Category Archives: General IT

General IT

Windows Phone 7 – You’ve just been Mango’d

1 Comment

This week I have managed to get the latest release of Windows Phone 7 on my HTC (codename Mango) and I have to say that yet again I’m impressed with the work Microsoft have done with this phone.

Below are some of the highlights in the basic release i.e. I’m not going to go into the Apps, just those features that are there as standard in the phone. After all every smartphone has plenty of downloadable apps and most of what you have on iPhone and Android is now (or is in the pipeline) for Windows Phone (so facebook, Sky News, Twitter, Foursquare are all there, Skype and Spotify are on there way etc)

I’m also trying to pick core phone features that may interest a lawyer (although they are useful functions for anyone really), but it means I’m not looking at Music, Video etc.

People hub

The key part of Windows Phone is how Microsoft have designed it from the ground up as a phone interface. So a lot of the design is around People, after all interacting with people is the primary function of a phone right? So they built the People hub, from the earliest versions of Windows Phone this held all your contacts and from each person you could interact with these contacts in all the ways you’d expect on a smartphone (email, text, phone etc). These contacts can be pulled from mulitple locations Exchange, Windows Live, Google, facebook etc and then deduplicated i.e. you can link together records for the same person, giving one contact record on the phone rather than one for facebook, one for linkedin etc. This data is kept in sync with the source “over the air”.

In Mango the set of sources got bigger. You can now link in Twitter, LinkedIn (excellent for lawyers, LinkedIn can really be your CRM system!) and from multiple Exchange accounts. So you get all your contacts collated in one place, and for a lawyer if the client updates his/her record in LinkedIn, the update is automatically made to the lawyers phone contact. As well as keeping information from these sources up to date you can also see real time information from contacts in the form of status updates from facebook, twitter, linkedin etc

What about the fact that you may therefore have hundreds of contacts pulled into your phone? Well you can then group contacts in the Mango release, so for example create a “Family” group. Then as well as easily finding your family you can also interact with the whole group. See all the collated updates for the group, text all the group etc. You can also filter your contacts by the source.

With all this being built into the phone (rather than multiple additional apps) everything is where you’d expect it to be. Wherever there is a contact you can interact with it as you’d expect.

Office

As you’d expect from a Microsoft product, Office has been available in Windows Phone 7 from the off. But the integration has now improved in Mango. Now Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint can all integrate with SkyDrive (Microsoft’s online storage), Office365 or your firms SharePoint environment. There are also a number of additions for Exchange users (Out of Office setting, search mail not on your phone but on the server).

Bing

Now Bing. Pre-Mango this was just a web search that was location aware. Now there’s “Vision” search where you can scan QR codes and translate text, basically point the camera at a QR code and it jumps to the relevant web page or point at a sign for example, it scans the text and translates it. Also is a Shazam like music search, not sure of a use for a lawyer other than say to cheat in the pub quiz! There’s also “Scout” which with a single press will provide “eat & drink” and “see & do” information for your location, useful for when room service again is too much to bear!

As well as using the camera to scan signs you can utilise for the obvious as well and with Mango you can share directly to twitter without an additional app (although this posts a link to a public skydrive area rather than use traditional services like twitpic or yfrog, a shame in my opinion), this joins the ability to share to facebook and the ability to automatically upload all photos taken straight to SkyDrive (no more needing to remember to sync or manually copy your photos off your phone).

Email/Calendar

Finally a few additions to the core parts of any smartphone. Email and Calendar.

In email you’ve three great additions:

Consolidated inbox – allowing you to merge multiple mailboxes (Exchange, Hotmail and Google for example) into one Mailbox on the phone. And it’s not an all or nothing, you could merge 2 personal accounts and keep your firm account separate for example.

Exchange – as you’d expect you can easily hook Windows Phone to Microsoft’s Exchange mail servers, but now with Mango you can sync to more than one.

Conversation View – I love this in Outlook 2010 and now it’s available on Windows Phone thanks to Mango.

In the calendar you can add multiple calendars into one phone calendar. Colour coding appointments so you can see at a glance which calendar they’re from. Previously missing Tasks from Exchange are now available in Mango.

And all this synchronisation is over the air, there’s no need to hook your phone up to a computer to do any of this with Windows Phone (the same goes for pretty much everything, including over WiFi sync with music from your music library).

