I haven't met two small business owners in a meeting where one doesn't ask how to get his or her site to the top of the Google search results list. There are transparent reasons for wanting to be first: you get more clicks, your business seems important, clicks convert into business, and your Internet traffic can skyrocket. What's the magic formula for getting to the top?

There is no magic formula
Disappointing as it is, there is no single solution to move your site's rank to #1 in Google. Now that you're over that impractical wish, let's find out how you can increase your page rank and stay away from what will get your Web site tossed from consideration.

Optimize your Web site
Sometimes called SEO, Search Engine Optimization (or SEM, Search Engine Marketing are related but not the same), is a marketing tool more than it is a technology process (so put it in your advertising budget). People type queries (search terms) into search engines and Google delivers results. If your site is optimized for your key product or service, then why isn't it at the top of the results? Common problem: your site hasn't been optimized and search engines cannot find it. You want examples?

We all suffer from TMI (Too Much Information). This week, I've made it my duty to opt-out of lists that once sounded good but are now simply an annoyance. It takes a little work but I'm definitely seeing results. With more than 150 average daily emails deleted (not counting the spam that is blocked before I see it), less email previewing time saves us time. Here's the how-to skinny on opting out of email, phone calls and postal mail.

Opt-out of phone calls
Most businesses and individuals are on the national Do Not Call List which prevents telemarketers from bothering you at work or at home with sales pitches and too-good-to-be-true offers. The big news is that your registration on the list is going to expire soon. Registration done in June, 2003, when the list was started will expire 5 years from that date, that is, by June, 2008. Your number(s) drop off automatically if you do not enroll again.

Those telemarketing calls are such a nuisance that some are encouraging making the list permanent but the director of the FTC, Lydia Parnes, reminds us that, "It is incredibly quick and easy to do." Our suggestion: go to the Do-Not-Call List and re-up all your numbers.

Use Safe Unsubscribe Make this the time you sign off those other useless email lists you thought you wanted but now have no time to use. Stores that you don't shop? Online e-lists that are from professional organizations you no longer belong to? Get rid of them if they offer Safe Unsubscribe features. One of the most frequently used mass email tools is Constant Contact and they offer a safe unsubscribe mechanism in addition to a rigid anti-spam policy. Newsletters sent via reputable firms have opt-out (unsubscribe) features. Isn't this a good time to get rid of the lists you no longer want?

Jim Louderback leaves PCMag and Ziff Davis after 16 years as an editor and on his way out tells us what he really thinks of Microsoft Vista. In his words, "The litany of what doesn't work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly."

Need new computers for your small business but are unsure what OS to put on them? Take a hint from Dell. For a while, Dell pushed Vista but after hearing customer feedback, is now offering XP machines again. The sound and fury of Microsoft ceasing support of XP in early 2009 may make you quake in your virtual boots; however, that seems to be myth and support will continue until at least 2014. See Microsoft's Support Lifecycle Policy and their backtracking on short-support for Windows XP Home (XP Pro is in a different product category and enjoys longer support).

But what if you need machines now? Which OS can you choose and be safe?

Dell's new business machine, the Vostro line, is offered with either XP or Vista operating systems (talk about listening to your customers!). Offered for businesses who don't want Vista – or for whom Vista doesn't work with their required software applications – Vostro boasts not what is on it but what was left off: trialware. It comes with a 30-day money back guarantee with no restocking fee, a 1-year online backup system and North American telephone tech support [some features cost extra]. It sounds like someone is reading those Dell consumer surveys we fill out and good for them.

You can make your hardy XP machine Vista-like with cool cursors and enjoy the experience without upgrading. After doing a Vista Business upgrade on a pretty darned fast Windows Home machine and watching the % meter for 20 hours inch forward, I am pretty against upgrading at all; do a clean install because you're going to have to reload a bunch of software anyway (hey, Adobe/Macromedia, what IS it with Dreamweaver 8 running under Vista?).

