Category Archives: General IT

General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – part 2

1 Comment

In this second post on Outlook 2010 I’ll be taking a look at the calendar functionality. There are some really nice features that I’m sure will please a lot of lawyers (and if not the lawyers then certainly their secretaries!). There are plenty of screen shots which you can zoom into by simply clicking on the image.

So first up is a look at calendar views and there are a few nice touches to point out here.

There is a combined calendar and task view. So as well as seeing the Monday to Friday view of appointments you get to see the days tasks listed as well.

outlook-cal-cal-view
Calendar combined with Tasks

Then there is the overlay view where you can overlay a number of calendars on top of each other to see combined appointments.

Another nice touch is the option on the main ribbon that allows you to create “calendar groups”. Basically a way of grouping shared calendars together into logical groups and thus ease viewing other people’s calendars. For example, this would allow in one click to quickly view project members calendars for scheduling a project meeting.

Outlook 2010 really seems to be about helping you with what you want to do rather than adding loads of new features. So there is a schedule view, which is just another way of viewing multiple calendars. But this way round it’s much easier to see free time.

outlook-cal-schedule
Schedule View

And again in this view there another little short cut, where if you haven’t got access to view someone’s calendar there is a quick way to request permission by simply clicking on the little icon below the persons name in the left column.

outlook-cal-cal-perms1
Request calendar permissions

outlook-cal-cal-perms2
And what the recipient gets

Once a calendar appointment has been created and the meeting request sent out, then as a recipient of the request Outlook 2010 makes it easier for you too.

First off you see your calendar for the day of the meeting request. This is one of the features I like best as you can immediately see your calendar for the day in question, as well as meeting conflicts etc, thus allowing you to make the decision on whether to attend the meeting quickly.

outlook-cal-mtg-req
Appointment request

Then once you’ve decided whether to accept or not, you can do so simply by one action on the ribbon.

outlook-cal-mtg-req-respons
Quick response possible

In fact you don’t need to be in the calendar view to initiate meetings. You can very quickly set up a meeting from an email. So say you get some information from a colleague on a deal from the client, you can with just one click set up a meeting with them and the team to discuss. Simply by clicking on the “Reply with Meeting” option on the ribbon.

outlook-quick-step-mtg
Quickly create a meeting request

In fact you can set up “Quick Steps” to do a number of things. Say you want a one click button the create an email to the Team. Just set up a “Quick Step”, chose your action, your To: list and it’s there as a one click option on your ribbon!

outlook-quick-step
Set up a "Quick Step"

Finally there should be an option when creating a meeting request called “Meeting suggestions”. I’ve not got this to work in my installation, so I’m presuming you need Exchange 2007/2010. But basically this appears when you create a meeting request and it does as it says, the schedules for attendees are analyzed and the best time is suggested based on everyone’s availability.  Take a look at this Microsoft article for information on this.

It’s worth noting that I’ve got my Outlook 2010 connected to an Exchange 2003 server, so there could be other functionality that is added or changed when connected to an Exchange 2010 environment.

In fact I’m sure there are plenty of other useful features around calendars and appointments, so if you find any please share them in the comments!

Share
General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – part 1

1 Comment

I’ve been running Microsoft’s Office 2010 on my home PC for about a month now and have to say I’m impressed. Well as impressed as you can be with an email client, a word processor and a spreadsheet application!

I thought I’d share in a few blog posts some of the really nice features of Outlook 2010 that I think will be useful for lawyers. For the first post I want to take a look at a couple of nice ways in which Outlook 2010 helps you organise and find email.

The conversation thread

This arrangement of the Inbox quickly tidies up all those email conversations. It allows you to maintain a date organised view of your emails, but then it groups a conversation into one line (see in the image below how the single email for Today is in fact a rolled up conversation).

Outlook-conversation-closed
click on the image to zoom

The conversation can then be expanded. The great thing about this is that it spans emails in other folders and even in other Outlook data files (e.g. a PST/archive file, which it does with my Archive Folders PST in the example below)

Outlook-conversation
click on the image to zoom

You can then quickly tidy up your email by a right click on the conversation and selecting “Clean up conversation”. This will then remove superfluous messages from the conversation.

