creation and sharing needed for your business, you can choose from several products that scale to the phases of your growth. Microsoft Office Web Apps enables you to access, edit, and share Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents quickly and easily online. From there you can save, edit, and share your documents in Windows Live SkyDrive: cloud-based file storage and sharing gives you 25 GB of free online storage. 

For larger businesses, Microsoft Outlook 2010 enables you to easily manage your email, combine multiple email accounts, calendars, and address books, and stay connected when you’re on the road with Outlook Mobile 2010 or the Microsoft Outlook web app. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 collaboration software makes it easier for people to work together by simplifying business intelligence, content management, search, and sharing for intranet and internet sites. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can set up websites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, and publish reports to help everyone make better decisions.