Finally you have the addition of instant messaging, not a separate app but fully integrated into the messaging (text) area. Keeping the theme in Windows Phone of integrating features in all the right places. So if you’re chatting with someone on facebook and they log off, when they continue talking via text you can still see their facebook responses in the same conversation thread. You can fire off an instant message from your contacts (either Microsoft Live or facebook).

Internet Explorer 9

With Mango comes Internet Explorer 9 giving full support of HTML5, CSS3, SV, XHTML, DOM apparently. Plus a faster JavaScript engine and hardware-accelerated graphics that use the phone’s built-in GPU when rendering HTML5 animation or video.

 

Summary

This is not the Windows Mobile of old. If your experience of Windows Phone was from a couple of years or more ago in it’s Windows Mobile 6, 5 or even 2003 guise then you’ll be very surprised. Windows Phone 7 has been built from scratch and bears absolutely no DNA of that old system.

It’s hard to compare Windows Phone over Android and iPhone, they all do some things better than each other. It’s true iPhone and Android have more apps available (but who’s going to use more than the 30,000 apps currently available for Windows Phone, never mind the 400,000 or whatever that the iPhone now has!). But the key differentiators for Windows Phone is it’s design from the off, the integration of social networking, email and text into the core phone OS.

I’m a big fan of Windows Phone 7. But I hope neither Google, Apple or Microsoft “win” this war, keep the competition of three heavyweight in the mix and the customer will benefit from constant innovation!

 

Finally if all you heard about Windows Phone was that cut ‘n’ paste wasn’t available, well that was provided some time ago with the previous release (codename NoDo)! And for those in the UK of a certain age who recognise the inspiration for the title of this post, here you go: You’ve been tango’d (YouTube)!

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

RIP RIM

Leave a comment

Well it’s been a bad few days for RIM this week (and I dare say a difficult time for a fair few IT depts in law firms as a result). And it looks like it isn’t just contained to EMEA either, reports suggest a spread to the US now.

A few things spring to mind off this:

1) It’s going to be one heck of a case study for IT service failure. From the technology that failed, the (lack of) disaster recovery and what resilience was built into a critical system through to studies into how not to manage an incident (the failure in communicating to customers etc). No matter how much redundancy you put in place we know things like this do happen in IT. But for your core product, in RIM’s case, there seems to have been no contingency (although in the aftermath this may end up being something truly unavoidable) and worse still no method of communicating good up to date information to the customer in place. It’s even worse when you consider the mainstream 24hr news services have been carrying the story and would have surely loved to broadcast comment and updates direct from RIM.

2) It’s a real kick in the teeth for cloud computing. Another provider (Office 365 outage, Amazon outage, Google Apps/Mail outage, Apple MobileMe outage) suffering a major outage and thus clients seeing service outages for their own customers.

3) In the corporate email and smartphone arena it’s a big bonus for Apple, Google and Microsoft. The other three key competitors in the smartphone arena. Also for services like Good Technologies who provide app based email solutions for enterprise.

RIM were on the back foot as it was, their main benefit over their rivals was enterprise strength email solutions (although personally I don’t buy into the whole BlackBerry is less of a risk that ActiveSync type technologies argument, but there you go). This reputation though has been dealt a big blow with this incident and they’re going to need some excellent PR work and customer deals to stop a desertion of the enterprise to rivals.

There are plenty of lawyers that use Apple or Android devices already (more so outside the UK), and now Windows Phone has a release that puts it on a par with the others. So at the moment it seems like RIM’s days are numbered.

Share
General IT

Back to blogging

1 Comment

OK not really a post as such, but just a quick update in case you were thinking this blog had been left to gather dust!

The last few weeks at work have been pretty hectic as we are working on a programme that will introduce Windows 7 and Office 2010 across our firm. The thought of blogging about Legal IT after a world of pain caused by it was not an option (poor pun intended!)

Anyway the pain has dulled somewhat, so from tomorrow I’ll start a top 11 cool things in Outlook 2010 (it was going to be 10, but I didn’t know which of my 11 to cull!)

If you want to pass these on then use this link that will display all the posts collated together (it’ll dynamically pull in new ones as I put them up).

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

What happens when a Baby Boomer lawyer meets a Generation Y client?