Search

The search in Outlook 2010 is much nicer than previously (for information, my previously is Outlook 2003).

When you start typing in your search you quickly get a drop down to allow you to limit the search to a person (from) or subject if required.

Outlook-search-selection
click on the image to zoom

The results are then highlighted both in the subject and in the body of the email.

Outlook-search-results
click on the image to zoom

There is also a quick link at the bottom of the results to allow you to quickly expand the search scope from the folder you are in to all mail.

Finally on search, as with the rest of Outlook 2010, the ribbon is now here. After initial confusion as to where everything has gone, the ribbon becomes an asset. For example once you’ve done a search the ribbon switches to the search ribbon and provides useful options to you to use without having to go hunting through menus.

Outlook-search-ribbon
click on the image to zoom

There are a couple of reservations I have regarding search in Outlook 2010 searching though:

  1. Performance – the indexing of all the email data. I’m not noticing any performance impact on my PC (a fairly old Pentium 4 machine), but my exchange mailbox at home is only 60Mb and the PST file attached is only 560Mb. When you’ve got a lawyer with three or four 2Gb PSTs you could be testing your PC’s!
  2. If you’re planning to run on Windows XP – you will need to install the latest desktop search software from Microsoft, Outlook 2010 uses this for it’s search rather than an in built search. If you’re moving to Windows 7 this isn’t an issue.

Further thoughts

Whilst using these two pieces of functionality in Outlook 2010, one thing struck me.

How will this work with Document and Email management systems?

In the conversation threads how would this integrate with emails filed in the document management system (DMS)? Similarly with the search, integration to expand the scope of your search to include not just other mail in your inbox but emails in the DMS would be nice.

Microsoft has gone to some great lengths to really think about how you use email and streamline things to make everything just where you want it. There is a challenge for Legal IT providers to integrate into Outlook 2010 in a way that complements this.

Share
General IT

Take time to be bored!

2 Comments

I received a few comments recently asking how on earth I find time to update facebook and twitter all the time? In fact it’s not the first time, my wife asks this question regularly.

The answer I usually give is that I find the time in between other things. I use a Windows Phone with a facebook and a twitter app, so if I’m stuck waiting for a bus I can use my phone to look at facebook or I can post a tweet whilst watching TV. But inevitably whilst I explain I usually get the “But who cares what I’m eating for breakfast? I’m not really that interesting….”.

I could come up with a number of reasons why you should, but I’m reading a book at the moment called “Socialnomics” by Erik Qualman that has a great response to this, you can read the first few pages on the Amazon page linked here (in particular take a look at page 3). The jist of the argument is that social media makes you more productive by turning a previously wasted 10 minutes into a productive 10 minutes.

But when I set out of the idea for this post it wasn’t intended to answer those particular questions. The post was to answer a question that I asked myself after reading the first chapter. I started to think “Should we really be filling every moment of our lives with something”?

It’s been two week since my last post. One of the reasons is that I have been busy (aren’t we all!). But if I think about it I have had spare time, but I’ve ended up filling it just as the chapter highlighted. Also the busy time has been “that kind of busy that leaves you no time to think”, you know the kind that leaves you at the end of the evening just wanting to collapse in front of the TV! But during this time I did read a great post from Peter Bregman that made me see that this need to fill every hour of the day with something can be counter-intuitive. This part was the paragraph that stood out for me:

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

And that’s it, spot on! I’ve been so caught up with things; managing the detail of projects at work, sorting out all those household requirements at lunchtime, three young kids bedtime routine, working on stuff for school governors, spending time on facebook and of course watching the World Cup, that I’ve not left myself time for my mind to wander off. There has been time to write blog posts, but no time for coming up with the ideas of what to write about.

In fact I’m sure this happens in the work environment. There is a push in most companies to fill the day with as much work as possible. If we’re not at our desks beyond our 9 to 5, if we’re not skipping lunch, if we’re not cramming in as much work as possible we’re not doing it right. Sure we get a lot done, we look busy, but if we allow ourselves to be a bit creative we might realise we’re not efficient, we’re doing it wrong or worse going in completely the wrong direction.

