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E-mail is like a spouse that we love but acknowledge to be imperfect. A recent survey documented the E-mail bêtes noires of 1,000 small companies.

E-mail problem % of respondents citing it
Spam 33%
Difficulties sending file attachments 22%
Lack of receipt confirmation 19%
Problems spelling addresses 17%
Prioritization of messages received 16%

Source: Cyber Dialogue Inc.

Good Skill Hunting

Good help is hard to find. Good technical help is really hard to find. Good technical help for small companies offering humble salaries--well, you get the picture. Here are possible sources of cheap talent.

Students. When Apogee Information Systems, based in Marlboro, Mass., needed to strengthen its systems muscle, human-resources manager Debra Amorelli turned to Northeastern University's co-op program. To date Northeastern, which is in nearby Boston, has provided the custom-software company with four student employees: one for network management, the others for client projects. "We pay our co-ops $15 an hour," says Amorelli. "A full-time entry-level person would cost $40,000 to $45,000 a year"--a significant chunk of change for the $2-million company. And Apogee has the co-ops for just six months, so if work dries up, it's not left overstaffed.

Teachers. If your project is too sophisticated for student labor, you can hire a teacher--if you can wait for summer vacation, that is. For companies in and around Omaha, finding such an employee is made easier by the Applied Information Management (AIM) Institute, which, among other things, acts as a clearinghouse for teachers looking to do short stints in the business world. Besides the extra income, teachers gain insights they can put to use in the classroom, says Carol Nickerson, a high school instructor who did some database work for a local company last summer. "I was looking to see what kinds of science and math skills my students will need," she says.

Your staff. OK, you're not going to turn the woman running the lunch truck into a database whiz. But nontechnical workers can master some technology tasks, according to Anthony Craig, until recently the CEO of the Global Knowledge Network, which helps Fortune 500 types train workers in network management. Employees get new skills; you get tech help from someone you know who's already on payroll. Of course, if such staffers take to their new responsibilities, you may have to find someone to replace them. --Mike Hofman

Hello? Hello?

Who's minding the phones? Most likely a human being, according to a recent survey of 500 companies with 50 or fewer employees.

How calls are handled
(by % of respondents)
By an employee 30%
By voice mail 21%
By a receptionist 20%
By call forwarding 6%
Other 18%
No response 5%

Source: Telecommunications Industry Association and the U.S. Telephone Association.

Let It All Hang Out

The National Academy Press (NAP) is realistic: just because Amazon.com sells a few of the publisher's books on-line, that doesn't mean retailers are going to start throwing their marketing dollars at titles like Nutrient Requirements of Swine and Chaos Theory Tamed. So NAP director Barbara Kline Pope is taking promotion into her own hands by getting the word out--or, to be more precise, all the words out--through the Internet.

Over the past two years NAP, the nonprofit publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has posted the full texts of more than 1,200 books on its Web site. Digital distribution fits right in with NAP's mission to disseminate scientific information, but for-profit publishers take note: Pope credits the Web strategy with boosting sales by about 5% a year. "We're selling more books because people have the ability to see what they're getting," she says.

Take National Science Education Standards, a 272-page guide for schoolteachers, published in 1996. Next to the "buy it" option on the NAP site, there's a "read it" button, which lays the whole book out on a potential customer's monitor. "We put it on-line immediately, and we've sold 200,000 copies," says Pope. "That's maybe 25,000 to 50,000 more than we would have expected if we hadn't done this."

Of course, baring all might not work for genres like, say, mysteries. But according to Pope, many publishers will find that the benefits of setting content free far outweigh the risks. "Yes, people can print it out, use up all their toner in the process, and wind up with an unbound pile of paper sitting on the shelf," she says. "My philosophy is to put the whole thing up there, and it will be more like shopping in a bookstore." --A. R.

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