Richard Morochove

Microsoft Exchange can help businesses manage the e-mail and collaboration services their employees use. However, Exchange is not the easiest Microsoft app to install and keep in good running order, particularly for a small business without a dedicated IT department.

While I believe Exchange 2007 is a little easier to set up than Exchange 2003, the newer version is available only as a 64-bit application; you may need to upgrade your server hardware to run the new Exchange.

Numbers may be the way that businesses keep score, but present a report laden with columns and rows of raw data, and your colleagues will soon exhibit what I call MEGO syndrome, as in "My Eyes Glaze Over." I've seen that telltale MEGO look around many a boardroom table, and it ain't pretty. So when I have the misfortune of presenting to a group, I do my best to make my information understandable with clear, simple graphics.

Of course, we're not all Excel experts, and sometimes the number-crunching features of a full-blown spreadsheet app just get in the way when you're trying to create a smart, snappy visual aid for your complex data. With a single-purpose data-visualization tool such as LogiXML VizLytics, you can skip all of the math and get right down to making pretty pictures.

Intuit's QuickBooks small business accounting software runs the back office for many of North America's 31 million small businesses. Now Intuit plans to expand globally by targeting 10 Asian countries, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea. Collectively, these 10 Asian countries have 250 million small businesses.

You won't see many notebook computers in the street stalls of Jakarta. Yet even a street sweeper has a mobile phone. So Intuit plans to grow globally by developing mobile-based versions of QuickBooks at its Global Business Division office, based in Mississauga, Canada.

In trying economic times, it's critical to keep your business in close contact with customers, so you can capture otherwise elusive revenue opportunities. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as SugarCRM help ensure that your sales stay on track.

SugarCRM offers better-than-average graphs that let you check your progress in meeting sales quotas.Like most CRM apps, SugarCRM tracks your contacts, appointments, and sales opportunities. On top of that, however, it offers better-than-average graphs that let you check your progress in meeting sales quotas. You can easily modify the app's terminology, as well as its look and feel, until it's just right for your business.

QuickBooks Premier Edition 2009, which goes on sale online today and is slated to appear in stores next week, sports numerous useful improvements, including multicurrency support for transactions with foreign vendors and customers. The new edition of the market-leading small-business accounting package also improves multiuser capabilities, offers smarter online banking, and makes it easier for your outside accountant to work with your QuickBooks records.

Longtime users will welcome improvements to the dashboard: The company snapshot feature includes more details on your business finances and makes it easier to drill down to examine the details.

Managing and prioritizing tasks is key to meeting business obligations. Almost every business professional has a method of managing small projects and effectively collaborating with others to get the job done. But can yours be improved?

I recall one client who proudly showed me his task management system: He neatly printed each to-do item on a sticky note and slapped it on the bezel of his computer monitor. When a task became high priority, he moved the paper higher on the side of his monitor and shifted the other notes lower. When he was very busy, the notes overflowed to his desk, marching in two regimented lines down each side of his monitor to his keyboard.

All businesses need to invoice their customers for products and services supplied. Invoicing is, of course, available in accounting packages that also track accounts receivable and handle many other chores such as financial statement preparation. But if you don't want the hassle of installing full-fledged accounting software and keeping your records up to date, you can use an online service that handles just the billing and collection services you require.

That's the appeal of Zoho Invoice, part of a growing suite of online business services from Zoho. Zoho Invoice lets you invoice customers by e-mail, track receivables, and collect payments online.

In a business with just a handful of employees, it's easy for the manager to distinguish the worker bees from the drones. But as a business grows and adds staff members who no longer directly report to a single person, managing employee performance reviews becomes more complex.

That's where SuccessFactors can help out. It's an online human resource management service that can help a company of almost any size handle performance reviews and better manage its employees. (Note, however, that it does not handle number-crunching HR tasks such as payroll processing and tax deductions.)

Do you need to keep tabs on what online news makers say about your company, products and competitors? Online media monitoring is now easier and less expensive than ever.

Filtrbox offers an affordable and easy-to-use Web service for tracking what online news makers say about topics of interest to you. It cuts through the online content clutter to focus on what you find relevant: Think of it as Google Alerts (e-mail updates of the latest Google results for your chosen search terms) on steroids.

Search engines can drive a lot of visitors (read: potential buyers) to an e-commerce site. But if you think good text is all you need to score a high search-engine ranking, you haven't looked closely at search-engine results lately.

Search results are no longer limited to blue text links. Search engines now integrate feeds from specialized areas, such as news, pictures, and video, into many search query results. New tagging technology promises to make it easier for others to find and access multimedia and other specialized content on your Web site.

All businesses need to keep track of their PCs and software, and several products already help small businesses with this chore. Now a new service, Paglo, leverages the expertise of a small but growing community to help you manage your networked hardware and software.

You can configure any number of Paglo dashboards to monitor items of most interest to you.The service is unusually flexible and can be configured to suit the needs of a wide range of businesses, from a small outfit with a simple ten-computer network to a sophisticated midsize business with a thousand systems.

Today Adobe launched the free public beta version of Acrobat.com, a Web-based supplement to its popular PDF document creation application. The new site offers an array of services to help businesses share and collaborate on documents. It also supports basic Web conferencing (including desktop sharing) and limited free conversion of documents to PDF format.

Acrobat.com works well with the beta version of Acrobat 9 (also announced today), which includes menus for sharing and collaborating on documents.  (See our First Look, "Acrobat 9 Aims to Reinvent PDFs"). The final version of Acrobat 9 is scheduled to ship in July, along with a new version of Adobe Reader.