PC World Business

Are you one of those unlucky souls who enjoys decent mobile phone reception when you're out and about, but can't get a signal at home or in the office? You're not alone. Indoor phone calls have long been a weak point of cellular coverage.

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."

Integration of traditional on-premises Notes-based collaboration, new unified communications tools, Symphony productivity applications, content management, Web-based services and the potential to mash it all together with new-fangled development tools and social networking innovations pouring out of IBM's research labs are just a few of the challenges facing IBM's Lotus Software division chief, Bob Picciano.

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.

The digital Disneyland of the future -- where we freely work and play online -- may be at risk. Why? Because, some argue, broadband carriers can't support it. The Internet's "free ride" culture has led to more people downloading gigabytes of data at practically no cost. Even if broadband infrastructure's capacity doubled or tripled, there's no avoiding the equivalent of an abrupt work stoppage.

The sprawl of management consoles, the proliferation of data they provide and the rising use of virtualization are adding challenges to corporations looking to more effectively manage mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments.

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

Even though strides are being made to define standards for extending Ethernet to handle data center applications, these advances will not be a panacea, vendors say.

Technology has played a particularly prominent role in the 2008 US elections -- and it isn't just the typical silliness over whether a candidate really claimed to have invented a key piece of technology. Throughout the year we've seen technological advances used both for good, such as using Short Message Service to announce a vice presidential pick, and for bad, such as hacking into another vice presidential pick's private e-mail account. In this story, we'll take a look at the eight techiest moments of the 2008 presidential race, including YouTube debates, viral videos and e-voting controversies.

When it came time for Washington, D.C., to create a new intranet for city employees, spending US$4 million on a site based on proprietary portal software just didn't seem like a good idea to CTO Vivek Kundra. But using Google Apps did, he said in an interview Tuesday.

Windows Web sites worth a look