I’m not advocating we all drop everything and use this as an excuse to be lazy, but just make sure there’s time to think. Maybe it’s just that hour at lunch spent wandering the city, letting your mind wander. Just some time in the day to break the busy and bring on a bit of boredom, just enough to get those creative juices flowing.

You know maybe Tony Hayward was doing just the right thing by taking time off to go sailing this weekend, maybe as he sailed round the Isle of Wight his mind wandered and he came up with an answer for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico!

Share
General IT

It’s nearly time to vote – Election 2010 and IT

Leave a comment

Given that in the UK this Thursday we will be going to the polls for our General Election, I thought I should do an election themed post. Having trawled through the manifestos of the three main parties I was intending to do a “BBC style” evenly balanced view on what the plans in the manifestos would mean to IT.

But then given that this is my own blog I thought no I’ll give you my thoughts and that means there will no doubt be some bias! After all the comments are open for you all to air your thoughts in return.

So here is my opinion on what the manifestos might mean to IT, feel free to disagree either in the comments or on May 6th 🙂

In the Liberal Democrats manifesto IT comes up as follows:

Better government IT procurement, investigating the potential of
different approaches such as cloud computing and open-source
software.

savings that can be made across government – such as on pay, public sector pensions, and IT provision

In Labours:

continuing to cut bureaucracy and inefficiency in procurement, IT and overtime

giving virtually every household in the country a broadband service of at least two megabits per second by 2012

priority in the expansion of student places will be given to …. , technology, engineering and mathematics degrees

We will scale down the NHS IT programme

And in the Conservatives:

a freeze on major new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) spending

We need to boost enterprise and develop a low carbon,
hi-tech economy

We want Britain to become a European hub for hi-tech, digital and creative industries

Make Britain the leading hi-tech exporter in Europe (whole section of the manifesto)

An economy where Britain leads in science, technology and innovation

So if you remove each parties plans to cut IT costs in government (which to be honest is inevitable given our spend on debt interest alone is higher than our spend on schools!), what are you left with?

Well the Liberal Democrats have a admirable but somewhat woolly commitment to look at open source software and, er well that’s it. Labour promise to give all of us (although watch for that virtually comment!) 2Mb broadband and a more worthy commitment to technology degrees. Not much so far, so we’re left with the Conservatives to focus a whole section of their manifesto on  growing the economy through the technology sector (Listen to the section here).

Clearly no one is going to base their vote solely on the IT sector, but in a display of complete and utter bias I say that Conservatives show a much more compelling view for the IT sector.

And in a final show of unbelievable political bias I leave you with this video, enjoy 😉

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z0PP1xRkWk

p.s. That’s it I promise, no more election posts until at least 2014 (unless of course you all vote Liberal Democrat, we end up with a hung parliament and we go through this all again in October!)

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

Backups – that dull bit of IT that someday you wish you’d done!

Leave a comment

Everyone who has ever lost data from their computer knows the importance of backups and for a law firm (no matter what size) it’s critical. I don’t suppose there is much point in me outlining the detail of why? But if you are interested in a good summary of why backup is a good idea try this site.

Also don’t fall into the trap of assuming that electronic data is not as safe and so keep everything as a piece paper. More often than not electronic information is just as safe (if not more so) if looked after. Take a look at this story as to why a printout in an offsite facility is not necessarily that safe!

If you work for a big law or mid-sized law firm, you’ll probably have an IT department and they will probably have some or all of the following:

  • A regime of daily and weekly backups of your data
  • Transfer of older backups to offsite locations
  • Larger firms may have multiple online data centres with your data replicated between them

For small law firms the picture may be different, but still there maybe a tape or disk backup. This may be taken offsite or perhaps even locked in a fire safe.

But even with your data backed up, there is more to just having the data safe when it comes to recovery from a disaster.

One benefit of a disk based backup (for example, on a small scale, a USB drive) is the fast recovery time. Just plug it in and access the data (in tech speak this is known as a small RTO or recovery time objective). Also there is no worry that at the time you need the backup the restoration software is not available!