When clients inquire about Vista (often when staff starts buying home computers with Vista and want it at work as well), we dissuade them unless the entire office moves to Vista and MS Office 2007, which is, I guess, what Microsoft wanted in the first place. For many customers, we're planning 2008-2009 tech upgrades for everything, including operating systems, office apps, and yes, server software (SBS 2007 has to come out some day!). Because many computers need upgrades to handle the new OS, the cost is significant, especially for small businesses.

We have a short list of guidelines for small businesses moving toward Vista:

1. Take an inventory of your machines and determine which have to be replaced and which can be upgraded to use Vista.
2. Seriously consider not buying OEM copies of Office or Vista from the hardware manufacturer and buy managed licenses instead. If your current old computer has Office 2003 OEM from, say, Dell, you can't install it on a new computer. It's considered part of the machine. Your lawyer may vary; check into it.
3. Upgrade all machines to at least 1Gb of RAM. Consider more. Check out the video card at the same time: does it work with everything Vista offers?
   
4. Will your current network software support Vista machines? (Trust me, we have NT networks that we still work on.)
5. Do you NEED or WANT Vista now? What are you going to do with (or what will it do for you) that makes the pain of cost and planning worthwhile?
6. Don't try to push a doorstop of a computer onto the receptionist so turning the machine on takes 12 minutes and opening Word takes another 15. That's not a technology plan.
7. Got any Macs in the house?
8. Office 2003 works fine under Vista. Office 2007 is way cooler (but doesn't create .doc files unless you've got a savvy user so sharing files is a daily frustration). It takes a good long time to upgrade from 2003 to 2007 so consider formatting all machines and then clean-loading Vista and Office 2007 and wait for all those users to complain about their missing software, license codes and other crying-jag inducing moments.
9. Have a technology upgrade plan. Hire a professional. This isn't your father's upgrade.
10. Lock 'em down. Don't let small business users start tweaking or you won't be able to support the mess of machines on your network. The business owner owns the computers. Let folks change colors but that's enough for a while.

Small businesses facing a technology upgrade should proceed with caution, take their time and consult professional computer engineers who do this every day. You'll learn a lot (and save unexpected costs) from their experience.

So you want to start a business blog? Congratulations! Let's start out by avoiding some of the "great blog mistakes" that too many potential bloggers make.

1. Who are you? If you're going to blog for business, make sure the readers know who you are and update the 'About the Author' page frequently. Tell us your title, what company you own or work for, and enlighten us about some of your accomplishments. A small picture helps us connect to you through the digital divide and an email link can be worth its weight in gold.
2. Bad post titles. Headlines are important since that's probably what shows up in most blog aggregators (RSS). Work on the post title's cleverness and avoid trite or meaningless titles (like "Today is Boring"). If you want people to click your link from the RSS feed, invite them to your site with a catchy post title.

In my never-ending quest for my business to be as technologically cool as my kids (and those their ages) are everyday, and to posit my business as technologically fashion-forward as possible, we've determined that there are five tools we can't live without and do our everyday business while moving ever closer to the techno cutting edge.

A phone with email
We can't live without email on our phones. For our (older person) needs, web browsing, watching videos and listening to music run a distant second. Our folks use Motorola Q and Treo and have tossed many others as unsuitable (too big, require too many reboots, bad keyboards, too many buttons to figure out). Not one of us wants an iPhone and we're not big text-ers, although our servers send SMS notifications when they're cranky. What frustrates us are the batteries – none has a long-enough life so we rely on Sedio to sell us better ones.

A reliable notebook to schlep
We take notebooks to meetings, to public wifi hotspots and business offices to meet with clients. Some of us, especially the girls, have a lightweight criterion, in addition to coveting reliable and easy to haul notebooks that survive minor life infractions (like car door clunking). There are no "notebooks to replace workstations" in our corral of equipment (too heavy) and where the USB ports are located (side or back) matters a lot. Designers require Macs; the business folks use obsolete-but-still-good souped-up Inspirons that reformat with a keystroke combination. They all go on the network. We reformat a lot.

A cool bag to schlep the notebook
Our cool bags? The Bag Lady, Funky, Chic and Cool , Coach (of course) and Case Closed. The guys like backpacks and hardly care about the colors (as long as they're dark).

