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A screen-sharing program can help train workers or update clients. They'll see your PC as if looking over your shoulder, even if they're across the office or around the world. But before you splurge on a paid service with unlimited connections, consider free and cheap alternatives. You can save if you only need to share a few times a month, or scale up if you need to buy more functionality.

One sharing service, Yuuguu fulfills my biggest demand for online collaboration; participants don't have to install anything. They just connect through a Flash-enabled web browser on any computer.

As the host, you'll download and install the free tool on a Windows, Mac, or Linux system and sign up for a free account. You'll launch a web conference through Yuuguu, and just give the participants the URL and access code to enter.

Up to 5 people can work in a free session together, and you're limited to 100 minutes of browser-based sharing each month. If each person installs the Yuuguu software, that time limit is waved; you could take this thrifty step within a business, but it's probably too much to ask clients or outsiders to install a program.

Paid subscription options expand these limits, starting at $15/month for a single user. Up to 30 people can join sessions, and you can conference with browser-based participants as long as you want. Yuuguu also sells a $30/month plan for 20 users, and other alternatives.

Yuuguu also provides voice conferencing through Skype on PCs or standard telephones. United States participants can dial in for free–less the cost of any national long distance fees–and international callers are charged on a per-minute basis.

While screen-sharing presentations make Yuuguu most appealing to me, additional features might suit your business. The host computer's keyboard and mouse control can be passed around in screen-sharing sessions, turning the service into more of a live collaboration tool. You can text chat throughout sharing, plus Yuuguu works as a general instant messaging client, connecting to users on AIM, Google Talk, Skype, Yahoo, and MSN Messenger.

Yuuguu's paid screen-sharing options might be compelling enough for your business to buy. But its free core connects to anyone in a web browser without spending anything.

Managing disks and files is one of the most common everyday tasks that IT professionals deal with. Sometimes it seems that Microsoft falls a little bit short when providing tools for managing these tasks. Fortunately there are a number of 3 party alternatives that come to the rescue. Here are three freeware utilities that I can't live without.

Sequoia View. This is one my favorite tools. For those of us who manage file servers, keeping track of where all the disk space goes can certainly be challenging, and Windows provides no easy method. Using SequoiaView, IT admins can quickly track down disk space hogs and identify the types of files clogging up your business's servers. SequoiaView uses a visualization technique known as "cushion treemaps" to create an image of your hard disks contents. File types are color coded, and a mouse over quickly provides the name and path of the file in question. What used to take lots of time drilling down through various directories can now be accomplished in a single glance.

Unlocker. It can be frustrating when you try to delete or move a file and you are unable to because of a lock on the file. Often the culprit is a system process or anti-virus software. Unlocker is a simple tool which alleviates this issue for you. Right-clicking a file or folder will reveal an icon to launch Unlocker. If the file or folder is locked, you'll be given the option to unlock it, or kill the offending process. You can then delete or move the file. No need to reboot your computer

DeFraggler is a simple, light-weight defragmentation app which improves upon the functionality of the utility built into Windows is a number of ways. For one, it allows you to defragment individual files. If your performance is flagging, and you want to quickly defragment specific essential files, Defraggler will do that for you. Defraggler also brings graphics back to defragging. I don't know why Windows no longer offers a visual representation of the fragmentation status of your disk, but its back with Defraggler. Also, if you select a file in the file list, Defraggler will highlight for you where on your drive it is located. This handy little 800k utility also offers niceties such as quick defragmentation, file-type, exclusions, and scheduling. Lastly, if you want to move larger files to the end of your disk, so that smaller files will be accessed more quickly, DeFraggler is there for you.