Furthermore, do you have budget to pull off an in-house project? What are opportunity costs? What is your company's track record of getting IT projects completed on-time and on-budget?

3. Project risk. One major reason that organizations build in-house is that they want to build expertise in an emerging technology. Does this meet your organization's business goals? What if you find that learning curve is long and steeper than you anticipated? Are you willing to take that risk? When you are scoping your project, have you considered all of issues? Are you willing to stick to your original scope when your users demand new features (scope creep)?

If you cannot mitigate these issues, then you should strongly consider a fixed price, packaged solution.

2. Process understanding. Collaborative inventory management(VMI) processes are complex and varied as your trading partner needs. If you have many diverse trading partners (or may have in future), building your own solution may not be a great idea (see "long term maintenance" above). Additionally, your trading partners may want to extend use of collaboration solution to their trading partners. Can they do this? Only if you are willing to get into solution environment. This is especially important as your trading partners start to get more and more benefit from these solutions and may force you to switch to another solution.

1. Third-party objectivity. A critical concern for trading partners is that of data confidentiality and security. Most trading partners are leery of exchanging critical and confidential and feel more comfortable with a third party managing data. Is this a critical issue for your organization?

Summary In nascent days of any technology, be it car or software, many companies think that they can build better mousetrap. However, as technology evolves and becomes more complete, there are significant barriers to entry. As collaborative inventory management field continues to evolve, there are enough reasons to give pause before deciding to build a solution in-house.

3. Marketing and Blogs? Yes! Blogs have fresh content, and remember content is King. A blog is a frequent, online publication of comments, web links and news. It is an online Enzine of sorts. People maintained blogs long before term was coined, but trend gained momentum with automated published systems, most notably is blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger alone. Blogs are pure imformation! Here is another hint START A BLOG, search engines Love Blogs! Post fresh content to it regularly, you can even get a free Blog from Google. Blogs are marketing and imformation trend of future, dont get left behind! Learn as much as you can about blogs and how to use them and get started right away blogging, it is future. To give you an example, first two years I was on internet doing business I would go to google once a week and do a search for my sites. The most links I ever had was around 35, my sales were slow and I only made a few hundred dollars in income a month( I was frustrated). So I started learning as much as I could about marketing on internet, my focus was on content, keywords, and blogs because this is what most webmasters seemed to talk about in their articles and news letters. After I applied this new knowledge my links in search engines started growing by hundreds a week, my income also started growing! My ads and articles started showing up on all kinds of other sites, this is free viral marketing! See if you learn these three topics well everything else will fall into place. I believe these three topics are key to all marketing on internet because you can apply these to everything you do, wether it is email marketing, website design, article distribution, gaining incoming links, or placeing ads.

In closing please remember this their is no magic bullet on internet, no one method that will make you a millionaire. Dont believe hype, even though we use hype to sell, keep everything in perspective your not going to get rich overnight. Everyones learning curve will be different, so learn as much as you can about marketing on internet and treat your home business like you would treat any brick and mortar business. Just because you work from home dosnt mean it should be any less important to you. The last thing is never quit, it takes time to make internet work for you. It will work if you dont quit. Alot of people think that if they sign up for an advertising system on internet, that it will work over night. It dosnt work that way. I signed up for a message system one time for advertising one of my websites, it took four months before I seen results, but it was sure worth wait, patience and persistance is key. I wish everyone success in all that you do.

Richard Weberg is an Internet Marketer and Motivational Speaker Resources for marketing and promoting your business. Increase your your online business, rankings, traffic and sales http://nehoma.com/rwmy206/ Click Here