Cheap easy and convenient media tools
Online businesses need video and audio tools but our staff admits they rarely use the higher-IQ video functions on camcorders (we outsource that function). Most small businesses require basic functions: relatively easy to point and shoot, some ability to correct for light, zoom, new lens capable, logical to download to a computer and the deal-breaker: standard file format. There's no pretending it's going to fit in a purse but it should live happily in a cool bag. We move files all over so we chose hard-drive recorders (not suitable for professional videographers) and HD. We like the Canon HV and HR line. You can get started for less than $1,100.00.

For audio, we're satisfied with Olympus products (used by many journalists), from the WS line. That gives us lots of recording time, a direct PC link and a built-in mic, but we bought external ones because they're just better. Prices seem to drop every day. Podcasting software can be free and do most of what you need.

Neater power
As the quintessential electronic consumers, using small office space efficiently is a daily challenge. Cord knots make us crazy and we've tried various tools that promise to make electronic living neater. There's the PowerSquid surge, the PowerSquid outlet multiplier, and the PowerStation cable organizer. Check out CableOrganizer.com for more ideas. Nothing we've found yet solves cord problems so we decided never to move the desks around in the office, even if we left-handers suffer a lot.

Even if you're not that mobile, get a docking station for your notebook so you can use a real keyboard, mouse and monitor. It cuts down on the carpal tunnel claims.

If you've got a small business toy you can't live without or recommend, please let us know. We buy new stuff everyday, it seems, and why should today be different?

Gen Y, a term sometimes used for those 20-35 years old, are old enough to be (some of) our kids but more importantly make up our next generation of clients. This generation, defined more by popular culture than by age, is an Internet-hungry and online-casual bunch. Currently, there are about 76 million of them in the U.S., not a bad market slice.

They communicated first via Instant Message and made the sport popular. After webcams were affordable, dating sites emerged. By the time YouTube opened up the face-to-face world, research as we knew it had changed permanently. Then social sites like MySpace, and Facebook blew onto the virtual landscape. Television is becoming secondary to seeing what you want when you want it (this is the ongoing theme) and BitTorrent (among others) is the way to find preferred media, not TV Guide.

If your business is looking for its next generation of customers, what kind of online presence do you need to attract and keep the techno-oriented Y'ers who spend big bucks online? Although neither exhaustive nor scientific (my sample was everyone I know under 35), here is a list of popular places where young folks come together online. If you market, you should consider these sites.

Download Squad and its cousins – people want to know what's out there as soon as it's launched. DLS not only tells you what's there but also make it easy to find plus they let you know if it's worthwhile. With so much information out there, DLS and its cousin sites offer today's specials so you don't have to bother with the entire menu.

Gmail, Google News Reader, Google Docs – free online services by King Google are the prime haunt of many 20-35 year olds. Make sure you know how they work so when you build apps on your site you try to mimic the look and feel. When they want world news, they often use the links at the top of the pages.

The News Empire – the business-oriented target group seems to enjoy CNN's plethora of sites including cnn.com for news, cnnsi.com for sports, and the new CNN video area. They find news at their local paper's site as well as at the major news sites including The NY Times, WaPo, Google and Yahoo!.

Things Technical – if the users are geeky (a term I use with respect), they're likely to grab the most current news available from sites like Slashdot, Digg, Techmeme, Engadget and Reddit. Never heard of them? Each is a field-leader and they all use a blog-like or RSS-like updating system. Ease of use and consistent uptime can be more important than design. (A site is successful when its name becomes a verb, like, "Google that..." or "My review was slashdotted...")

Sharing Socially – social networking sites are more than just a "what's new" news item. Facebook and MySpace connect this international generation like virtual glue. Many users consider these sites to be their homepages and include links to other sites they want to visit (like Twitter, Google Reader, Pownce, their favorite blogs) right from those pages.

