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Printer sharing is a cool thing. You can make the most of your resources by having everybody print to one machine, rather than putting a printer on everybody's desktop. If only it weren't so complicated to configure and set-up that sharing.

PrinterAnywhere lowers the bar on printer sharing. Rather than relying on your expertise in networking, all you do is install the app and let it figure everything out. It detects your local printer and any network printers to which you're connected. Use is simple: you just print the way you normally do from your applications, you just choose the remote printer instead of the one sitting on your desk. And doing regular printer sharing one better, with PrinterAnywhere you can print beyond your network as well.

Your print job is encrypted, so you're safe printing around the block or around the world. And unlike e-mailing documents to other folks for them to print, with PrinterAnywhere the recipient can't keep an electronic copy or accidentally forward it to their whole email address book.

PrinterAnywhere is a Windows application. You need to be running Win2k or later to use it.

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For your website's pages to show up in search results in Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines, their "robots" have to be able to find your site's pages. That stands to reason: how can they report on what they haven't seen? The "seeing" part, however, isn't always so easy.

Search engines run on a numbers game. They want to be able to report the greatest number of relevant results to their visitors while expending the least amount of effort on their part. Generally search engines find your site by following links from other sites; then find other pages by navigating through your site. There are some types of navigation that work well for your human visitors that just don't work for search engine robots.

Search engines can't click buttons, they can't follow JavaScript links, and they don't like big, long, nasty URLs like

   http://www.example.com/somepage?arg1=one&arg2=two&arg3=three…..

So how do you get those pages indexed?

The major search engines support what they call "site maps", a way that you can submit a list of your pages to Google, in effect telling them "these are the pages on my site that you should crawl." This site map file is a specially-formatted XML file that adheres to specific standards. While Google makes available a tool to help you do this, it is written in the Python language. That's nice, but if Python makes you think of an English comedy troupe rather than a computer program, it may not the solution for you.

GSiteCrawler is a Windows tool that generates site map files that can be used by Google and Yahoo!. You can load it onto your Microsoft web server, or presumably grab the log files from your Apache server, turn the crank, and generate that standards-compliant site map file. Much easier than learning Python.

GSiteCrawler is a Windows app, and will run on any 32-bit Windows platform—Win95 or later. It also requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or better.

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If you're responsible for the care and feeding of a website, you know that creating the site is only part of the job. After you're up and running, you need to see who comes to visit, and tweak the verbiage and pictures to make sure that folks are getting to the pages you want them to visit, and hopefully signing-up for those newsletters and buying your products. In order to do this, you need to look at your server's access logs.

Raw logs contain all of the information about who came calling, but not in the most friendly or intuitive format. Website statistics programs can help make sense out of all that data. SmarterStats Free Edition is one such tool, at a price you can't beat.

Who came to visit? Which pages did they see? Where did they come from? If they came via a search engine, which terms did they search on? This kind of data and more is yours with SmarterStats. While the publisher offers "Pro" and "Enterprise" editions of this tool for reasonable prices, this free edition gives you much of the same functionality as the Enterprise Edition—at a greatly reduced price—although you can only monitor one site with the free product.

SmarterStats is a Windows tool. It requires Window 2000 or later, and version 1.1 of the .NET framework.

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Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

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Virtual Private Networks (VPN) allow you to use a public network as if it were a private one. Imagine being able to send your sensitive data across the Internet, for example, without fear that your privacy will be compromised.

While there are a number of VPN applications available, Hamachi is different in that it allows you to create a tunnel even between hosts that are behind firewalls or NAT routers. Unlike other VPN setups, Hamachi's servers help to facilitate communication between machines that use non-routable private IP addresses. Once the connection is made, the server steps out of the way, so none of your data actually flows through their network, guaranteeing you the privacy and security you're looking for.

With the ability to create up to 64 networks with 16 nodes each (or 256 networks with 256 hosts each on the paid version), you can connect a sizable number of machines even though they're spread all over the world.

Hamachi is available for Windows systems running Win 2000 or later. A console version (no bells and whistles) for Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded also.

