This may be the easiest overlooked opportunity of them all. I can say from personal experience in juggling matching 19" LCDs on my desktop and a 15" notebook on the road, once you go multi-monitor, you never want to go back. I'm even seriously considering going triple-display, but then I run into the problem of having a display that doesn't match the color output of the first two. And it's not just a size-really-does-matter ego thing. It's about comfort and productivity. There's even proof.

In October of 2003, ATI, NEC-Mitsubishi, and the University of Utah released a study called "Productivity and Multi-Screen Displays" that showed beyond any reasonable doubt how going dual-head could make a significant positive difference in the workplace.

"The study reveals multi-screen users get on task quicker, work faster and get more work done with fewer errors editing documents, spreadsheets, and graphic files in comparison with single screen users," said Dr. James Anderson, professor at the University of Utah's Department of Communication. "The technology required to support multi-monitor computing is not only affordable, it has become standard within operating systems and LCD displays. Multiple monitor configurations are poised to become the new standard in the workplace."

The study showed that participants increased their errorless production by 18% with multiple monitors. Twenty-nine percent of participants found multiple monitors more effective in tasks, and 39% found it easier to manage on-screen information. This is such a no-brainer that IT managers would look foolish arguing the benefits. The challenge for resellers is to hit upon the right multi-monitor solution for the customer.

NVIDIA's SLI technology has received a lot of attention lately, but the coverage almost always seems to be about gaming performance, and SLI can only output a game to one monitor. I have never seen any detailed description of SLI used for multiple-monitor output in a workplace context. So I called NVIDIA and confirmed that, yes, SLI does allow for multiple displays. Plug in two 6600 cards, each of which has two video ports, and you've got quad-head output for about $220 in PCIe gear (plus monitors, of course). With all of the marketing buzz, SLI nearly sells itself now. But that doesn't mean you can't take the opportunity to push the multiple-monitor potential of the platform and upsell more glass.

ATI doesn't have a dual-slot technology announced as of this writing, although we know one is coming soon. What ATI does have is the ability to deliver triple- or quad-head output via its XPRESS 200 IGP chipset. The XPRESS 200 is the first IGP to let the onboard graphics stay active alongside a discrete graphics adapter. Today, the first run of production boards based on the new IGP only feature one video port, although higher-end designs with two ports are expected. According to ATI, Acer has adopted the XPRESS 200 into its desktop line and is reportedly so jazzed about the platform's multiple-monitor capabilities that the company will make multi-monitor computing an anchor message in its upcoming marketing. ATI also hinted to me that when it does release a dual-slot board design with IGP, the platform will be able to accommodate six simultaneous displays. The potential in signage and financial circles is promising.

But multi-monitor output isn't only a desktop play anymore. A company called Village Tronic (www.villagetronic.com) has a PC Card product called the VTBook. Inside the card is a Trident X2 GPU with 32MB of video RAM and the ability to output to two monitors. Add this onto the notebook's native port and you get a triple-head desktop on either DVI, VGA, or ADC (Apple) displays. This is a great upsell for mobile presenters and an essential option if you're at all involved in whitebook sales. This is also an excellent product for pitching to your existing whitebook install base.

Many customers, consumer and small business alike, do not implement effective backup strategies. This upsell is a gold mine for resellers because a low-end backup solution is inexpensive to implement and existing low-end implementations can be made more secure through upgrading.

The simplest path for standalone desktops and small LANs is to have a high-capacity drive serve as an automated backup target. I'm a big fan of Hitachi Deskstar drives (www.hitachigst.com), and the new 400GB 7K400 is currently the highest capacity drive in the world—at least until the 7K500 with 500GB of capacity and a 3 Gb/s SATA or Ultra 133 PATA interface arrives in a few months. The 7K400 should be sufficient to back up two or three LAN nodes, and the 7200 RPM, 8MB buffer drive features either SATA or PATA interfaces. Ideally, a solid backup solution should have at least a RAID 1 mirror in place. Many mainstream and performance motherboards now support this function onboard, so you only need to install two matched drives and configure accordingly. If cost is an issue, you can generally buy two 250GB drives for the cost of one 400GB model, and 250GB should be sufficient to backup at least one modern system.

There are plenty of decent desktop backup utilities out there, including the one bundled into Nero, but budget buyers can make do with the Backup program built into Windows, which is fully capable of running scheduled normal, incremental, and differential backups of local and network folders on any schedule the user specifies. (Backup also has no trouble recognizing the shared volumes on Linux boxes.) If you're selling to small business, though, EMC just acquired the famous and very robust Dantz Retrospect (www.dantz.com) software line. Retrospect incorporates top-notch error checking, antivirus collaboration, and can back up to hard, tape, and optical drives as well as tape systems. Retrospect also addresses business-class needs such as data filtering, remote management, and reporting.