For big law this switch to disk based backup is fine, this is why many have set up their multiple data centres, but what about small firms? USB drives can handle computer failure, but what about fire, flooding or other natural disasters? It’s a pain to keep swapping USB drives and taking one offsite or to have to lock it in a fire safe overnight etc (especially as the most convenient time to do the backup is overnight!)

Well take a look at this drive I recently got my hands on. It’s called an ioSafe and it’s main aim is to resolve this very problem!

ioSafe

It’s basically a fire proof, shockproof and waterproof USB drive. I’m not brave enough to trash it in the quest for a YouTube video demonstration of its capabilities, so you’ll have to take a look at these demonstrations!

BBC – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8449893.stm

Channel 5 – http://fwd.five.tv/gadget-show/blog/episode-1-the-desert-challenge Note the follow on point on the C5 website on how they could have got the data back following the gadget show demo.

So what’s it like as a USB drive?

Well apart from the size and weight of the device it works pretty much as you’d expect. It’s low noise, there isn’t any noticeable speed difference to old my USB drive. The only mild criticism I’d have is that the activity light on the front is a a bit dim. But basically it’s a USB drive, and it just works as you’d expect!

The big benefit I can see of a device like this to a small law firm is that it can cope with a fire, a flood or I guess an earthquake! And the benefit over a DVD backup being taken offsite is that it can give a fast RTO (this could also be the case for it being used in conjunction with tape backups in larger firms to reduce the RPO – recovery point objective (more tech speak I know, but that basically means the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time i.e. a days worth of data lost if you restore to that DVD that went offsite yesterday).

All ioSafe hardware also comes with a Data Recovery Service. So should a drive be damaged for any reason ioSafe will spend up to £500 to recover the data and then send it back to the customer on a replacement device!

For pure backup it’s a great concept and perfect for small business, but I can see a question and a future threat that you may want to consider:

The question – cost?

  • A 1Tb version is £260 vs. a 1Tb standard USB drives cost of £80
  • The value is in the fireproof, water proof aspect. Is it worth it? Well I guess if you look at a decent fire safe being £100, needing an extra drive 2x £80 to be able to pack a USB drive away each night in the safe. You’re at the same price! Then factor in the ioSafe convenience and  benefits of the DRS should there be issues with the recovery and the ioSafe doesn’t look too bad value wise!

The threat – cloud based backup!

There are some cloud based backup options but for law firms I see a few issues with these at them moment:

  • Confidentiality – ensuring that this is met and for those particularly outside the US that cross jurisdictional issues don’t crop up
  • Cost – most are subscription based and charged at cost per Gb. There could also be data transfer costs depending on your internet connection deal with your ISP.
  • Risk of the company going bust and losing the backup of your data.

Longer term I think cloud based backup may be easiest form of backup, but for now have a look at the regime you have in place and check whether it would keep your law firm going in a disaster. If you’re after a little more piece of mind with a USB based system, then maybe ioSafe is just the device for your practice?

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

email, hate the stuff!

3 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about email recently and I mean a LOT! I’ve concluded I hate the stuff, both on a personal level and on an enterprise level. It’s like sand, it gets everywhere and you can’t get rid of the stuff. And even if you put it in a sandbox, you’re still finding the stuff all over your feet and clothes for days.

The worst thing is that email plays to our natural instinct to hoard. We actively go and collect the stuff. Then we keep hold of it for years! I know of lawyers who have mailboxes running in the Gb’s and have inboxes with tens of thousands of items in them. I remember doing a rollout in 2005 and noticing PST’s in lawyers mailboxes going back to the early 1990’s!

So what does it matter if we collect the stuff? Well let’s ignore the fact that as a lawyer there should be an organised file somewhere (PDF) and just look at the pain they cause…

First off the performance nightmare!

The chances are you’ll be storing all the stuff in Microsoft Exchange and Outlook like most corporates.

Matt Cain, lead email analyst at Gartner. "We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial email market by 2010”

Bottom line is big mailboxes equal bad performance (unless you’re lucky enough to have a quad core desktop with a solid state hard drive at work!). There are a number of factors involved in Outlook performance, but basically big in size (Gb) is bad and big in number of items is bad!