Photo Share – Got a shelf full of quaint photo albums? Today's shelves are online on a Flickr, Picasa or other photo site's servers. With the rapid availability of fast bandwidth, pictures go online instantaneously and can circle the globe in less than a morning. Others can comment and you can share all the photos you upload from your digital camera or more likely from your phone. In the olden days, we taught people how to attach a photo to an email. Today, we read the Flickr feed to see a picture that might interest us.

It's All in the RSS – most everyone who leans toward the technical has an RSS reader, whether it's Google or FeedDemon or others. The younger online group gets the feed for whatever interests them and checks that feed several times a day. It's neater and cleaner than browsing all over the Web and they get what they want when they want it (the ongoing theme) and have time to read it. If you don't yet have an RSS feed, what are you waiting for?

Share, Share, Share – the definition of social sites is sharing. We share not only photos and text but also we expect sharing in return. It's almost as if the Web has come full circle. From the olden days of the early 1990s to the mid-first decade of this millennium, the Web has evolved from open and free (when I started) to pay-as-you-go (when they expected you to pay to get news) and has grown into freely shared spaces that are your own. The mantra of sites is "Twitter/Pownce - Digg - Flickr" for the younger and clued-in audience.

Whether you consider this generation of Internet users to be egocentric and instantaneous gratifiers or open-minded and savvy, the proof of the online pudding is in the feed. Click a few links and see how they are coming to the knowledge that will make them – or keep them – from becoming your future customers.

If your fav site was omitted, please add it in the comments. You'd be surprised how many great sites we find out simply by asking others who are slightly more geeky than we are.

A couple of years ago, I wasn't completely sure what Web 2.0 was and sought an education. Robert Scoble, here to keynote for ConvergeSouth, sat at my kitchen table and answered the elusive question in a single word. "What's Web 2.0? Widgets." Suddenly, it made sense. Web 2.0 is the interactive Web (so sayeth Dave Winer and he should know) and widgets – a play on our old Econ 101 class' finest example – are the glue that holds Web 2.0 together.

In the Web 2.0 world, it's a lot less about design and a lot more about place and experience. You want your content and not just your Web site to be identified with your brand. Find a designer who thinks like a programmer and your site can reflect the changes of Web 2.0. If your designer talks about a "Flash intro," think about hiring a new one. And find out what's free online.

Are Web 2.0 logos free?
Web 2.0 logos can be free if you're willing to build your own from a step-by-step tutorial. If you've been thinking of redesigning your Web site, now is a good time to go 2.0 ("two-oh"). Learn how to make a 2.0-ish logo (Photoshop tutorial). Take a look at the free 2.0-style buttons for your site here. There are even blank buttons you can use on your new site here (or get a graphics designer to build custom).

Besides, it's time for your site to transition to XML and use an RSS feed for updates and news. You might as well start out with new 2.0-ish site buttons.

What's free to make 2.0 buttons and icons?
If you don't have $1,200 to spend on the newest incarnation of Photoshop, get Gimp. It's free, very Photoshop-like and runs on Windows. If you're not a do-it-yourself'er, you can get previews of free Web icons and buttons suitable for the Web 2.0 theme here.

Visit free online button-generating sites and create some 2.0-ish graphics for your site that use your colors. There are button makers and more button makers and even more button makers that are free.

Repetitive tasks are a huge time-waster that small business can't afford. Decrease time spent on a task and you increase productivity. Use the tools you already own - download one or two - to speed up jobs you do repeatedly.

1. Template it. If you use MS Word (or another word processor) to write letters, make fax cover sheets, create printer labels, write proposals, build reports, print your own notecards and more, make Word templates for each and put them on the server so everyone can use them (or copy them to everyone's machine). Company-wide documents should be built on templates and they should be available to everyone who needs them. Make folders for template types and they'll show up as tabs when you click "File-New" in each MS Office application. Create online letter templates here. Open Office users have extras available as well.
   
   On a Windows XP machine, templates often live here: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates ("Owner" may vary).
   
