Lauren Simonds

As small businesses become increasingly mobile, finding ways to keep current with meetings, appointments, contacts and e-mail while traveling — across town or across the country — can be a challenge. For many mobile workers, the ability to stay connected with crucial business applications while away from the home office not only increases their productivity, […]

First appearing back in 1987, ACT was, and still remains, a top choice for small businesses looking for contact and customer management software. And while the company’s name recently changed from Best Software to Sage, its goals have not. The company designed its latest version — ACT by Sage 2006 — to improve productivity, simplify […]

Maxtor’s been busy creating an ever-expanding family of external storage drives to meet the needs of both small-business and home-computing consumers alike. The latest member to join the clan is the Maxtor Shared Storage Plus. Regular readers of this site may recall that the company released a similarly named product last February — the Maxtor […]

E-mail is, without question, a crucial communication tool, but it’s also, without question, a huge security issue that every company — large, small and in between — must face or risk the consequences of unbridled spam, viruses and other assorted electronic attacks. McAfee and Postini, two leaders in their respective fields of anti-virus and spam […]

You’d be hard pressed to find a more time-consuming, yet vital, business issue than customer support. Customer retention should be a concern of every small business owner since it costs a lot less to keep a customer than it does to create one — or to get one back. Still, responding to support e-mails takes […]

Lots of service-oriented small businesses bill clients based on the number of hours that they work. From lawyers and architects to accountants and designers, keeping track of hours is both crucial to a company’s fiscal well being and a royal challenge. Responding to customer requests, and with an eye toward helping SMBs increase efficiency, Sage […]

When it comes to running your company’s Web site — whether you’re selling online or providing information to drive sales at your brick-and-mortar location — it pays to differentiate your business from the competition. Oddcast, a New York City-based company, believes its SitePalservice is just the tool to make small business sites stand out in […]

Small businesses looking for a way to let their mobile employees connect to the home office while on the road or working from home may want to know about the Firebox SSL Core VPN Gateway, a new network appliance developed jointly by WatchGuard Technologies and Citrix Systems. Both companies say that Firebox is the first […]

“If you build it, they will come” might have worked for Ray Kinsella in the movie Field of Dreams, but any e-tailer can tell you that it takes a lot more than Hollywood magic and a snappy catch phrase to drive people to a Web site. Once you build your online shingle, you need to […]

External drives appeal to small businesses for a variety of reasons. They offer sole proprietors and small offices an easy way to add storage capacity, they let you backup your data quickly, and they don’t cost all that much. While Maxtor remains the undisputed leader when it comes to external storage, Fastora’s ExBoot adds a […]

Having the right IT support for your small business can improve the company’s overall efficiency and productivity and ultimately help it compete at a level that belies its size. But finding the solutions that work best for your company takes a lot of time and specialized knowledge. Surveys consistently indicate that SMB owners would rather […]