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Get up, run through the shower, and then it's off to your favorite caffeinated beverage dispensary for a cup of Joe and a quick read of the morning's news. Hey, with any luck, maybe your system isn't being compromised, losing passwords, credit card numbers, and important company information. But why count on luck?

Hotspot Shield is a free Wi-Fi security app that you can load onto your laptop that will keep the uninvited out of your system. It creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your machine and the Wi-Fi router, making your communications—a least the portion between your machine and that local gateway—as secure as can be.

Hotspot Shield is available for both Windows (Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.4 or later).

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Did you ever want—or need—to be in two places at once? Hey, you could get twice as much work done, or at least only be half as far behind. But seriously, multitasking is rapidly becoming a way of life: so much to do, so little time.

We can't promise to give you the secret behind bi-location, but we can suggest the next best thing: LogMeIn Free. A "remote control" tool, LogMeIn Free allows you to run one computer from another one. Need to check email at work, but you're at home? No problem. Need grandma's email address from your home system, but you're at work? It's done.

Installation is simple; you just install the software on the machine you want to control from afar, and leave that box running. Now you can access it from anywhere in the world. On a business trip and need that file you left at the office? Just go grab it.

LogMeIn Free is available for both Windows and Mac systems.

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How would you like a free website with a free domain name? What if it was hosted for free? It's yours with Microsoft Office Live Basics.

Microsoft Office Live Basics is a free service that helps you to get up and running with your own business website, with an unbeatable price. Along with your own domain name, you get design tools to create your site, web hosting to make it available to the world, and up to 500MB of storage space (that's a lot of pages). Add to that website statistics tracking, so you can see who is visiting you, and up to 25 email addresses (each with 5GB of storage—that's a whole lot of email messages), and you'll be a presence online in no time. You also get a $50 credit toward online search advertising, so you can make sure the world knows about you.

Of course, Microsoft would be more than happy to help you upgrade to one of their paid services, but for a start, it's not too bad.

Microsoft Office Live Basics is for Windows users, and requires Windows XP or better and Internet Explorer version 6.

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Sometimes you want all the bells and whistles. Email clients are famous for doing everything—formatted text, images, and on and on. That's great when appearance is everything, but sometimes you need substance over form. Back in the day, email was all about text. It was easy to get your words out there, and everybody understood.

As a rule, those fancy email programs are pretty complicated beasts. They don't often provide you with an application programming interface (API), so there's really way to get them to talk to other programs. Suppose you've written several batch files to take care of some housekeeping activity in the background on your system, or more likely on some remote server you're interested in. When that script runs, you may be interested in the results—did it run? was it successful? were any errors encountered?

In the land of UNIX, you've got the mail command to send these script-created messages; Windows doesn't have that flexibility. With Bmail, you can grab output from scripts, batch files, and other programs and create and send email messages based on those results. Website down? Send an email. Backup complete? Send an email. You get the idea.

Bmail is a free command line SMTP mail sender. With a generous number of command line arguments, you can create and send the message you need, automatically. Pipes, redirection, and files can all be used in generating and sending your messages. By adding the mpack utility, you can even include MIME encoded attachments. How cool is that?

Bmail runs on most Win32 systems.

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KompoZer is a high-end WYSIWYG web authoring system that just happens to be free. With power like Dreamweaver and a price of $0, how can you go wrong?

Built on the Gecko rendering engine, the same one used by the Firefox web browser, KompoZer is fast and reliable. It doesn't require that you know any HTML in order to create killer web pages. It builds good HTML, not like some word processors, so you don't have to go in and fix what the tool created. With built-in validation, you can verify that you're putting clean code out there. Making extensive use of stylesheets, your code will be rendered more accurately by most web browsers. With tabbed documents, you can have multiple files open at once, and each one can be viewed in normal WYSIWYG mode, as well as HTML Tags mode, to see where the important tags are located, and even in source mode, so can see the underlying code, though you don't have to. And finally, with built in FTP support, you can use the same tool to create your pages and then publish them.

KompoZer is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

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