Sure Exchange 2007 brought improvements as did Outlook 2007 Sp1 on the desktop. And Outlook/Exchange 2010 may bring more, but if email usage continues to grow then they will just be playing constant catch up (also I bet most of you are on Office 2003!).

Then you have to worry about storage!

There are probably gigabytes or terabytes (or petabytes!!!) of the stuff that your organisation collects. More and more money thrown at playing catch up with shelves of discs to collect all the emails you hoard. Sure if you’re a small firm you can outsource your email to say GMail or as a large corporate perhaps to a hosting company (it might ease the hassle but probably not the cost). In fact I suspect that maybe this is the future, we will treat email as a utility like with we do electricity. But that’s not addressing the problem is it? It’s like buying space at Big Yellow Self Storage because your back bedroom is full and you can’t bring yourself to throw away your shoe, comic, book, record (delete as applicable) collection!

So what’s the future?

Can’t we just kill it off? As well as performance and storage there’s the time sucking controlling nature of the stuff. I was hoping instant messaging (IM), wikis or social media would kick in and reduce emails dominance (like facebook has virtual killed my useful home email, I say useful to distinguish from the almost spam messages I get from sites like LinkedIn, Amazon etc). It’s starting slowly in firms but IM is like the healthy vegetable sat next to the krispy kreme doughnut of email!

I don’t have all the answers for the problem above unfortunately. But if someone can solve them for me, then from a lawyers perspective I did come up with an idea for organising the stuff that would require virtually no effort on the lawyers time. No filing, no tagging, but that’s a post for another day ……

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

Apple iPad – a disappointment for legal

12 Comments

A lawyer sits in an airport lounge, pulls out the iPad and connects to the firms document management system (DMS) through the Autonomy iManage App in the AppStore. She flicks through the correspondence folder, checks her teams filed emails and reads up on the clients comments to the agreement draft. She then decides to dictate some amendments to her secretary using the built-in microphone. Launching the agreement from the DMS, she highlights the paragraph needing amendment and also launches the BigHand dictation app ……

<Fail> No multitasking on the iPad!

There have been plenty of posts why the iPad falls short some I agree with some I don’t. But as a device for lawyers or other business usage I think it’s a case of “not there yet”.

As well as lack of multitasking, I think for a tablet to be a great tool for a lawyer it would need to replace the touch keyboard with a stylus/pen and good handwriting recognition. Marking up a document on a tablet with a pen surely is the “revolutionary” vision Mr Jobs?

It’s not far off and to be fair to Apple I never thought it would be a business tool, it’s a consumer device. But as a consumer I’m personally not convinced there is a gap between the smartphone and the netbook. I prefer the former on the move and if I wanted something a little more the later would be more convenient (and less tied into the Apple eco system!)

So after all the hype, the multitude of blog responses (including this one) I’m left with the feeling that with the iPad Apple have maybe left us with another :-

Apple Newton
The Apple Newton

“magical truly revolutionary product” – Steve Jobs on the iPad

Perhaps it’s just too early for the technology that will make the tablet a real killer device. I think there is a gap (especially in business) for tablet PC’s, but the revolution will only come when it’s as convenient as a pad of paper or a paper magazine!

Share
General IT, Legal

“I’m going to be late. Yeah, because of the snow”

8 Comments

Well after a week of snow and disruption it’s back to work today (or perhaps not as for some of the UK there is forecast for another day of snow).

The business headlines though have been full of the cost to the UK economy, quotes range from a general £1.2bn cost to the economy to a daily cost of £0.5bn due to absenteeism. The feeling from a lot of these articles is that it’s the employees fault for not trying or the local governments fault for not gritting the road, but it never seems to be the employers fault…no they’re the ones suffering.

Wakefield under snow
Wakefield under snow

Isn’t it about time we had a revolution in work days in the UK? A move from the practices and procedures in place to support an office in a city centre with set working hours? An abolition of the 9 to 5 … and for those who are about to say “if only” can I say we should also do away with the long hours culture too. Sure, work the long hours when you need to (finishing projects, completing deals) but not to impress your boss or worse, just to be seen in the office.

