Tax preparation can be rather grueling with all the different forms to be filled, documents to be submitted and refunds to be filed. It generally involves a lot of paperwork, calculation and prior planning. Depending on the kind of income, there are various kinds of forms that are to be filled. Selecting the right form, obtaining the right information and submitting the form on time are very important aspects.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has made tax preparation very easy these days. The IRS has published many books, like Your Federal Income Tax and Tax Guide for Small Business. More information can be obtained at the local library or the IRS’s website.

These days, tax preparation can be done online or by using certain software. There are many kinds of software available for tax preparation. The online forms are provided by certain professional tax preparation agencies. All you have to do is fill in an online interview form by providing all the relevant information. The software checks the form and sends back the form if there are any exclusions or corrections to be made. The form can be corrected, and the e-file is sent to the IRS directly. The form can also be printed out and mailed to IRS via post. You can check the status of your return any time by logging into the online service. These online programs can be downloaded into the PC. The basic system requirements are: Win95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP or MAC OS X or MAC OS 9.1 operating system and Internet Explorer (4/5/5.5) or Netscape Navigator (4.7/6.2/7) or AOL (5/6/7/8/9) supported browsers.

Some of the most popular tax preparation software packages are: TurboTax for Mac (TurboTax for the Web, TurboTax Deluxe, TurboTax Premier, TurboTax Business, and TurboTax State), Kipplinger TaxCut and Quicken TurboTax. Prices of this software start at $10. These can be used online or can be downloaded onto the PC. There are also special software packages like basic, essentials, premium, business and others.

Tax Preparation provides detailed information on Tax Preparation, Income Tax Preparation, Tax Preparation Software, Tax Return Filing Preparation and more. Tax Preparation is affiliated with IRS Tax Help.

Somewhere in the mid 90’s, my company, Brook Group, underwent rapid growth as it converted from being an advertising and design firm to a web services firm. We were running 3 shifts at the time and we only had one manager: me. Coming from a design background, I had a lot of (sometimes very difficult) lessons to learn about technology projects and managing folks who make technology products.

I imagined a way for me to post tasks for each employee without knowing HTML, to make managing the late night folks easier. My programmer created it and the lightbulb went on. Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a series of these types of widgets to allow any user to post content to the web without knowing HTML? And that is when Tacklebox, my enterprise content management system, was born.

I have survived building 4 versions of Tacklebox, the latest of which was actually launched. I learned these lessons the hard way and I want to share them with anyone tackling that sort of project. Think of this as a fundamental, practical, elementary guide to building a software product.

1. Patience is a Virtue. If you are starting from scratch and you are not well-funded, and you plan on bootstrapping the development effort, realize that patience is a virtue.

2. Know thyself. This means know your limitations. If you don’t know how to do software product development and you are bootstrapping and starting from scratch, get people involved who do know how to do software development, product development, project management, product pricing, product marketing… You be the entrepreneur, idea person, but don’t try to head everything up yourself; you will fail out of the gate.

3. Make Something. Don’t go to Venture Capital folks or potential partners with a flip chart and a pitch that sounds something like, “This is going to be really cool”… VCs want to see a working product. And do not go to VCs too early; you might lose your chance to get funded because you haven’t done your homework.

4. Plan. Plan. Plan. Start the project with a plan. It can have basic elements like what this product is going to fix, what is the business problem, who is the audience, and on several levels, why it will be better than the competition? And yes, you do have competition.

5. Get the Right People involved. Whether you’re hiring or looking for a partner, two guys in a garage are not the best choice for building a software product. Sometimes those two guys in a garage dress up good. Maybe they move into an office space and start a company like real grownups. You had better make sure you can identify the difference between a real company and two guys in a garage that just graduated. Ask them if they have business insurance, errors and omissions insurance; ask them for Service Level Agreements. Talk to them about CMM levels.

6. Don’t use proprietary anything to build your software. You’ll be tied to that proprietary code forever, or it will cost you a small fortune to have it removed from your source code.

7. Independents are independent. They will hold you hostage one day. Don’t hire independents to build your product. If you hire a team to build your product, focus on hiring “company people.”

8. 95% of your success will come from hiring the right and best people, 5% by training people. Don’t hire to train, unless you have the best and brightest around to do the training, and a multi-year commitment from those who are getting trained that they will stick around!

9. A caution about partnering. You don’t want your intellectual capital sitting in the brain of a contractor. Make sure that whatever you do, you own your source code outright. You need to hire the right people and make sure that their knowledge — your capital — stays at home.

