D-LINK
DES-1228P Web Smart Switch: $529
www.dlink.com

WHEN A BUSINESS CUSTOMER ASKS FOR ADVICE ON NETWORK equipment, do you point him in the direction of mainstream switches or high-end managed hardware? D-Link’s DES-1228P gives you something priced right in between, with a spec sheet that tends toward the enterprise side of things.

All of the switch’s 24 ports support Power over Ethernet at 10/100 Mbps speeds. Four ports run at Gigabit signaling rates for uplinking to network storage. If you need even more flexibility, the DES-1228P supports link aggregation, letting you create larger pipes to a server or cascaded switch.

With advanced manageability, a single administrator can monitor nodes wired straight into the switch or connected to wireless access points through a single control console. Add D-Link’s Web Smart AP DWL-3140AP, equipped with a discrete smoke detector to cover wireless connectivity and physical security.

INTEL
SRCSASJV RAID Controller: $749
www.intel.com

RAID SUPPORT IS A NECESSITY IN ANY SERVER OR WORKSTATION YOU build. Regardless of whether you’ve built a simple RAID 1 array or a more complex RAID 6 configuration, storage requires processing power. Most desktop boards with RAID functionality generally tap the host CPU for all of that number crunching. That’s usually not a problem when your customer is running Word, Outlook, and five instances of Internet Explorer. But as clients ascend the hierarchy of business computing, it becomes more desirable to offload storage processing.

Intel’s SRCSASJV, based on LSI Logic’s 500MHz 1078 RAID-on-chip, delivers the hardware processing needed to drive high-throughput RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6 arrays, along with RAID 10, 50, and 60 spans. The PCI Express card supports eight configured ports, and an onboard multiplexer lets you choose between its two x4 internal ports or x4 external ports for maximum flexibility. Either way, the SRCSASJV lets you address up to 240 connected devices.

MICROSOFT
Dynamics CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition: $599 Per Server
www.microsoft.com

CRM SOFTWARE IS THE FANCY way to package the tools your customers need to track everything from customer contacts to purchasing and post sales. The software consists of multiple modules, which enable sales, marketing, and customer service with the goal of improving business processes, facilitating tighter relationships, and achieving better profitability. Naturally, helping your customer understand the purpose behind a CRM suite is the first step in making it an integral part of his business.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition is a particularly noteworthy offering due to its close relationship to SBS 2003 (and resulting massive cost savings). Like SBS, Dynamics CRM supports up to 75 simultaneous users but will only run on a single server, as opposed to the Professional Edition’s distributed setup. Despite those restrictions, selling CRM 3.0 Small Business still gives your customer the full sales leads, customer interaction, and customer data management modules he needs.

NIKON
Coolscan V ED: $599
www.nikonusa.com

THE FUTURE IS IN DIGITAL-—DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS, DIGITAL VIDEO, digital audio. But not everyone’s there yet. You’ll still find plenty of customers who either still use 35mm film or have old slides lying around. What will become of that old school media once tabletop albums and slide projectors disappear? Don’t make those folks find out.

Nikon’s Coolscan V ED accepts 35mm slides and film, with an option for IX240 fi lm and medical slides if your customer buys the adapter. Using a 3,964-pixel linear CCD image sensor, the Coolscan creates 4,000 dpi images using a 14-bit analog-to-digital converter. With no options selected, the scanner takes about 14 seconds to generate a preview and about 38 seconds to scan and display the complete shot.

Priced at $599, the Coolscan V is equipped for serious business-class scanning. But its price is still well within reach for more mainstream customers with an attic full of film.