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.

Collaborating with other members of your team to create and modify documents is a common business need. But what's the best way to handle this task? A new online document collaboration service called HyLighter lets you use color coding to highlight annotations, which the service tracks separately from the original document.

Products designed to address the needs of people who collaborate on documents have been around for awhile. One familiar example is Microsoft Word's Track Changes capability; introduced several years ago, this feature lets users  mark up a Word document with comments and suggested changes that other collaborators can accept or reject.

How does your business handle general and sales query e-mail? In many organizations these messages go to a shared e-mail account, such as info@yourdomain.com. Answering them may be the responsibility of any one of several company reps.

But how do you ensure that your company promptly handles all queries sent to a shared e-mail address? In today's fast-paced business world, letting an e-mail sit too long unanswered can spell the difference between winning a sales order and losing it. And how do you prevent multiple employees from wasting their time (and giving the customer a bad impression of your business's processes) by answering the same query?

Does your business need help getting more organized? JuggleMyStuff is an interesting Web based service that offers simple project management, collaborative file sharing, and a calendar and event planner. Other Web-based services, such as Basecamp, have similar capabilities, but JuggleMyStuff adds depth and increases flexibility.

If you need this mix of features, you can check out JuggleMyStuff at no cost--but the free plan's capacity is too limited for most businesses. Paid plans offering greater capacity range in price from $5 to $139 per month.

A legal agreement may be the start of something wonderful in a business. But keeping track of all the details in a large number of contracts can be a record-keeping nightmare.

Mumboe's main dashboard shows upcoming and past-due tasks, along with their deadlines. Prominent icons allow you to create, view, or find an agreement you've stored in Mumboe's online database.A new service called Mumboe takes legal documents out of dusty file cabinets and puts them into a secure and searchable online database. It can help a business create and track both its legal agreements and any deadlines or other key information related to them.

Should you use a specialized--and pricey--online search engine to help you track what bloggers say about your products and services?

Online opinion makers are more important to business success then ever before. Blog buzz is today's digital equivalent of word-of-mouth that can make or break a new product.