Nine year-old: "I wish every day was Friday."
Seven year-old: "Duh. We'd have to go to school every day!"

An article earlier this month at Business Week lists ten effective small business technologies for small businesses. The article is a general overview and limited on specific links in some categories, but it does a great job of identifying ten specific categories of applications that can advance small business productivity and lower costs.

Following up on the discussion of Skype a few days ago, I noted the article identifies a free conference call service at freeconferencecall.com. I tried this service about a year back and found strange call drops and other unexplained irregularities. Apparently, these issues have been resolved. The best feature of this service is the ability to have the conference recorded and stored for 120 days. You can access the recording as a .wav file, rss feed, or podcast.

remote desktop access software is probably the best productivity software for a small business. I think the Business Week article assumes a lot in suggesting Windows Terminal Server. It is great technology and there are open source solutions. Teamtutorials.com has a great tutorial using the Windows XP Pro platform with links to open-source alternatives. Give it a try - have a good weekend.