When it comes to setting up your small business, there are a great number of things to worry about. Among them? Implementing a phone system for use by a small, handful of employees or by vast quantities of call center drones… or any combination of employees in between.

There are a great number of sophisticated VOIP solutions out there. You can go the Microsoft route and implement a “unified communications” suite like Microsoft Office Communications Server. Similarly, you can go with a richly-complex Windows Server-based solution like ShoreTel. If you’re a true rogue, you can alternatively go the open-source route and opt for a Linux-based phone system like Asterisk.

Of course, there’s always an online solution that’ll save you from investing in either hardware or software. (For the most part, at least.) Enter Zaplee. Zaplee integrates with your existing Skype account(s) to provide you with an easy way to manage departments, extensions, greetings, forwarding, complex routing, etc.

Getting everything setup, at least according to the site, is a pretty straight-forward, 4 or 5-step process: download the software, setup the extensions, setup departments, record greetings and then, well, go live. Check out the Zaplee feature tour to get an overview of how the system looks and works.

As a side note, there are two flavors of Zaplee: the $5-a-month (for unlimited users) solution that you can manage from your desktop, alongside the Skype software. The other option, Zaplee On-Demand, at $10-a-month (also for unlimited users) is entirely Web-based.

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive, quick and easy way to get a phone system setup in your office. Sure, you might very well outgrow it eventually and you might decide that you’re better off with one of the aforementioned paths I mentioned above (OCS/ShoreTel/Asterisk) but, then again, Zaplee might just do everything you need… and at a ridiculously-low price.

What say you? What voice system have you decided upon/deployed for your office?

Alright, it’s happened to me no less than one trillion times now and I’m sure it’s happened to you: you fill out a contact form or a form for tech support only to lose every carefully-chosen word in some fluke accident like a browser crash or the accidental closing of a tab.

If it has happened, save yourself some trouble in the future by installing the Lazarus add-on for your browser. (Lazarus for Mozilla Firefox | Lazarus for Google Chrome – sorry IE users)

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One of the (few) complaints I continually hear about Windows 7 is the lack of the Quick Launch toolbar for the taskbar. Sure, the icon-friendly new taskbar makes it easier to store multiple shortcuts but you still can’t store that many.

Enter 7Stacks and Jumplist Launcher. Both apps enable you to add shortcuts to folders/applications anywhere on your system… shortcuts that will be accessible via a right-click on the app icon in your taskbar. It’s something that I wish was built into Win7 natively but a 3rd-party app will do just nicely.

[Source: FreewareGenius.com]

Given how frequently I tinker with different web-based app installs (WordPress, drupal, Magento, etc.), I’ve always found it a bit of a pain to regularly backup the databases for those installations. Of course, however painful it may be, it’s always worth it in the event of a disaster!

I’ve found many MySQL backup solutions but none of them seem to be perfect in my eyes. (Hey, what is perfect these days?)

DESKTOP APPS

There’s Backup Watcher for MySQL but a) it costs $$ and b) you have to “activate” the software in order to use it. For someone like myself – who is constantly reformatting the various machines on which I work – that’s far too annoying given that you have to wait for a new activation code from the company. Of course, if you’re just gonna set this up on a server or desktop that you touch maybe once every three years – it may very well be worth it. Setting up automated backups is fool-proof and the interface isn’t too archaic. Plus, support usually responds within one business day – even if they aren’t that fluent in the English language.

One benefit to the above app is that it runs on Windows. For me, at least, that makes administration much easier. Another such app is Auto Backup for MySQL. (I’ll try and download and install this to post a review here soon.) This one also costs money (still less than $100) but the fact that it appears to be continually updated – it’s now Windows 7 and Server 2008 compatible – puts my mind at ease.

For more advanced MySQL DB management, you might also look at Navicat for MySQL – an all-in-one mgmt app that not only enables scheduled database backups but also provides you with options to interact with the data itself as well as the overall structure of the database. Pricing is much better than I remember. You can probably stay close to the price-range of the apps mentioned above and wind up with many more features at the same time. Plus, the interface is quite a bit more polished than the other apps.

WEB-BASED SCRIPTS

A more universal option (for those on different platforms beyond Windows) is a self-install script like Backup2Mail… which costs absolutely nothing. (The song “Born Free” from the last episode of the first season of Dexter is now running through my mind.)

Scripts like this one reside on your server, alongside your MySQL install, and regularly emails you backups of your database(s). The company recommends that you use a secure email environment given the risk involved in sending potentially-confidential data through email.

AutoMySQLBackup is a free script that’s been around for a while. Much like Backup2Mail, this script enables scheduled backups via the web but, with this one, you can not only send backups by email but also dump them to a directory on your web server. That way, if you’ve got the available space, you never need worry about the size of your DB backups.

What backup solution are you using/do you recommend? Let other readers know in the comments below.

We’ve been using Mozilla’s Weave extension/platform for some time now and the team, today, launched Weave version 0.7. Nothing major to report in this release, just some performance and UI improvements. However, Mozilla’s always had plans to enable the synchronization of your many different Firefox add-ons. I suspect that’ll be something that comes with the release of 1.0 but who knows what 0.8 or 0.9 will bring…

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