There are two problems with internal drive backups. A surprising number of consumers backup their data to a different folder on the same drive as the source data. Sure, it's a forehead-slapper, but they just don't know any better. If the drive goes down, everything is lost. It would be better to back up to optical media, although it's a slower, more cumbersome process. (Optical RW media can work well for incremental or differential backups if the new data volume isn't too high. The downside is that the user has to be there to manage discs, which works against the automated strategy you want to push.) Presented with this simple fact, most buyers will see the necessity of upgrading to a second drive.

The other problem is that if disaster strikes that box—flood, theft, power spike, you name it—then the source and backup files are as toasted as if everything had been on a single drive. This is why external drives make such sense. Externals generally transfer data more slowly than internals, but since backups are likely to be scheduled to run in the middle of the night, no one usually cares.

A good example of an external drive is Seagate's 400GB External Hard Drive. Cleverly designed to either stand vertically or stack horizontally, the External features a front-face button that launches the bundled CMS backup software. Seagate also uses its 7200 RPM, 8MB cache drives in this unit for top performance, and the back face offers both USB 2.0 and 1394a ports. Some customers may appreciate knowing that FireWire tends to outperform USB 2.0 despite the latter's higher theoretical bandwidth.

If speed in an external drive is important—a plausible possibility since the drive is portable for hauling off to client sites and such—consider taking a high-performance internal 3.5" drive and planting it in a 1394b (800 Mb/sec) enclosure. I recently had occasion to try this with ADS's PYRO 1394b Drive Kit and 1394b PCI controller, and the results were very impressive. The newer interface yielded a roughly 50% improvement in transfer times, and when you're dealing with capacities ranging up to 400GB, that accounts for a lot of saved minutes.

The trouble with USB or FireWire drives is that they're dependent on the host PC. If you turn the PC off, the external drive goes down with it. Driver problems or other glitches can interfere with access from remote users, and, again, in case of theft, the thief is likely to snag any attached devices along with the main PC. In the business world, NAS (network attached storage) boxes are the norm. These boxes plug straight into the network switch via Ethernet, host their own OS (usually Linux), are remotely administered across the network, and may support multiple drives that can be configured in any of various RAIDs. Since NAS boxes can be placed anywhere there's a network jack, many users stick them in locked closets or other areas with restricted access in order to keep their contents safe. The one drawback to NAS is that 10/100 Ethernet is horrifically slower than USB 2.0 or FireWire. Do the math and you'll see that a major backup session will likely take many hours. Fortunately, corporate admins tend to care a lot less about backup times than security and ease of maintenance. It's a lot easier to back up to a fixed IP address than a drive volume that changes letters for any number of reasons. NAS boxes are also much less likely to be hit by malware or hackers.

One interesting new opportunity is the rising wave of NAS boxes for home and SOHO users. Maxtor's new Shared Storage Drive is a good example. Essentially, the SSD looks like a OneTouch II drive with a couple modifications. The DSS obviously has a LAN jack in the back, and it offers two USB ports for adding network printers or additional USB storage.

So far, we've covered oft-overlooked backup options, but not unobvious ones. My last suggestion is to look at CRU-DataPort's product line, in particular the HotDock and DP25. The pitch for CRU-DataPort revolves around security. These are the products government agencies and enterprises use when needing to move drive-sized data sets between locations in an ultra-secure context.

Most CRU-DataPort products rely on mounting a hard drive in a sort of railed drive carrier fashioned of unbreakable, molded metal that in turn slides into a receiving frame. Usually, the frame is installed in a PC. Also, some carrier models have the ability to access encryption keys. These are small flash devices (three ship with the carrier) that serve to lock and unlock the DES and 3DES encryption handled by the carrier. Unlike other encryption solutions, CRU-DataPort even encrypts the file allocation table, so hackers can't even see what files are on the drive, never mind the actual data.

The HotDock is a USB 2.0- and 1394a-based frame able to accommodate both PATA and SATA interfaces in the form of an external drive enclosure. For clients who are sold on using DataPorts as a means to transfer protected drives between PCs, the HotDock is a way to keep removable drives accessible when there is no PC around with a DataPort frame installed.

The DataPort 25 is an ingenious variant of the DataPort design. The DP25 is a 3.5" format carrier that holds two 2.5" hard drives. The back of the carrier can connect to the motherboard via either PATA or SATA, and the drives can be RAIDed with whatever RAID modes the motherboard or add-in card supports. This presents a novel way to perform either a high-speed application or redundant backup solution in a system that may not have any available hard drive bays left. This can be especially true with small form factor PCs. On the consumer side, imagine being able to maintain a Half-Life 2 configuration (HL2 does not tie into the Windows registry) on a striped volume that can be transported to a friend's house rather than lugging along an entire system. For business backup, I've never seen a more convenient way to move a mirrored RAID between locations. This design also lends itself well to vertical niches. For example, CRU-DataPort sells the DP25 to police departments for installation into patrol vehicles and recording of video camera footage.

The need for backup exists everywhere. All you need to do is find out how your customers' current configurations can be made better.

