The Info Treasure Trove

Have you ever noticed how visible large corporations are? Take Coca-Cola®, Nike®
and McDonalds®. They are everywhere. Just ask anyone what comes to mind when
he/she hears the words soft drink, running shoes or quick burgers. More often than
not, you’ll hear these brand names immediately.

We’ve been exposed to these companies so much that it’s natural to think of them
immediately. We recognize them as experts in their specific industries.

What’s the lesson here? Visibility.

As a small business owner, you MUST be visible. If your business isn’t visible to
potential clients and customers, then you might as well close the doors.

Visibility is proactively marketing your business in order to effectively attract new
customers. Sure, you may have a somewhat consistent client base, but resting on
your laurels or just relying on your current client base as your only source of
revenue carries an incredibly high risk, one that has been the detriment to countless
small businesses.

Visibility is one of the MOST crucial determining factors in the success of your small
business. People can’t do business with you if they don’t know you exist.

How can you proactively be visible?

First, remember you are the number one asset of your small business. More than
just getting your name out there, you have to get your face out there in the
marketplace. Prospects can turn up in some of the unlikeliest places and when they
do, it’s your face they need to see in order to consider doing business with you.

For example, take Donald Trump. Whether you admire him or despise him, he’s
everywhere. A few years ago, who would have thought that he would be hosting one
of the most acclaimed network series on television? Who would have thought that he
would have a brand new bestselling book? Even while experiencing financial
uncertainty in his primary business enterprise, Trump is still going strong. Why?
Visibility?

I hear you say, “But, I’m just a small business…I don’t have the same endless
budgets to be as visible as all those corporate types.” As a small business owner,
you don’t have to have a big budget to be visible.

The secret to small business visibility lies in tapping into the solid gold value of
networking. Networking is the high performance vehicle by which small business
owners can drive their exposure towards a successful finish.

But the caveat is…it’s up to you to take advantage of the opportunities that you do
have for networking and to also create your own new opportunities.

Networking is all about people. It gives you the chance to meet new people, make
new contacts, exchange ideas and interact with others. This can seem particularly
challenging for small business owners who run their businesses from home. It can
also seem challenging for those who don’t live in larger cities, but rather in smaller
towns.

But, there are several ways of navigating these challenges. Consider the valuable
networking opportunities with each of these ideas.

One last thing about networking…its not net-sit, net-eat, net-drink or net-hide-in-
the-corner-and-don’t-talk-to-anyone. It is netWORK.

Chambers of Commerce:

Even the smallest of towns has a local chamber group. Membership fees are
typically based upon the annual revenue or number of employees of a business.

If you are a brand new business with limited funds, consider opting for an individual
membership at a minimal fee. This will still give you the opportunity to participate
in chamber events and meet other people in the business community. It will also
give you the opportunity to determine whether your area chamber offers the
networking opportunities for which you are looking.

Professional/Industry-Related Associations:

Do you belong to a group or organization relevant to your area of expertise? If so,
when was the last time you attended one of its meetings or functions? Do you even
know what it’s doing these days?

Sure, you may be a member of such a group, but are you an active member? Simply
paying your annual dues and not participating is not only a waste of money, but
also a waste of a valuable networking and visibility opportunity.

I hear you say, “I don’t have time. That’s like consorting with the enemy. They’re my
competition.” Rest assured that the time you don’t take to make the most of this
opportunity to network is time that your competition is taking to maximize its
networking opportunities.

Look at it this way. What potential value can you offer one of your competitors that
might result in a mutually beneficial situation? How can you benefit from working
together? One of your competitors may be able to provide you with a solution to a
problem while you can offer a solution to one of his/her problems.

Unless you network, you’ll never know. It would be a shame to miss such a valuable
opportunity simply because you decide that you don’t have time or don’t want to
face the competition.

The Internet:

Whether you run your business from a small town or even from home in an isolated
rural area, the Internet has made networking a worldwide possibility. If you don’t
have a business web site, then you are missing your absolute best potential for
visibility.