10. Always learn from your mistakes. Sometimes we joke about when we are going to stop learning lessons the hard way. Probably never, but make sure you learn each mistake, so you don’t repeat it. And just when you think it’s safe, new ones will be right around the corner.

Kara Brook is the President and CEO of Brook Group, a Web site development firm near Washington, DC. Recognizing the need for user-friendly Web site management, she conceived Tacklebox, one of the industry’s most exciting new content management systems. More articles by this author can be found at Usability and Branding.

If you already have photo editing software on your computer, you may want to know how to convert a number of images at a time to the format you desire. This feature, batch image format conversion, may be necessary to send out picture invitations/announcements to friends and family via email, or you may be preparing a business brochure and need to find a way to get the best quality graphics on each brochure that is sent out. Here are some companies/programs that offer this service that you may want to take a look at.

www.snowbound.com has a number of format conversion software programs that will work well with your computer and give you graphics with rich color and detail. The conversion tools support a number of formats and file types, including PDF, JPEG, and Microsoft Word. The programs also allow you to split multi-page files into single page files, and to convert PDFs, so the files are easy to see and read no matter how you download them. The program is best supported by Windows NT and Windows XP, which are on most computers. You can even provide the company with an evaluation of your Snowbound or Snowbatch software once you purchase the image conversion program.

If you’re not sure which company you want to purchase your batch image conversion software from just yet, or if you want to know more about what the program should be able to do, you can check out www.batchimage.com. There are a number of companies that sell batch image format conversion software on the site, so you can click on the links for each programs to learn more about which one would be best for your computer. Programs include Batch Image Commander, which comes in three modules (command line, time-based controlled tray icon, and batch timer processing modules). These features help you to accurately resize your images while retaining the resolution and quality, change the JPEG quality, and create captions for your photos. You may also want to check out Batch It!, Batch It! Pro, and Batch It! Ultra, which are Windows-based image processors that are easy to use. You can create HTML and thumbnail galleries using these programs, and can individually crop or rotate certain images in your photos. The Pro and Ultra versions of the program allow you to convert more files at a time, and can also give your graphics a better resolution. For more information on these products, or to find out about other companies that offer batch image format conversion, visit the site for more details.

Mansi gupta enjoys writing about image converter. Learn more at www.autoimager.com .

Microsoft Great Plains as ERP and Microsoft CRM as Client Relation Management system is very robust combination and could serve midsize to large corporation as Business System. Being VP IT or IT Director you need to foresee the positions to have in your IT department to do internal MS Great Plains and MS CRM support.

Let us give you the directions, based on our research and consulting practice.

1. Microsoft SQL Server Specialist - we specially do not name this position as MS SQL DBA, because both Great Plains and MS CRM are not very complex from the database administration side, they do not use indexes optimization, referential integrity, probably do not require complex transaction log backup/recovery scenarios. On the other hand this position requires Great Plains and Microsoft CRM tables structure analysis and some primary Great Plains data fixing skills via SQL queries, described in MBS Customer source techknowledge database. The best candidate should have some accounting background - to be able to address ongoing issues to MBS technical support.
   
2. Network Administrator with good Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory skills. Microsoft CRM uses all the newest Microsoft technologies, and Exchange is a workhorse here. In order to install and upgrade MS CRM this guy needs to understand the under-laying Microsoft technology. In the best case - she/he should know Exchange security structure and probably program Exchange handlers, due to the fact that CRM/Exchange connector is not a perfect tool yet.
   
3. C# or VB.Net programmer with excellent SQL Skills- if you are midsize or large company - you should have this position - you will need web publishing and MS CRM customization and its support. Currently Microsoft CRM SDK has C# examples - so C# programmer would be the best fit, it may have more VB code in the future, so the C# - VB balance maybe restored.
   
4. Crystal Reports Designer/Programmer - Crystal Reports is the best tool available on the market to address both Great Plains and MS CRM reporting needs. This position maybe merged with one of the above.

These people should be probably cross-trained in both Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, Crystal Reports, SQL and C# programming, so you do not depend on the unique skills of one person. In our opinion, which is based on our long term consulting practice - these skills will allow you to keep the cost of IT support reasonably low and avoid paying high consulting price to your Microsoft Business Solutions Partner.

Happy hiring and training! But in any case you need to select Microsoft Business Solutions Partner/Var/Reseller to be your official representative. This is how MBS has its channel working - it assures that Microsoft Business Solutions products are properly implemented. If you want us to be your Microsoft Business Solutions Partner - give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies - USA nationwide Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Great Plains implementation and customization company, based in Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Dexterity, SQL, VB/C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.