Tips & Tricks: Features

It's a great time to set up a small business. The Web gives even the littlest operation enormous reach, while vendors now sell small-business technology that delivers unbelievable bang for the buck.

There's a special place reserved for the stalwart hardware that many of us have depended on day after day, year after year. Or at least, we believe there should be a special place.

IT managers are facing a perfect storm of Windows upgrade options.

Figuring a good sales compensation plan is like making oil and water blend smoothly. Sales people always think management is cheating them out of commissions. Management always thinks sales people are stealing them blind. Owners of smaller companies who manage the sales people themselves often focus on the dollar paid in commission rather than thinking of the associated $20 of company revenue.

Microsoft Outlook is a nearly ubiquitous presence in PC computing -- and, seemingly, a universally reviled one. Outlook has countless features, ranging from e-mail gathering to calendaring, contact tracking, to-do list creation and more -- yet its tendency toward bloat, sluggishness and unreliability can make it maddening to use.

Microsoft's Windows Vista can be used for as long as 120 days without agreeing to its product activation antipiracy software, the company confirmed Friday. That's four times longer than the 30 days the company has widely used as the maximum time span the operating system can be used before it shuts down.

Little-known technologies that pack a big punch

It's official: IT budgets, once so resilient in the face of three years of worsening economic news, aren't immune to the downturn after all.

Despite some shortcomings, software-based network access control technology that enforces policies on network endpoints is often the first choice of customers who adopt the technology.

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.