Maximize your marketing potential by investing in a business web site. The
exposure it generates for you will produce a valuable return of your investment.

However, it is vital that your web site presents your business in a professional light.

If you design your web site yourself, but are not a professional designer…if you
scrimp and try to develop a site on the cheap…and if your expertise is not in
knowing what content to include in a web site to attract clients…you are presenting
yourself to potential clients and customers as an amateur or fly-by-night operation.

This is the LAST thing that you want. Sure, you’d be visiblein a VERY bad way.

In addition to having your own web site, the Internet offers other opportunities for
increasing your visibility through networking. Search for professional and/or
industry-related web sites in your area of expertise. Post comments or suggestions
on industry-related discussion groups or blogs.

Dig a little and you will find valuable resources such as industry-specific forums
that offer countless networking opportunities.

Remember, if people don’t know you exist, they can’t consider doing business with
you. Although this sounds like simple common sense, I regularly see small business
owners who have no concept of the visibility factor.

You MUST be visible.

When it comes to being visible, they mistakenly think that they “don’t have time”,
“can’t make time”, “can’t afford the investment”, “can just hide in their offices and
expect the phone to ring” or any other flimsy excuses that gets them nowhere.

The time to drop that rock is now and increase your visibility.

Jeanna Pool is President of CATALYST creative, inc., an award-winning graphic design, web design and marketing firm located in Denver, Colorado. She helps small business owners who are really good at what they do, but struggle to market their services effectively to attract more clients on a consistent basis. She can be contacted at http://www.catalystcreativeinc.com, info@catalystcreativeinc.com or call 303.380.9100.

I’m pretty sure if you asked 100 Americans how long the Thanksgiving holiday has been observed, they would answer ever since the pilgrims arrived and technically celebrated the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, MA.

For the most part, these people would be correct. Thanksgiving has been a long-standing tradition in America for hundreds of years.

But the actual, official holiday has only been recognized since the 1860s.

Abraham Lincoln (our 16th president) was the first leader of our country to officially call for a national day of thanks.

And so, each thanksgiving celebrated since has been the result of this great president.

For that, I am truly thankful.

It’s a fact; people love their holidays.

Time away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life is a welcome respite for us all.

I haven’t seen any statistics lately on what the favorite holiday here in the US is, but if I had a guess, it would be either Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Both of these holidays conjure up a variety of emotions for me; Christmas in particular.

But it’s Thanksgiving (at least for me) that I look forward to the most.

Without all the media-driven hype and overly-promoted commercialism, thanksgiving in usa towns and homes is simply a time to enjoy good family, fine food, and healthy fellowship.

So often in the US we see foreign comments about us which are clearly so jaded they do not warrant any sort of response. Often these comments come from anti-Globalists or Anti-American groups and they use our negative news against us. In fact they recite the worst of it and embellish it and then trash the USA in online Blogs. Well here is one right back at them;

President Bush and his administration along with the US Military has prevented WW III by going into Iraq. Now unfortunately we see we have another issue in Iran, which must be dealt with for the future of mankind. So we must rise to that occasion.

You anti-everything bloggers are stating poll numbers which sway like the wind based on mass media content information overload of the human mind in the living rooms of America. TV is not reality, well I know that is an obvious statement, but really in the over all scheme of things, it is not even close.

You bloggers are so anti-American, anti-globilist, anti-World Bank, Anti-Western World. You are pro-Terrorist nation state sponsor, pro-nuclear detonation in Israel, pro-insurgency in Iraq killing US Troops, pro-Iranian fanatic fundamentalism. And you are trying to convince a “Blue Blood American” that the United States of America is to blame for the World’s ills?

Give me a break, have you taken a look lately at the corruption of the vocal political opponents of the United States, Western Democracy and liberty and freedom for all peoples? Bringing the World together in a common cause, why are you supporting those who oppose this and continue to carrying on in their acts of terror and violence? Take that you anti-USA blogging scoundrels from hell!