   
2. Signature it. Create email signatures to pre-write the repetitive things you send. Make a signature for confidentiality, one with your mobile phone, one with all your other contacts (e.g. Skype, IM, Twitter), and one of my favorites: the prices to renew domains when they expire (we manage hundreds of domains and send reminders almost daily). Click "Insert-Signature" (in Outlook) and choose the one you need at the time. Take the time to create one for plain text and another for HTML. Most email programs have a signature option. Use it creatively and save time.
   
   

Does your business have a Facebook page? MySpace? Chances are you have heard about each but chances are also that if you're a small business owner, you haven't had time to figure out how to get yours or worse, what to do with it. Heck, you don't even have a blog yet, do you?

You're way out of the loop and I won't even mention Twitter or Jaiku. (Not yet.) But they're coming.

The 2008 Presidential primary is an investigation of who's using the Internet more (although who's using it creatively would be a better benchmark). Every major candidate has a space on the social networking sites and each wants an "I'm-first-to-do-this" feature. Sure, they pay Internet consultants for this edge, so take advantage of their investment and borrow the best from the brightest for your business.

As ecommerce sites invest R&D into social features (like e-notifications, RSVP systems, unique hyperlinks, photo albums, message books, and registry systems you can put on your own site), you can see how ecommerce is seeping into social networking. For starters, we use office product sites that remember (for free) what we bought last time.

IT'S TIME TO GET YOUR SPACE – Log into the well-known social networking sites and claim your business name's space. It's a good idea to get a Web-email address to use (free Web-mail from Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others) to control likely spam. If you have teenagers handy, they can help make the process understandable. You don't have to build it up yet; just get your name branded there and think about offering something to download. If a number of people want it, create an email list.

DON'T BLOG. MICROBLOG

"And we want to be on the first page of Google," another new client said matter-of-factly, as the after-thought of our Web design meeting. I nodded, inhaled, and began my spiel.

"What are your stats now?" I asked, although I knew the answer. Many small businesses don't review their site stats, don't know how to view them online and can't really interpret them, but all Web site rebuilding plans include being on the first page of Google results. Let's try to marry the want with some how-to and understand how this works.

KNOW YOUR STATS
Know what your Web stats are. Contact your Web firm and demand the link. Bookmark them. Look at them! Pay attention to the "search keyphrases" and "search keywords" that users enter into search engines and find your site.

Site traffic is saved to logs and statistics programs display the data. Web stat programs are usually loaded on the server, so they have to be available from your hosting company. One of the most common stat packages is Webalizer, a fast and free log file analyzer. There are countless guides to help you interpret the numbers. And the mystery between "hits" and "visits" is explained here. Another common stat program is AWStats, an open source project at SourceForge There is a plethora of stat programs, many of which are free [see DLS for more info]

BUY BETTER STATS
You can buy access to better, more colorful stats with graphs and charts and circles and arrows. If you have a marketing department, they should take a look at WebTrends for small business, one of the older analytics, and check out the demos. WebTrends, like many other quality stat packages, is not free, so decide if the pretty pictures are worth the price.

I WANT TO BE ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE!
You want higher ranking in the search engines' results? In the olden days, everyone played on the same field. Nowadays, it takes a village to raise your rankings. Try these suggestions, many of which are human-intensive.

Security. Protection. Backup. We're all familiar with protecting our assets –data, personnel records and credit card numbers. But after spending thousands of dollars on brand and identity campaigns, how many small business owners get scammed out of their domain names?

It's one thing to register a domain in good faith and then have the ICANN approved registrar turn into an international mockery like Register Fly. It's another scandal for domain registrars to send misleading postal and email to scam domain owners into giving up control of their domains and losing their Web sites [see one here and the FTC press release [pdf].

It's not good enough anymore to shift the responsibility onto those who "get it." If you own a business, then you just have to learn who owns your domain, know how to control it, and be aware if someone is trying to steal it. Your domain name is in the top three of your brand/identity package. Can you afford to give it away because you don't understand how it works?

An individual, group or business registers (not "buys") a domain name from an approved registrar. There is an up-front fee and an annual renewal. (This is not the same thing as paying for Web hosting, although you can pay the same registrar for both.)

