Actually you don't need to run 10 different instances of Business Manager. It is much better to run one instance (say on the first of your Plesk servers) and connect all other Plesk servers to it. This way the one keeps all business/invoicing staff in a single place (Business Manager) and also can sell different platform services to their customers - like one subscription is Unix and another one is Windows.
As and if this is the case, that single instance of the business manager can handle multiple Plesk servers centralized, I think this whole Customer and Business Manager is a right step to right direction from Parallels. We have already briefly waltroughed some of the Plesk interface and the Business Manager too and it sounds very promising.
Refering the documentation/administration guide:
http://download1.parallels.com/Ples...k-10-business-manager-administrator-guide.pdf
part. C H A P T E R 6 - Connecting Hosting Panels, it seems that business manager can (at least in theory) take a lot of business operations and handle them from a single server point, is this correct?
I read the documentation briefly and understood that CBM can do (at least in theory) the following:
- It can automatically receive the orders from the customers trough website plugins, correct?
- It can automatically (or after admin approval) create customers, their subscriptions based on service plans and add-on plans, correct?
- It can automatically handle payment gateways and/or create invoices that are sent trough e-mail on PDF format or printed and sent via regular mail, correct?
- It can automatically/manually follow the invoice payments and re-send the unpaid invoices, correct?
- It can automatically register the domains and/or ssl certificates trough a limited number of registrar gateways depending on the payment situation, is that correct?
- It can automatically re-create the invoices or payments following the preset invoicing period, and even bundle the products to the same invoice if the proration is used in the service plan, correct?
- It can generate required reports for accounting?
- and it can handle a X amount of Plesk (and other panels too) servers from centralized, single location, allowing creation of the customers, subscriptions and invoicing done in the single service point, even though the actual physical accounts are distributed to different servers, correct?
For the first time in several years I honestly believe Parallels is taking actions to right direction with Plesk and it's additions. The new Sitebuilder 5.0 (with 100 instances) is bundled with Plesk 10 license - as well as the Customer managers is bundled as well with possibility to handle 1000 customers with no extra charge. I believe this is a great step to right direction to offer free bundles and broaden the benefit for customers for using Parallels products (just like with Nokia did their Ovi Maps and Ovi Music unlimited services, btw..
So before criticising the new Business Manager, I really would suggest everybody to take a look to document of this and see what you can (possibly) do with it. It could integrate and automate your business to single point and lessen the manual work related the customer account creation, invoicing and domain registration.
However, after these complimentaries (which I think Parallels is actually in this case really deserved, at least with potential impression I was given with the Business Manager), I also would like to give some critizism:
- There is awfully low amount of supported domain registries (we would miss for e.g. Joker.com) which we would like to be included in the gateways of CBM. Also most of the european national domain registries are missing. For e.g. we're hosting provider from Finland and to use this CBM we would require to have also gateway to .fi domain names (domain.ficora.fi registry) and simply cannot use the CBM without it.
- The same goes with languages. There are only a few main languages supported and Finnish isn't (which is obvious) one of them. Translating the languages is just a pain with the current amount of translations required with Plesk10, Sitebuilder and CBM, as well as the site plugins required if we want to use the ordering system of the CBM in our own web pages (for ordering integration).
- We would also like to see the Finnish payment gateways to main banks (Nordea, OP, Sampo) and Finnish credit card processor (Luottokunta) gateways, just like they're in Parallels Business Automation (
http://www.parallels.com/eu/products/pba-standard/).
However, I undestand that these features are similar from Plesk users from different countries, which would require the same localization options.
It seem IMHO that there is a lot of good in Parallels Plesk 10 + Sitebuilder 5 + Customer And Business Manager 7.0 which is bundled and offered greatly under the same license. The steps Parallels has taken are for sure good. However, I would like to see the mentioned improvements before we can fully benefit from this product.