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Frankly, anyone who owns a business or represents the business to others must have professional business cards. Business cards are an expectation when networking. They show that the person handing out their business card is professional, well-prepared and wants to talk with you in the near future.

Whether you’re in sales and need clients and potential clients to get in touch with you, or you’re in a service industry where enabling people to contact you is essential, then quality business cards are a must.

But what’s more, quality business cards are a reflection of your company. They’ll set the stage when the recipient eventually contacts you. They can make or break the image of your company, so your unique business cards should be designed carefully, with your company’s branding image in mind.

Although the standard information on a business card must include your name, title, company name, address, phone numbers, e-mail and Web sites, you have the freedom to make your unique business cards entirely your own creation. Use graphics that help to describe your business. Maybe include your company’s tag line.

Create a professional-looking business card thatwith one lookyour contact remembers who you are and why they need your products or services.

Also important in your planning is the business card printing. A proper business card printer will provide you with options to make your business cards unique and professional. Look for high quality paper, images that print at 300 dots per inch (dpi).

Jonathan Bowalsky handles news and information for Jontal Printing. For more information on business cards or custom postcards, visit: http://www.jontalprinting.com.

Web and FTP Servers

Every network that has an internet connection is at risk of being compromised. Whilst there are several steps that you can take to secure your LAN, the only real solution is to close your LAN to incoming traffic, and restrict outgoing traffic.

However some services such as web or FTP servers require incoming connections. If you require these services you will need to consider whether it is essential that these servers are part of the LAN, or whether they can be placed in a physically separate network known as a DMZ (or demilitarised zone if you prefer its proper name). Ideally all servers in the DMZ will be stand alone servers, with unique logons and passwords for each server. If you require a backup server for machines within the DMZ then you should acquire a dedicated machine and keep the backup solution separate from the LAN backup solution.

The DMZ will come directly off the firewall, which means that there are two routes in and out of the DMZ, traffic to and from the internet, and traffic to and from the LAN. Traffic between the DMZ and your LAN would be treated totally separately to traffic between your DMZ and the Internet. Incoming traffic from the internet would be routed directly to your DMZ.
Therefore if any hacker where to compromise a machine within the DMZ, then the only network they would have access to would be the DMZ. The hacker would have little or no access to the LAN. It would also be the case that any virus infection or other security compromise within the LAN would not be able to migrate to the DMZ.

In order for the DMZ to be effective, you will have to keep the traffic between the LAN and the DMZ to a minimum. In the majority of cases, the only traffic required between the LAN and the DMZ is FTP. If you do not have physical access to the servers, you will also need some sort of remote management protocol such as terminal services or VNC.

Database servers

If your web servers require access to a database server, then you will need to consider where to place your database. The most secure place to locate a database server is to create yet another physically separate network called the secure zone, and to place the database server there.
The Secure zone is also a physically separate network connected directly to the firewall. The Secure zone is by definition the most secure place on the network. The only access to or from the secure zone would be the database connection from the DMZ (and LAN if required).

Exceptions to the rule

The dilemma faced by network engineers is where to put the email server. It requires SMTP connection to the internet, yet it also requires domain access from the LAN. If you where to place this server in the DMZ, the domain traffic would compromise the integrity of the DMZ, making it simply an extension of the LAN. Therefore in our opinion, the only place you can put an email server is on the LAN and allow SMTP traffic into this server. However we would recommend against allowing any form of HTTP access into this server. If your users require access to their mail from outside the network, it would be far more secure to look at some form of VPN solution. (with the firewall handling the VPN connections. LAN based VPN servers allow the VPN traffic onto the network before it is authenticated, which is never a good thing.)

Chris Weight is a writer for www.stekno.com , information for IT professionals

Your network is growing. You know lots of different business people and you are getting to know what they can deliver. And, of course, they are getting to know you and what you offer.

But does everyone know EVERYTHING about you? And do you know ALL there is to know about your contacts?

