Small Business > Opinions

Projects that sail along smoothly, with no resistance, are great. But it's the ones that throw lots of roadblocks in our way that end up teaching us things.

Although it may seem like your computing life is all e-mail and browsing, computer users still create files, documents, spreadsheets, boring presentations and all manner of other stored information. Which brings me to the question: Where do you store your data? And are you ready to store your data online in a service hosted by a third party provider?

Here's a statistical downer: there will be around 40 trillion inbox-clogging spam e-mail messages delivered this year. Experts know this because there were 30 trillion spam messages last year. With this much hay in the stack, it's hard to find those message needles, and that's why some smart companies are looking beyond public e-mail.

You might hate Wall Street -- and who doesn't this week, but if you work in IT you owe the Street a vote of thanks because the fat cats in financial services have been a major driver of technological innovation.

It was a decision heralded by industry media types and praised by blogging heads around the Internet. Steve Sinofsky, the legendary show-runner for Microsoft Office, would take over the Windows reins from the departing Jim Allchin.

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

Business isn't what it used to be.

Bill Gates Q&A with Network World May 15, 2000

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in every industry, if you define "interesting" as the kind of thing that a practitioner of the space will jump for joy at the prospect of reading.

For the mid-market, an integrated CRM solution improves business productivity at a low total cost of ownership.

Quite simply, business process management (BPM) allows a small business to grow. What most SMBs don't realize is that BPM and putting business processes in place is extremely important and perhaps even more critical for them to adopt than larger businesses.