I mean this week how many like me have spent hours wasted standing on freezing platforms? Or struggling to get through the roads on buses and in cars? If you managed to get in at all, how many have been “late in”?

So will this cold snap finally kick start a new wave of forward thinking employers that shift to a flexible working model, not just in terms of working hours but also in working location? Law firms are ideally placed to take advantage as they don’t have the necessity of a set working hour like say retail.

The technology is there to enable lawyers to work anywhere:

  • Remote access – how many firms don’t have some form of remote access to either connect your work laptop from your home broadband or even to use your home PC to connect through to your work environment?
  • IM (Instant Messaging) – on my top 5 for 2010, IM has the ability to replace those adhoc chats in the office. Also bringing video to the desktop makes communicating more successful than with just the telephone. Also when you consider Skype’s recent announcement for their HD video it’ll be much better than the grainy pictures of old.
  • Workflow – in dictation and other systems, workflow is built in. Meaning you can do your dictation or task, submit it and it can go on to a pool of people to complete (either in their home, another office or another country).

The benefits during this last week are so obvious!

Your employees firstly can get to work (no snow between bedroom and study and even if for whatever reason there is, then just use the laptop in your bedroom!). Your employees who got to work this week were probably late, cold and rather un-motivated due to expending all their energy on their commute!

The cost benefits are there too. By providing flexible working a percentage of the firm will always be working out of the office, this should enable firms to redesign their office space requirements to utilise less desks and less space. Less space = less cost, a big saving for a lot of law firms whose offices tend to be in prime real estate locations.

Yes there are the common complaints:

  • People aren’t working, but having a “jolly” at home. This perhaps will require the most effort to resolve as it will require a shift in the way we manage people. But surely we should be managing for results/deliverables anyway, rather than by how long someone is at their desk or in the office? After all lawyers work with clients very effectively and they’re offsite, so surely it’s as easy if not easier to do that with colleagues?
  • Missing the day to day chats. This can be alleviated with IM as previously mentioned, but I’m not advocating sole home working. So the adhoc chats will still happen when people are in the office. If there is a need for a team to keep in regular contact then the team probably needs to be together in the office but it won’t be all the time.
  • Some people can’t due to the nature of their work. That’s right, but my answer is so what? Why should there be one policy for all employees? In Law firms more can. Take Legal IT departments as an example:

So stop the complaining about the cost of the snow and do something about it. It’s time for a flexible working revolution. Let’s get rid of 9 to 5 and get rid of the concept of needing a permanent desk in an office to do your work!

Share
General IT, General Legal IT

Head in the clouds?

2 Comments

Cloud computing. The latest buzz word in IT, one that is probably only knocked off the top in a Legal IT game of “buzzword bingo” by eDiscovery! I started writing this blog post a few months back, at a time when I’d been flash mobbed by “cloud computing” companies. The intention was to put down some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting  for Legal IT people, together with some of my thoughts on “cloud computing”.

So what exactly is “Cloud Computing”? According to Wikipedia:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”

That help?

Probably not, let me try. It’s basically the infrastructure (all the hardware currently located in many firms computer rooms or data centres) and rather than being in your firm it is hosted somewhere else by someone else. The location you don’t care about (in a technical sense). It’s out there somewhere and it’s always big enough for you to add all your new applications and data to.

Basically so that the worry of keeping enough space to hold all your data or enough power to run your applications is taken care of by someone else (subject to you paying them more money for more space/power of course!). And all the disaster recovery and business continuity work is taken care of.

So some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting  for Legal IT people?

One of the first to catch my eye back in the summer was Legal Cloud, I  was obviously interested in their "Legal" angle. And I subsequently ended up on a call with the CEO of Legal Cloud, Mark Hadfield. You can read on their site what they offer, but for me as an IT applications focussed person I picked up on the possible benefits for testing software. When you’ve the masses of data a lot of law firms now have it becomes difficult to test new upgrades in a way that is close to your live environment, after all finding spare storage for a few terabytes isn’t easy! Legal Cloud though can offer a “temporary use” option, i.e. you can use a few terabytes in the “cloud” which you could utilise to test say an upgrade of your DMS (Document Management System) along with the millions of documents.