You need to know all this if you are going to seize every opportunity to build even stronger business relationships…

Create Your Referral Matrix

The simplest way to keep an eye on what is developing is to create a Referral Matrix. The concept is very simple. The Referral Matrix gives you an ‘At-a-Glance’ picture of your business relationships progress.

You’ll do this for your own contacts and services/products and another for your contacts products.

Let’s start with your services and products.

1) Take a piece of paper.

2) Draw a grid shape. You need enough columns going across to list all your products and services in the top row; show one in each.

3) In the first column of the rows going down list your contacts.

4) Choose 3 different, strong, colors. One represents ‘Told‘, another for ‘Sold‘ and the third for ‘Referred‘

5) When you tell a contact about one of your products; have supplied information so you know he/she is fully aware of it, mark the color for ‘Told‘ against that company in the column for your product/service. (I usually fill in a third of the box).

6) When a contact has bought a product/service from you add the ‘Sold‘ color - you now have two thirds of the box completed.

7) When a contact recommends you to someone else, ‘refers you’, fill in the ‘Referred‘ color.

Some of the boxes may have the Told and Referred, but not the Sold color.

Now you can see, at a glance, which of your contacts do not know about some of your products (in which case you can inform them) and, just as importantly, if they have been informed whether they have bought from you or referred you to someone else.

Create a similar chart for each of your ‘Hot’ networking contacts - those you have a close working relationship with.

By doing this you take a pro-active stance to recommending their services to other people you know AND you’ll know if they do something that you may need in the future.

Do this and you are building strong relationships.

What’s more you’ll get a good reputation for being the ‘person who knows’ and your networking circle will grow.

(This works really well on a spreadsheet, such as Excel. If you would like to see what the grid looks like, send an email to the link below, and request the Referral Matrix PDF).

©2005 Original Work by Carol Bentley

Learn more about Persuading People to Buy… Subscribe to your free reports, with no obligation, at http://www.CarolBentley.com

Carol is the author of ‘I Want to Buy Your Product… Have You Sent Me a Letter Yet? (How to create powerful sales letters, advertisements, flyers, brochures, web pages and newsletters that persuade hundreds, or even thousands, of additional customers and clients to buy from you!) by Carol A E Bentley (Rated 5-star on Amazon.co.uk) This book is available at a special offer at http://www.CarolBentley.com/offer

Carol is one of the highest paid direct response copywriters available. If you would like to talk to Carol’s office about having her work on your current or next sales project you can use the contact form on her website http://www.CarolBentley.com/contact.asp

It is a hierarchical representation of all the objects and their attributes available on the network. It enables administrators to manage the network resources, i.e., computers, users, printers, shared folders, etc., in an easy way. The logical structure represented by Active Directory consists of forests, trees, domains, organizational units, and individual objects. This structure is completely independent from the physical structure of the network, and allows administrators to manage domains according to the organizational needs without bothering about the physical network structure.

Following is the description of all logical components of the Active Directory structure:

Forest: A forest is the outermost boundary of an Active Directory structure. It is a group of multiple domain trees that share a common schema but do not form a contiguous namespace. It is created when the first Active Directory-based computer is installed on a network. There is at least one forest on a network. The first domain in a forest is called a root domain. It controls the schema and domain naming for the entire forest. It can be separately removed from the forest. Administrators can create multiple forests and then create trust relationships between specific domains in those forests, depending upon the organizational needs.

Trees: A hierarchical structure of multiple domains organized in the Active Directory forest is referred to as a tree. It consists of a root domain and several child domains. The first domain created in a tree becomes the root domain. Any domain added to the root domain becomes its child, and the root domain becomes its parent. The parent-child hierarchy continues until the terminal node is reached. All domains in a tree share a common schema, which is defined at the forest level. Depending upon the organizational needs, multiple domain trees can be included in a forest.

Domains: A domain is the basic organizational structure of a Windows Server 2003 networking model. It logically organizes the resources on a network and defines a security boundary in Active Directory. The directory may contain more than one domain, and each domain follows its own security policy and trust relationships with other domains. Almost all the organizations having a large network use domain type of networking model to enhance network security and enable administrators to efficiently manage the entire network.