Leave a comment

A recent experience of trying to hire a car over the “royal wedding weekend” got me thinking about how important good electronic communication is with clients.

I was after a large mini-van or mini-bus for the Bank Holiday Monday and for one reason or another didn’t start looking until the Saturday. The first two companies I tried were the big national car hire chains, I started on their websites and for both it was clear that on the day I required the car they were closed at my local branch. Annoying for me, but at least I knew where I stood.

I moved onto some smaller local businesses, the next two had nice large adverts in the local business pages and indicated they provided the type of vehicle I was after. Both had prominent website urls on their adverts. So I visited the sites and got their contact details. As they had email addresses or web based contact forms I used these (although a Generation X’er myself I do seem to favour a lot of the communication forms of Generation Y!).

These companies then failed. Not only did they not respond to my email, they never acknowledged them at all. I know they received them as I ended up calling them by phone and they clearly knew of my query. Also they didn’t have the vehicles available either so a simple “Sorry no vehicles available email” would have taken 30 seconds!

The remaining local company I tried looked a bit more hopeful and they had online booking!

The order was taken and an automated confirmation received. I was wary though with it being a bank holiday so I emailed them to check they booking, after no reply in 24 hours I called by phone and got no reply. But the automated phone message gave no indication of the company being closed for the bank holiday, so although doubtful I had no reason to believe my car wouldn’t be their waiting for me.

Guess what though, it was closed! Worse still was the fact that a week later I have had no reply either email or phone from this company apologising for their error or even just acknowledging it!

Unbelievably a lot of companies seem to recognise some need to have a website and an email address but then treat them as a second class communication form over phone and face-to-face. Trouble is for them, unlike the boomer generation, the Y generation favours the electronic. Given the volume of email coming into law firms, it’s clear that a lot of lawyers get this and are comfortable with electronic communications. But there are a still some older lawyers who don’t and are quite happy to dictate emails for their secretary.

Regardless of which camp you’re in we still need to remind ourselves to acknowledge those emails. If we can deal with it immediately, do it and then get the email out of the inbox. If it can’t be dealt with quickly, acknowledge the receipt, add a task to deal with it later and get the email out of the inbox. As someone who has 90+ emails in their inbox at the end of today still, I know it’s easier said than done. Also clearly not all emails are from clients and need this kind of attention. But hopefully it’s obvious that we should try to avoid being the law firm that mirrors those firms above. At best your clients will be annoyed, at worst they’ll go somewhere else next time!

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

Those funny square barcode things

Leave a comment

img.phpTheir actual names are QR Codes, like the one to the left. They seem to be cropping up all over the place, including lawyers business cards.

I’m not sure about the benefits other than being a gimmick to attract attention. I posted as much this week on twitter and this led to a brief twitter conversation with @jeffrey_brandt, @emmalouwillcox, @KMHobbie and @geekchicy on the merits of QR Codes.

Some of the comments raised were:

  • scan code smartphone, no typing – big advantage! Great for location based stuff (Maps)
  • why should you need an app for it?!
  • QR code on google.gl service link page, e.g. http://goo.gl/info/7nKy1#week
  • I see biggest potential value of linking static hard copy to dynamic web content

I was also reminded of Microsoft’s attempt at its own version (as somebody pointed out “came up w/their own version of QR code. Quite silly!”), this then reminded me I did a blog post about Microsoft’s “Tag” just over a couple of years ago!

“Microsoft Tag – perfect for the paper file?”

I re-read my article and can’t help think now that a simple barcode would be as useful and so my thoughts come back to my original point made on twitter:

Are QR codes just a fad? What are benefits over urls? Seems bit of a gimmick to use an app to snap QR to get a link? Am I missing something?

And I don’t seem to be the only one, Google seems to be thinking the same. But I am going to install a QR application on my Windows Phone 7 and give it a go for a while. I’ll post what I think in the comments, but let me hear your thoughts on QR codes too.

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

The Helpdesk is king (oh and local IT support too!)

1 Comment

I read an article in The Spectator magazine recently that touched on a customer satisfaction survey of hotels in the USA. The following point caught my eye:

What emerged from this study was that a guest’s enjoyment and appreciation of almost every aspect of a hotel is coloured by their initial experience of their visit — specifically how fast and easy they had found the business of checking-in.

