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Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

Just because you don't have a large enterprise doesn't mean you can't run your IT operation like the big guys. Here are seven ways to help your SMB--a small or medium-size business--implement some of the lessons big IT operations have learned over the years. Using these tips, you should be able to improve productivity, cut costs, and keep your business running smoothly.

Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack.

Whether they're in branch offices or home offices, workers are increasingly telecommuting instead of working in a traditional centralized office environment.

Telecommuting is back on workers' radars in a big way these days, thanks to gas prices that were a whopping 30 percent higher this summer than last.

You've done the hard work of optimizing your Wi-Fi network, and it reliably beams high-speed data to every nook and cranny of your home or office. Now, it's time to take it to the next level by connecting more than just computers.

The past 30 years of InfoWorld's existence have seen a series of future shocks, from the ascent of the personal computer to horrifying strains of malware to the sizzling sex appeal of the iPhone. In honor of InfoWorld's 30th anniversary, we've decided to take a playful look ahead at the future shocks that could occur in the next 10 years (30 years seemed a little too sci-fi).

Buyers of IP PBXs need to look beyond simple voice capabilities to unified communications and make sure the gear they buy will be compatible with applications they will want in the future, experts say.

Anyone who has worked in IT for more than five minutes knows that the field has been in a dramatic transformation for the past 10 years, invading and conquering other organizational domains such as communications and security, while also wrestling with the new issues that technology has wrought such as employee mobility. In most organizations, IT has had to transform itself from a bunch of techies installing and troubleshooting equipment to a key enabler of business strategy and competitiveness.

Integrating enterprise communication tools -- from telephony to e-mail, conferencing and instant messaging -- is the key to delivering a richer collaboration environment that increases productivity. But deployment and management of unified communications systems can be daunting.

VoIP services are rapidly becoming the bread and butter of enterprise voice networks, as roughly 72 per cent of all enterprise voice lines shipped by vendors in 2007 were IP-capable. Now that companies are definitively moving away from the traditional Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) voice networks and into Session Initiation Protocol-based (SIP) VoIP networks, we examine the VoIP industry's most pressing issues, including SIP interoperability, TDM-to-SIP transition services and VoIP security issues.