Objects: Active Directory stores all network resources in the form of objects in a hierarchical structure of containers and subcontainers, thereby making them easily accessible and manageable. Each object class consists of several attributes. Whenever a new object is created for a particular class, it automatically inherits all attributes from its member class. Although the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory defines its default set of objects, administrators can modify it according to the organizational needs.

Organizational Unit (OU): It is the least abstract component of the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory. It works as a container into which resources of a domain can be placed. Its logical structure is similar to an organization’s functional structure. It allows creating administrative boundaries in a domain by delegating separate administrative tasks to the administrators on the domain. Administrators can create multiple Organizational Units in the network. They can also create nesting of OUs, which means that other OUs can be created within an OU.
In a large complex network, the Active Directory service provides a single point of management for the administrators by placing all the network resources at a single place. It allows administrators to effectively delegate administrative tasks as well as facilitate fast searching of network resources. It is easily scalable, i.e., administrators can add a large number of resources to it without having additional administrative burden. It is accomplished by partitioning the directory database, distributing it across other domains, and establishing trust relationships, thereby providing users with benefits of decentralization, and at the same time, maintaining the centralized administration.

The physical network infrastructure of Active Directory is far too simple as compared to its logical structure. The physical components are domain controllers and sites.

Domain Controller: A Windows 2003 server on which Active Directory services are installed and run is called a domain controller. A domain controller locally resolves queries for information about objects in its domain. A domain can have multiple domain controllers. Each domain controller in a domain follows the multimaster model by having a complete replica of the domain’s directory partition. In this model, every domain controller holds a master copy of its directory partition. Administrators can use any of the domain controllers to modify the Active Directory database. The changes performed by the administrators are automatically replicated to other domain controllers in the domain.

However, there are some operations that do not follow the multimaster model. Active Directory handles these operations and assigns them to a single domain controller to be accomplished. Such a domain controller is referred to as operations master. The operations master performs several roles, which can be forest-wide as well as domain-wide.

Forest-wide roles: There are two types of forest-wide roles:

Schema Master and Domain Naming Master. The Schema Master is responsible for maintaining the schema and distributing it to the entire forest. The Domain Naming Master is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the forest by recording additions of domains to and deletions of domains from the forest. When new domains are to be added to a forest, the Domain Naming Master role is queried. In the absence of this role, new domains cannot be added.

Domain-wide roles: There are three types of domain-wide roles: RID Master, PDC Emulator, and Infrastructure Master.

RID Master: The RID Master is one of the operations master roles that exist in each domain in a forest. It controls the sequence number for the domain controllers within a domain. It provides a unique sequence of RIDs to each domain controller in a domain. When a domain controller creates a new object, the object is assigned a unique security ID consisting of a combination of a domain SID and a RID. The domain SID is a constant ID, whereas the RID is assigned to each object by the domain controller. The domain controller receives the RIDs from the RID Master. When the domain controller has used all the RIDs provided by the RID Master, it requests the RID Master to issue more RIDs for creating additional objects within the domain. When a domain controller exhausts its pool of RIDs, and the RID Master is unavailable, any new object in the domain cannot be created.

PDC Emulator: The PDC emulator is one of the five operations master roles in Active Directory. It is used in a domain containing non-Active Directory computers. It processes the password changes from both users and computers, replicates those updates to backup domain controllers, and runs the Domain Master browser. When a domain user requests a domain controller for authentication, and the domain controller is unable to authenticate the user due to bad password, the request is forwarded to the PDC emulator. The PDC emulator then verifies the password, and if it finds the updated entry for the requested password, it authenticates the request.