Last on our list but perhaps first in priority, this suggestion doesn't pertain to a customer's product problems. It's actually about fixing a problem you have—well, all of us have. No matter what our level of expertise in any field, there is always more to know. The more you know, the better you'll be able to service your clients and the more you'll be able to charge for your time and effort.

You need to work to fill in your knowledge gaps. If you're strong on hardware, study software and vice versa. But be smart about it. Work to fill in a knowledge gap that is complementary to your primary client base. For instance, if you specialize in SOHO accounts and crafting hardware and networking solutions for those environments, learning about Linux or Microsoft Small Business Server would be a good match. Getting a security certification would mesh well for that group. But CRM? CAD? Probably a waste of time.

I would be hard pressed to find a better example of a vendor that stresses reseller education more than Microsoft. The company's Action Pack product highlights this effort. For only $250, you get essentially every major Microsoft title under the sun to install, use, and master plus all of the tools you need to learn how to sell it. Nothing else in the industry comes remotely close to that.

Microsoft is also extremely aggressive about road show seminars for reseller partners. Part of the almost unfathomable $1.7 billion Microsoft invested last year in its direct partner support program went to putting on roughly 2,000 shows in cities across the U.S. These include TS2 (product demos and discussions), MSDN Events (on Microsoft developer tools), TechNet Briefings (in-depth, technical coverage on using Microsoft products), and others. One of the most popular is the 20-city System Builder Road Show, which drew in over 2,200 attendees last year. In case you've never attended one of these, I asked Microsoft's Pip Marlow, general manager, U.S. partner group, to describe the experience.

"Well, you'll arrive, get registered, go through a mingling period, and then come in and find a laptop in front of you, which is something we haven't done historically at these events. We would start off sharing information with you about the flow of the day and the core technology readiness topics we'd be covering. That might be training on a server product, on new operating systems, networking infrastructure, opportunities like SBS, pre-installation environments, technical tips and tricks for system builder installers, how to do recoveries, import your logo, all of that. We'd probably do a session on business opportunities and make sure you understood what we saw as the key opportunities in the near future and the tools you could get from us to help support you. You'd use the laptop for the technical hands-on work, just like you were doing it in your shop. All of that would take a few hours. In last year's show, you'd have the option to go into a room with a bunch of parts laying out and be guided by a lecturer through the process of building an MCE box. In fact, nearly 1,000 of the system builders attended the MCE Build Party portion of the event and walked away with MCE machines to use as demos or displays in their shops. We've found through attendee feedback that 92% of partners would recommend the event to someone."

For the 2005 Road Show series, Marlow says that key topics will include any necessary Longhorn readiness, business opportunities training, and whitebook training. Personally, forgetting all the other benefits, I'd show up just to have a shot at sitting in on a Whitebook Build Party.

But seminars aren't end of Microsoft's education efforts. Specifically for system builders, Microsoft offers seven online courses: XP Media Center 2005, OEM System Builder Licensing, Understanding the Value of the Microsoft Platform vs. Open Source, The Genuine Desktop, Windows XP SP2, Team and Personal Productivity: Articulating the Value of Office 2003, WSS, and OneNote, and Selling Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.

Speaking of SBS, Microsoft is not the only gig in town when it comes to getting educated on Microsoft-centric technologies. Harry Brelsford founded SMB Nation (www.smbnation.com) as a front end for various consulting, seminar, and publication efforts revolving around the SMB space and Microsoft's Small Business Server in particular. Brelsford has authored 12 books to date in this area, including the just-released "Advanced Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices". He also puts on a 60-city seminar tour, sponsored by HP, dedicated to topics such as mobility and Voice-over-IP. You may not walk out of an SMB Nation Summit with an MCE box under your arm, but you will get an independent look at key Microsoft topics, such as building an SBS consulting practice, Microsoft CRM, integrating SBS 2003 with Office 2003, and so on.

Brelsford also points out that part of getting smarter about your business and filling in knowledge gaps involves finding the partners at your own level who can help you. Typically, finding such people can prove difficult, but Brelsford points to one possible solution.

"There's a big buzz in Redmond right now around the idea of 'community.' This is an effort to offset or thwart the Linux success that is grassroots or very community-based. So Microsoft is saying, well, we need a community. That's why, right now, there's a user group road show going on for Small Business Server. They're running around doing pizza and pop at night in 20 cities to pump up user groups. The offshoot is that these gatherings are a great place to meet your peers. You know, we're mature enough to see that lawyers and other trade groups get together to share ideas, and this actually results in more business because you can say, 'Hey, I'm stuck on a CRM implementation. Any of you guys know CRM?' Sure enough, the guy two rows over is a CRM guru."

Whatever education modes you adopt, the goal is to keep your business's intellectual base expanding. We all know the saying of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc: "When you're green, you're going. When you're ripe, you rot." Kroc also said, "Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get."

Educating yourself into new business segments takes sweat. Getting creative about solving widespread customer problems takes sweat. But I guarantee that if you can act on at least a couple of the ten ideas we've explored here, you find luck knocking on your door and the winds of spring blowing those sales doldrums away.