I’ve heard of hosted ERP and CRM solutions. What does 'hosted' mean, and how can hosted...

A hosted solution typically refers to one where the application — customer resource management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), in this case — and the hardware that it runs on are provided to you as a turnkey solution by a third-party application service provider.

Two popular hosted products are Netsuite Small Business and Salesforce.com. NetSuite offers both ERP and CRM products as part of its suite. Salesforce.com serves up a popular CRM solution and partners with companies to extend its product to include ERP functions, among other things.

Larger companies such as Siebel and SAP also offer hosted solutions. Make sure they are geared toward a business your size, however, before entering into relationships with the major players. Sometimes companies will offer a scaled-down version of its product that hasn't been optimized for small businesses.

There are also a couple of free hosted CRM solutions available. FreeCRM can be accessed by more than one person at the same time. Salesforce.com also has a free CRM application, which they call their Personal Edition. Its drawback is that only one person can access it at a time, which can be inconvenient if you have a sales team trying to access data. If you find that the Personal Edition is too narrow for your needs, the Team Edition can be used by five people at a time and is relatively inexpensive. Both will sync up with Outlook or your PDA, so you can stay current.