HOW TO LOSE YOUR DOMAIN

If you're in business and reading this article, chances are your company has a Web site. Before we all go to Web 2.0, does your site measure up to Web 1.0? Let's check how your site stands up to Web pages that "suck."

Read on to learn how you might be sending your potential customers fleeing in terror.

We know what a "smart" phone is. I've recently learned what constitutes a dumb phone and how it foils productivity. However, it makes a gaping hole in a wall when you throw it with the force of frustration.

Smart phones are PDAs and phones and include email, calendar, contact list, tasks, Web browser, and, oh yes, telephone capability. Most of us are used to cell phones, which are mostly just phones, and do phone things very well. Smart phones seem to do phone functions almost as an afterthought. If you and your employees need a phone first and use ordinary functions primarily like calendars, dialing from the contact list, and reading and replying to email, then the phone you buy should maximize those features.

Leave cool stuff like watching videos and installing lots of programs for people who will figure out how to do those geeky things on any phone you buy. Your kids can get your ringtones installed for you in just a few seconds and won't even read the manual (RTM).

SMART PHONE BUYING TIPS FOR SMART DECIDERS:

1. THE SCREEN Can your users see the screen without reading glasses? If not, make screen size, resolution and contrast important considerations. Take the phone outside and see if the screen is still visible in moderate sunlight. (Take the store employee, too.)
   
2. INSTALLATION Do you need to hire someone to install the phones? If so, make sure your phones work with your server (aka "The Blackberry Dilemma") or POP email accounts or you're going to feel very silly when the engineer arrives.
3. WOMEN'S CLOTHES Got female employees? How women carry phones is different from how men do. What holster choices are available, how much do they cost and most important, what colors do they come in?
4. HANDS FREE ROCKS Earbuds are not only for dorks (because I am not a dork). While driving, I used to put on reading glasses, tap a stylus on my PDA, get a phone number, transfer attention to my phone and dial. A Bluetooth phone with an earbud and voice dialing provided immeasurable safety to other North Carolina drivers. If your folks are mobile, get voice-dialing.
5. QWERTY Will your staff ever be able to use the phone's keyboard? Women often have longer fingernails and some men have chubby ("athletic") fingers. Related: how many txt messages can one employee send in a business day?
6. PHONE NAVIGATION Wheel or stylus? Are iPod users just smarter – or younger – than stylus users? Conversion can be painful with the wrong phone.
7. TAKING PICTURES Are you allowed to take a camera phone into businesses you frequent? Lawyers beware: most federal courts ban cameras, let alone webcams.
   
8. MICROSOFT OFFICE Are you going to edit documents on your phone or perhaps only open or beam them to a nearby computer? Related: Star Trek beaming noises are banned in my office.
9. TALKING TOGETHER Does your team need speakerphone capability? Some phones have remarkable quality speakers built in. If you need a full-duplex speakerphone, consider a phone that offers that feature.
10. CAN YOU HEAR ME? No company can afford a phone with poor reception or sound capability. Try out phones at the store or bring a rep to your office. Call willing clients and test the sound from your office and not only from the store, where, I am convinced, they install boosters.
    

Gadget buying requires a team nowadays. And get advice from your teenage son or daughter, niece or nephew, or grab one off the street, before you commit to a smartphone for your business.

Just when you think that if you're aware of what MySpace is then you're on top of geeky things and your kids might respect you, along comes Twitter. Not a blog, not a social networking space, Twitter is a conversation online with no one – and with everyone on the planet. Your short twitters can be sent from phone texting, IMs and blogs and are immediately online through Twitter. And yes, even from Web sites (they seem almost anachronistic now.)

Get a Twitter friend (or 50) and watch their happenings. Know what they're doing right now. Organize a dinner through Twitter and your Twitter friends will know where and when and in whose name the reservation was made. It's that easy – type your message and move on. Welcome to the conversation economy.

Setting up your phone for Twitters (noto bene: be sure you or your kids have unlimited text messaging) is a snap; getting Twitters through IM is a breeze. The developers are having a field day because now we have:

Twittervision! (The father of Twittervision is David Troy.)