Infrastructure Master: The Infrastructure Master role is one of the Operations Master roles in Active Directory. It functions at the domain level and exists in each domain in the forest. It maintains all inter-domain object references by updating references from the objects in its domain to the objects in other domains. It performs a very important role in a multiple domain environment. It compares its data with that of a Global Catalog, which always has up-to-date information about the objects of all domains. When the Infrastructure Master finds data that is obsolete, it requests the global catalog for its updated version. If the updated data is available in the global catalog, the Infrastructure Master extracts and replicates the updated data to all the other domain controllers in the domain.

Domain controllers can also be assigned the role of a Global Catalog server. A Global Catalog is a special Active Directory database that stores a full replica of the directory for its host domain and the partial replica of the directories of other domains in a forest. It is created by default on the initial domain controller in the forest. It performs the following primary functions regarding logon capabilities and queries within Active Directory:

It enables network logon by providing universal group membership information to a domain controller when a logon request is initiated.

It enables finding directory information about all the domains in an Active Directory forest.

A Global Catalog is required to log on to a network within a multidomain environment. By providing universal group membership information, it greatly improves the response time for queries. In its absence, a user will be allowed to log on only to his local domain if his user account is external to the local domain.

Site: A site is a group of domain controllers that exist on different IP subnets and are connected via a fast and reliable network connection. A network may contain multiple sites connected by a WAN link. Sites are used to control replication traffic, which may occur within a site or between sites. Replication within a site is referred to as intrasite replication, and that between sites is referred to as intersite replication. Since all domain controllers within a site are generally connected by a fast LAN connection, the intrasite replication is always in uncompressed form. Any changes made in the domain are quickly replicated to the other domain controllers. Since sites are connected to each other via a WAN connection, the intersite replication always occurs in compressed form. Therefore, it is slower than the intrasite replication.

About the Author:

uCertify was formed in 1996 with an aim to offer high quality educational training software and services in the field of information technology to its customers. uCertify provides exam preparation solutions for the certification exams of Microsoft, CIW, CompTIA, Oracle, Sun and other leading IT vendors. To know more about uCertify, please visit www.ucertify.com/

In my previous article (Using Forums To Improve Customer Relationship Management) I covered the learning/information aspect of forums, as well as how you can use forums to positively impact your lead generation efforts and customer relationship management initiatives. Unfortunately, forums can also have a dark side - in that they can seriously impact your other forms of marketing if you choose to ignore or abuse them.

The negative impacts forums can have on your marketing efforts are in part, the flip-side of the positive actions I recommended you take:

* Dissatisfied Customers Voice Their Complaints

Aggrieved customers who are web-savvy can damage your reputation with a few postings stating their dissatisfaction.

If these are isolated incidents, your satisfied customers will often come to your defence, which should offset the negative comments, and may even earn you some unexpected positive publicity.

However, if others also start empathising with them, and provide feedback of similar incidents of poor service or product quality, your market reputation will suffer. There’s not much point in merely increasing your sales efforts. You need to improve your product quality, and also improve your customer relationship management and service.

* People Recommend Alternative Products To Yours

Questions are sometimes asked in forums regarding which product or service is best for a particular business need. While customers may not be at odds with you, if your product fails to keep abreast with the competition, your customers will not continue to recommend you. In fact, postings about other products could cause a customer retention nightmare.

* You Display Your Lack of Professionalism

The quality of your postings - regular poor spelling, grammar, lousy sentence structure, and posts in poor taste can significantly downgrade readers’ impressions of you. Infrequent typos are not a big issue, but business-promoting posts that show a consistent disregard to quality could give your prospects some clue as to how you approach the rest of your business.

* Your Postings Reveal Flaws In Your Personality

Some forum members seem to forget that snide or intolerant postings can be viewed by a large audience in the forum. These postings can also linger for quite some time as well as get unwanted negative publicity in the forums (members use the posting as an example of how not to behave on the forum).

Your testy or ill-conceived comments can often be seen by non-members. If the forum has been spidered by the search engines. web searchers can also stumble across these postings. If they are carrying out market research or due diligence on you and your products, you can probably kiss those prospects goodbye.

A recent incident where my wife Gill asked me to investigate an emailed ‘business opportunity’ illustrates the negative impact a couple of forum postings can have.

