Content management systems are a huge part of both my business and my everyday life. The term has almost become ubiquitous online for any piece of software that lets you manage information to be presented in another form or fashion to end-users. Thanks to the increasing need for multi-user systems for managing all of the information available inside corporations and other groups the need for quality content management is rising exponentially with each passing month. If you’re looking to publish online or in print and have tons of information to manage a CMS is the only way to go in order to get your project in motion.

In my own business, building a custom content management system is definitely not a rare request but I also offer other services so I’m not always in a position to fill that need. There are companies, such as DPCI, that specialize in building and selling digital asset management software.

By going with CMS experts, like DPCI, you can be assured you’ll get the system and assistance you need. There are so many content management options on the market today that it’s important to find a vendor or consultant that knows how to separate the good from the bad and get you a working system that will help your business or project succeed.

In my years of freelancing, I’ve come across the need on several occasions to find a viable provider of Exchange hosting. A lot of businesses want the benefits of an Exchange system but are afraid of the inherent costs of the hardware and IT maintenance.

An alternative to an in-house Exchange server is a hosted solution. SherWeb is one of the providers I find meets the needs of most companies looking for Exchange hosting. At just under $9 per mailbox the plans are affordable and come with no minimum number of users. That’s a big plus for smaller sized businesses looking for the benefits of an Exchange Server without the normally high costs associated with one.

SherWeb also provides hosted Sharepoint for those businesses looking to take advantage of Microsoft’s popular collaboration environment. The Sharepoint web hosting that SherWeb provides its customers comes with built-in integration for Microsoft Office and their hosted Exchange service. With an online collaboration environment it’s easier to keep offices in proper communication on their projects.

SherWeb offers a complete set of hosted business tools and applications and better than competitive pricing. I highly suggest businesses of any size, or freelancers looking to make recommendations to their clients, give SherWood’s product line a good, hard look.

Even in the middle of the worst economic crisis in half a century, I find myself entering into the Fall “busy season” for the fifth consecutive year. As of Wednesday of this week, my calendar is booked into January of next year. That’s not too bad considering recent economic events in the US.

The majority of my freelance business centers around the sports industry with a particular focus on baseball, although 2009 will see expansion into other North American sports. As summer draws to a close and teams wrap up their seasons I begin to see a dramatic increase in work requests and project proposals. In the fall, teams shift their focus from the happenings on the field to the happenings off of it.

The Downside of the Busy Season

Of course, the inevitable downside of the busy season is the opposing slow season. When we near the end of spring next year, my sports work will more than likely dry up unless I establish connections with new clients. This is something I’ve had to deal with every year since 2004.

Because of this downswing I’ve developed to growth strategies during these times for my freelance business/ With such a reliance on a cyclical industry and work schedule it is incredibly important for freelancers caught in that kind of loop to find “offseason” clientele or use that time to develop income generating side projects to help you supplement your income.

Finding new clients in a pinched economy isn’t always easy so building sources of passive income might be easier for you. There’s a great quote I heard last night on CNBC in reference to IBM’s business model. A talking head said that IBM “eats while we all sleep.”

A Slowdown Solution

That’s exactly what you want to be doing in your freelance career during down swings in activity. I’ve been an advocate of side projects here on this blog since I began writing it and now, during these potentially difficult times, they are even more important than ever.

There’s something satisfying about building a product, or web site, that generates hands off revenue for you 24 hours a day. If you can begin to generate your own revenue, without relying on constantly churning new clients and getting paid by current ones, you’ll be able to buckle down and make it through the ongoing uncertainty.

Today more and more companies start to understand the importance of PM software which is targeted to solve numerous tasks and thus gives an opportunity to increase profit potential and decrease costs

One of the most positive points of project collaboration software is that it gives a possibility to improve the overall work on numerous projects. For example, many managers of your group fulfill different functions and work on different parts of the project. It would be a hard task to estimate the work of everyone and also see the work in progress. Only imagine what will happen if just one of them does not work properly or makes mistakes. It can spoil the work of all members of the group.

But if you have special online project collaboration software you can see the work of every manager online and of course correct their work online. Another advantage of this particular kind of custom software development is that it works with the help of Internet thus it gives a possibility to connect all your offices which can be situated all over the world. As you see there are numerous advantages of installing PM software.

This has been a crazy week of server maintenance, PC crashes (buy Macs people, please) and client technical support problems. I spent a huge amount of time already this week logging in to various remote systems to fix a handful of disasters and problems. And none of it would have been possible without VNC.

VNC, or Virtual Network Computing, is a method of accessing a remote system. It’s basically a simple way to do desktop sharing. I use it to help troubleshoot client problems by logging directly onto their computer, taking control of that machine’s keyboard and mouse and walking through the problem live with my client. It’s an invaluable tool that every freelancer needs to become intimately familiar with.

This whole setup is very easy to install. I use RealVNC on each client machine and then, since I’m a Mac user, I connect to them using a program called Chicken of the VNC. Chicken of the VNC also has one of the best application icons of all time, as you can see on the right.

Anyway, if you have clients and find yourself in need to some hand holding with them you should definitely look into using VNC.