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The runner-up award goes Google Apps Premium Edition, which got the nod from 23 percent of small business votes. Google Apps, which includes Google Docs' word processing, spreadsheet and presentations, Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Sites, has been building up a user community and also serving to even further strengthen small businesses confidence in Web-based applications.

The jury is out about whether Google can seriously challenge Microsoft for business applications supremacy. However, another sign that Google is serious is its recent announcement that it will create a channel sales program to help sell and support Google Apps for small businesses.

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Customer / Sales Management

Getting and retaining customers has never been easy. But with the economic downward spiral showing no signs of ending, knowing your customers has never been more important. For that reason, the Customer / Sales Management category holds particular relevance this year. Tying for the top spot with 27 percent of vote are two familiar names: perennial favorite ACT defended its crown, but this year has to share the title with Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager.

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Extending the reach of its features, ACT by Sage 2009 now offers "En masse e-mail attaching." This lets you select multiple Microsoft Outlook e-mails — from different senders — and quickly attach them to the contact of your choice. From within Outlook, you can click on an ACT button to attach an e-mail to an ACT contact. You can also use Outlook rules to configure your system so any e-mail from a particular contact automatically becomes a part of a contact's ACT history.

While ACT has focused on integration with Outlook, Microsoft itself continues to make Outlook more of a customer-management product in its own right with Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager, which Microsoft began offering as a standalone product in early in 2008.

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Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager is designed to make it easier for small businesses to organize contact, prospect, and customer information in one place (i.e., Outlook); manage sales leads and business opportunities; create, personalize and track direct marketing campaigns; and centralize project information and task management.

Outlook with Business Contact Manager is also available in Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 and Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007. The software also now offers integration with Microsoft Office Accounting 2008.

And, of course, what would a software category be without a healthy dose of open source software. SugarCRM is strong runner-up in the Customer / Sales Management category, capturing nearly 20 percent of the vote. The latest version of SugarCRM shows it's keeping with the times by offering new cloud services, social networking features and mobile administration.

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VoIP

VoIP delivers professional features typically found on the phone systems of much larger companies but with lower costs and simplified management. That's a good thing, because anyone with even a passing familiarity with telecommunications knows that phone systems can be a royal pain in the receiver.

This year's top spot goes to Junction Networks OnSIP, a hosted PBX service that not only lets you pay-as-you-go, it charges you based how much you use, not by licensed seats or extensions. A simple portal interface makes it easy for you to add extensions, configure call-forwarding rules, create call groups and more.

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For companies with local and 800 numbers in foreign countries, OnSIP's Inbound Bridge service lets callers use phone menus, transfer calls, put callers on hold, etc. Without the bridge, inbound callers would be disconnected when they tried to navigate the menus or transfer to specific extensions.

Microsoft claims the runner-up position with its Response Point communications software. Sold as a bundle with the phone system hardware from vendors such as Aastra Technologies, D-Link, and Quanta Computer, Response Point supports both VoIP as well as analog phone lines. Features include interactive voice response capabilities, find-me-follow-me options, unified messaging and integration with other Microsoft products, such as Outlook.

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Collaboration

Let's face it: The days when collaboration meant attaching and e-mailing files that you could then discuss over the phone are over. These days collaboration means one document reviewed in real-time by multiple workers who share a vested interest.

If Adobe Acrobat doesn't spring to your mind when someone says "collaboration," you aren't among the 28 percent of readers who voted it Best Collaboration product. Adobe Acrobat 9 is designed to let businesses use commenting tools to share feedback and collaborate live within a PDF document by working with Acrobat.com, a suite of hosted services. Also, because Adobe Reader is free, you can share feedback and responses with just about anyone.

Taking runners-up honors, with 22 percent of the vote each, are Google Apps Team Edition and Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 (the company's first product release after it was acquired by Yahoo).