If you have a personal avatar (icon), then your Twitterism and your mug shot show up reasonably close to your geographic point-of-origin. Twittering is perhaps this month's newest time-waster but it's as fascinating as can be and has become the darling of the uber-geeky set. Global voices are having conversations in real time and if you thought that fifth graders didn't know geography, this is novel and effective way to teach them where the international community lives and how they can talk to you right now.

If IMs, or texting, or logging into a Web site are too complicated for you, Firefox offers a Twitter plug-in. Switch your (probably) Google search default to Twitter and each string you type is automatically Twittered. Let's be careful out there: switch back to your search engine or you're going to share your searches with the world.

The next step in instant global communication has to be popular-level videophone.

Is this useful for your business? With an open developers' platform and creative programmers, Twitter is the closest app I've seen to replacing those pink while-you-were-out slips that decorate your doorway or cube glass when you step out to the restroom or dare to take lunchtime.

Microsoft Office 2007 is big, bloated and brilliant. There is a plethora of new features for PowerPoint, Word, Excel (the jewel in the crown) and Outlook, my other husband. Microsoft recently brought the 2007 show local and I couldn't resist spending an intimate day with hundreds of other geeks. When the demonstrator's overloaded power laptop blue-screened, the crowd of small business owners cheered. We're a testy bunch when it comes to ROI on computer purchases.

Office 2007 runs on either Windows XP or Vista. The changes we saw were primarily cosmetic but productively important: when it takes employees a while to re-learn what they already know how to do, we lose money on the learning curve. (Using Outlook as a business contact manager was a large part of the demo and deserves its own post.)

The Ribbon
The most user-challenging feature will be the "Ribbon," which replaces the two friendly toolbars we know, love and customize.

Office 2007 is intuitive. The ribbon morphs unasked into the tasks it thinks you want to do next (called "contextual tabs"). If you're in a table, it moves to table commands in a disconcerting and resource-sucking visual blip. I predict we're going to lose monitors due to thrown objects caused by ribbon morphing, but right-clicking is a better alternative. Microsoft promotes it with '[T]he tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications.' Remember that the question of relevancy is highly individual with power users.

Going Home
The Home button provides easy access to the most frequently used Office commands. To new 2007 users, it's an extra click, a superfluous layer, another mouse move but in reality, it's the place to click to share, print, publish, and send documents.

Emailing files
Do you send Word or Excel files? Word 2007 saves in a new format (no more .doc) and you'll have to "save as" an "older" version (that'd be XP, which is lumped into Office 95 as an antique format) to share with those not yet blessed with Office 2007. A happy new feature is "save-to-PDF" and sending PDF files is the best choice anyway. Recommendation: send PDF files whenever possible.

Do you have the techno-horsepower?
Upgrading your current Office version might be cheaper than buying new, but it is time-consuming to load, resource-intensive and requires more RAM and better video (especially if you're considering Vista). Office 2007 is exceptionally graphical (and resource-intensive). In preparation, we upgraded our machines from 1Gb to 3Gb of RAM (older RAM costs less) and double-checked the video cards to make sure they had at least 128Mb of on-board RAM (we replaced only two because we knew it was coming 2 years ago). Call your IT folks and talk it all over before buying Office 2007 or Vista.

The money question
Does your business need Office 2007 with its bells, whistles, contextual tabs, galleries and Ribbon now? At the demo, the leader pointed out that things the "geeks" could do are now available to "regular" users like 'us' (well, them). The quandary: those things were always available and regular users could rarely do them so what makes you think they're going to start doing them now because they're prettier?

The bottom line
The reviews are in. ZDNet advises that if your current version works, don't upgrade even though there are significant improvements to Excel formula referencing, pretty PowerPoint, and better document recovery. They note that the drastic design changes demand a steep learning curve and the new interface isn't intuitive.

If you've got power users, they're going to love Office 2007. Regular users will face a learning slippery incline (not quite a steep curve). Your costs for both software and people frustration may vary.