From a Legal IT point of view I’m sure the same is valid, how that first contact with IT comes across (typically the helpdesk or a local IT support) will colour their view on IT.

The article goes on to say:

It supports other research suggesting our memories of events are much more determined by how they begin and end than by ‘the stuff in the middle’. (The NHS does itself a disservice here — the stuff in the middle is often good, but the admission and discharge procedures are dreadful.) What has very little effect on our memory of any experience is its duration.

In a Legal IT context, the “begin” would be the initial contact with the IT department. The point where IT needs to answer quickly, be polite and be knowledgeable (not necessarily able to fix every problem, but enough to know when they can’t, explain they can’t and move the call on quickly to those that can).

The “end” is where the lawyers IT problem is solved and importantly the customer informed that it’s solved (based on a recent survey I’ve seen, something that is often forgotten).

So let’s divert all resource and budget to the helpdesk? Of course not, it’s not all about ensuring your helpdesk is spot on, the bit in the middle is after all pretty critical too! Without it you’ll rarely reach the problem solved and if that’s the case then you may as well not bother answering the phone in the beginning! It’s a balance, but clearly from the hotels survey getting that first point of contact spot on could just make everything IT do seem so much better.

One last quote from the Spectator article, “What has very little effect on our memory of any experience is its duration”, now there’s a start for an article on project deliverables at some point!

Share
General IT

I’m getting old and tired, a bit like Legal IT software

2 Comments

This week I caught the news that the ZX81 hit 30 and that got me thinking about the computers I have owned.

Then the fun went out of computers. I mean take a look at the next lot. (don’t believe me, pull out the internet cable and see what you can do with that thing on your desk!)

  • PC (386 laptop with a massive 8 inch b&w screen)
  • PC (486 compaq from work)
  • PC (self built Athlon)
  • PC (water cooled over clocked P4)
  • PC (i5)

That first Commodore started me on the path to an IT career in applications development. Developing software in BASIC was the only way I could get that PET to do anything useful. The early days of the Spectrum as well led to plenty of coding, mainly due to the magazines at the time having code listings for games and projects. Also the plethora of magazines like INPUT (TV advert), that taught programming for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 amongst others.

These were the early days of home computing when there were many different machines, each with their own operating system. These machines had languages either built in or shipped with them on disks that allowed kids to experiment in programming.

Then came the PC (and to a lesser extent in the early days the Mac) and years of same old same old, with some improvements and iterations in the OS and just a little be faster hardware in each release.

So apart from a little nostalgia what’s the point in this post?

Well it’s tablets. The multiple different devices, the lack of standard operating system, the explosion in software development for them. It reminds me a little of the early days of home computing. The explosion of Apps is encouraging people to develop again. This could lead to a whole new generation of developers who enjoy coding, rather than build a web site in the hope of being the next Mark Zuckerberg.

From the developers of my generation came most of the stalwarts of the current Legal IT portfolio. The developers that come from tablet generation will maybe bring the next wave. I hope so, Legal IT software to me seems old and tired at the moment. It’s iterations of what we have already, better but not revolutionary.  Maybe the tablet will bring the change?

Share
General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office

2 Comments

Here’s one to strike fear into every risk manager in law firms and perhaps give a warm glow to every lawyer (well the tech savvy ones at least), Google Cloud Connect!

In Google’s words.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office brings collaborative multi-person editing to the familiar Microsoft® Office experience. You can share, backup, and simultaneously edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint®, and Excel® documents with coworkers.

or how about “with coworkers clients”!!!

It’s only been released today, so I’ve not had chance to play about with it too much but from what I have used so far it was fairly easy to set up and very easy to sync to the cloud. Maybe a simple way to finally rid ourselves of the back and forth drafting process via email attachments!

There is more information on how it works in the video below.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office (2003/2007/2010)
Share
General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – the final say

Leave a comment

This is a short post, but it’s something I missed off the previous Outlook 2010 post. It’s to note a feature of Outlook 2010 that I forgot to include, but that I think will be very useful to lawyers (as well as Legal IT staff, Knowledge Management staff etc etc).

RSS feeds into the Inbox!