Gill was reluctant to surrender her contact details to get more information without knowing a little more about what the opportunity was all about, so she asked me to see if I could find out more details. The email address gave away the website, which was a mini-site with a compelling sales letter. I did my standard Google trick of ‘website name’ + ’scam’, and found several forum postings. One posting stated interest in the site/opportunity, and what the poster wanted to know was whether it was legitimate, or merely a scam.

The first response was from the website owner. Rather than providing some reassurances, emphasizing guarantees and refund policies, or even testimonials from satisfied customers, he started berating his prospect for not contacting him directly (rather silly, as the enquiry wanted to get impartial feedback, not another sales pitch).

A forum member tried to smooth things over by stating that all the prospect was doing was due diligence - which was his right. The website owner then started attacking this member. At this point several other forum members - several of whom were actually interested in the advertised opportunity - all posted that they had seen enough to decide to have nothing to do with this irritable individual.

Forums can be a useful addition to your marketing toolkit. You do, however, need to avoid some marketing minefields. Used intelligently, they can help with both lead generation and customer relationship management. Abuse them, or use them carelessly, and they will drive away prospects and customers.

© 2005 Intellinova (Pty) Ltd. - All Rights Reserved
This article may be reprinted, provided it is published in its entirety, includes the author bio information, and all links remain active.

For the past 20 years, Jeff Walters has transformed raw data into profit-producing strategic information in various sectors - banking, insurance, gambling, medical, government. He has lead several data-to-information projects: ABC Costing, analytical CRM, datamart development, and Balanced Scorecard.

Want to convert your raw data into strategic assets? Contact Jeff Walters via: http://www.IntelliNova.com, or http://www.SystematicDirectMarketing.com

In my previous articles about PHPBB2 I shared with readers my experience in shifting over to this type of software and I also listed some of my favorite mods and styles. If you already have downloaded PHPBB2 and are running it on your computer you have a great piece of open source software at your finger tips. As with any program you must keep it up to date. Let’s take a look at some important things to consider in keeping your program current.

First of all, the best thing you can do is to subscribe to the opt-in mailing list for notification of any updates. You must subscribe as no one will automatically tell you your site is out of date although your administration panel will give that information to you. To opt-in please visit www.phpbb.com to subscribe.

Next, when updates are announced you must select between two methods: a “changed files only” update or a “patch” update. If you haven’t made any extra special modifications to your program than the first choice is what you want. Simply download the information to your desktop, unzip the files, and follow the installation instructions on how to update your board. If you have added on some modifications than a “patch” update is for you. If you select the former method you will delete all of your modifications. Thus, only a patch update is what you want in order to keep your modifications in place.

So, that’s it. Make sure you receive notifications of changes as they occur and select the right update for your board. When an update is announced, plan on installing sooner rather than later as many updates include important security improvements that can help to close holes in the program.

Copyright 2005 — Matthew Keegan is the owner of a successful article writing, web design, and marketing business based in North Carolina, USA. He manages several sites including the Corporate Flight Attendant Community and the Aviation Employment Board. Please visit The Article Writer to review selections from his portfolio.

Webmasters believe that a lot of money can be made off of discussion forums for several reasons. The main reason people see a lot of money in them is because they have an enormous amount of page views and return visitors. It is very difficult for a normal website to get those two things and very easy for discussion forums to get them. People focus on that and rush to start up a discussion forum only to give up and let it die after a short period of time. The reason is because many people do not take into consideration how important actual signups are. A lot of people will go to a forum everyday and read through things but never sign up. If people do not sign up the forums are worthless.

Something that can be done to entice people to sign up are offer rewards for those that sign up. You can also have a posting contest by giving away something to the first person to reach a certain number of posts. Another thing is to start a controversial thread that will force people to sign up and participate in the discussions. No matter what you decide to do to get people to sign up try and make sure that it is planned out before starting the forum. If you think about that after the forums have been started it may be too late.