There used to be a great add-in to Outlook (Newsgator Inbox) from a company called Newsgator. This brought RSS feeds into Outlook, allowing you to read your RSS feeds in an Outlook style interface. I used this for some years until I switched to their stand alone FeedDemon product when they acquired that. Newsgator switched focus a while ago to SharePoint, but for those that were aware of Newsgator Inbox then the Outlook 2010 functionality is very similar.

Basically you have an RSS Feeds folder in Outlook and in here you can add feeds. This allows a very familiar interface from which lawyers can use RSS feeds (without the need for further training of yet another product).

No Option RSS feed in Outlook 2010

As they are in your Outlook profile they follow you around from machine to machine in your organisation (similar to the synchronise function that was available in Newsgator Inbox). See below for the posts available in Outlook Web Access under Exchange 2003.

For those of you that use Google Reader, unfortunately there is no way to synchronise with your Google Reader feeds as yet. But you can import OPML files into Outlook 2010 (OPML = Outline Processor Markup Language – an open standard format which can be used to import/export feed entries from one service to another). Take a look at this article if you want to know how. This could also be an easy way to populate a set of feeds that would be useful to a specific set of lawyers.

Vote for Jason Plant - IT Blog Awards 2010

Share
General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – part 3

3 Comments

It’s been a couple of months since I last blogged about my thoughts on Outlook 2010. You can read my previous two posts here and here (and on the Legal IT Professionals site, here and here) or you can just use the Office 2010 Series category to the right.

This post is a look at the presence, contacts and social connector features in Outlook 2010.

First let’s look at the contact cards. In the contacts folder there isn’t anything revolutionary, it’s pretty much the same as previous versions. But it’s the exposure of this contact information in other parts of Outlook that is a nice addition in 2010.  Just hover over a contact anywhere in Outlook (on an appointment, an email address etc) and you get the following pop-up displayed:

outlook-contacts

From here you can do a number of things. You can of course use the arrow in the bottom right to get more details of the contact. This can be information from your contacts folder or information held about people in your organisation address books.

But in addition from this pop-up you can start integrating into other parts of Outlook. So click on the email icon to send an email to the person or the icon to schedule a meeting (where it will show their availability where the contact is in your organisation).

Also from here you start to see the integration into other Microsoft products. So if you have Office Communicator in your organisation, you can see the presence of the contact (i.e. whether they are online, in a meeting, away, busy etc), you can start an IM (instant messaging) conversation or initiate a phone call with the person. Just like the rest of Office 2010 it’s all about having the right functionality available in the right place!

Another nice addition is the “Suggested Contacts” folder. This looks at the emails you send and builds up a collection of contacts for you. Initially you think “in most cases won’t that just be the email address and maybe a name?” Not necessarily!

Let’s look at how Outlook 2010 expands the contact card within the new People Pane and also allows you to expand it further with “social connectors”.

outlook-peoplepane

This area, below the email reading pane, works in a similar way to Xobni for those that have used that application. You can see an example above. In the top right of the people pane are all the contacts from the email (To:, CC: etc), click on a contact and you see details of other emails from that person, appointments you have with the person or attachments you have received from the person.

If you’ve got one of the Outlook Social Connectors installed then you can also see social media status updates, RSS feeds etc from the person. In the above image you can see I have the Linkedin social connector installed, this would be an excellent addition to Outlook 2010 for lawyers. As clients or prospective clients email you (or are cc’d in emails to you) you can immediately see information from their linkedin profile!

There are also social connectors for facebook, windows live messenger and myspace available from Microsoft at the moment.

But in addition there is a Social Connector Software Development Kit available from Microsoft, so there is the opportunity for law firms to develop their own social connectors. The obvious one is to pull richer information on internal contacts from intranets or people databases the firm may have.

Looking to the world of third party legal IT vendors, this has to be a great area for CRM in law firms. LexisNexis surely have to develop a connector for InterAction! It would be a perfect addition, allowing lawyers to instantly see up to date information on clients.

Also for Knowledge Management, a connector into the DMS (document management system) or Knowledge Management Systems to see documents or content authored by a particular contact within the organisation.

With all the added functionality and the flexibility in Outlook 2010 the difficult job for those Project Managers having to run the Office 2010 projects is where to draw that line under your project scope!

computerweeklybanner
Vote for Jason Plant - IT Blog Awards 2010

Share