Autonomy iManage’s Digital Safe product also got my attention. Allowing a consolidated archive of the vast amounts of email and documents within a law firm. This also integrates with their WorkSite DMS (which is the DMS of an awful lot of law firms) and also the IDOL engine for retrieval.

Finally I caught a few news stories about Microsoft Azure and their offerings for data, SQL server database and .NET services running in a "cloud". I was especially interested in their Web Platform Installer which to me seems a great platform to run all kinds of applications on the “Azure cloud”. As someone posted on twitter, for the home PC market this platform could do for Microsoft what the App Store has done for Apple’s iPhone platform.

As well as tangible products like these there is unfortunately an awful lot of hype surrounding cloud computing. But much as the media likes to advertise the wonders to consumers and remind us of how it will be a multi billion dollar industry in n years, at the end of the day for the most part the end user won’t notice any difference. After all if their data is sat in your computer room in the Rotherham or sat in a giant data centre "somewhere" what do they care (so long as it’s safe)?

My thoughts on cloud computing then?

First let me link you to a post on a blog I follow “3 Geeks and a Law Blog”, this post by Greg Lambert was on the possible IT reservations with the Cloud.

“The ‘Devil’ on my right shoulder starts to put two and two together and wonder if my IT/KM friends are also seeing this effect of the "cloud" and playing on the basic fears that the law firm leadership has about putting any information or resources outside the physical reaches of the firm?? Meanwhile the "Angel" on my left shoulder shouts that I’d better listen to my IT/KM folks and not be such a ‘greedy bastard’ (he’s a little foul mouthed angel) in trying to save money while exposing my firm and its information to all kinds of access, security and ethical risks.

I’m probably being over simplistic in my example, but this type of argument is probably going on right now. Cost versus Security… Cost versus Access… Cost versus Risk…. Over time, it seems that the cloud based infrastructure is going to close these holes and create a much harder argument for technology departments to win.”

Generally I have never worried about this. I am of a generation that completely understands that not only do you not have a job for life, but the industry you’re in may not last your lifetime! The IT industry certainly is not unused to outsourcing parts of if not all of its functions, so I’m not sure my “coolness” on cloud computing is through fear of my job.

The big issue I see right now though is a point Greg also raises:

“we will need high-level contract negotiators to craft the contracts between the firm and the companies providing the services”

This may prove easier for US Law Firms where the data can be hosted in US data centres. But for the global firms that cross multi jurisdictions there will be a whole raft of contracts to ensure clients know where there data is.

On the whole though I just can’t get excited by the whole cloud computing concept. For the end user it’ll be nothing different, just that your data and systems might not be sat in your computer room in the Slough office but in a giant data centre "somewhere". And maybe that’s how we need to see it. A potentially very useful piece of technology, but certainly not a silver bullet technology that is going to save billions, save the planet and sort out every one of our technology problems!

Addition: you may also want to take a read at this blog post I caught today, it has some good explanations of the different models and delivery methods of cloud computing.

Share
General IT, General Legal IT, Technical

One to pass to your IP/IT lawyers

1 Comment

Are you ready for WWW.JДSФИPLДЙT.CO.UK

As of this month the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) agreed to allow non-Latin script web urls. This means the address above could be a perfectly valid web address (domain name).

This gives a whole raft of opportunities for cyber squatters to snap up domains of companies, especially those that are based in the emerging markets of most international law firms, the eastern European, Asian and Gulf region countries. And as well as squatters if you have clients whose brand names are non-Latin character based or who trade in regions where the writing is non-Latin, it could be an opportunity to advise them on protecting their brands.

Unfortunately the change means that there are also more opportunities for phishing attacks through spoofing domain names.

For example, take a look at this url www.jаsonplаnt.co.uk It looks pretty normal right? However try the link, you’ll get a 404 or page not found. Why? Well the a’s are actually а’s (still confused? the first is a Latin character a and the second is the Cyrillic character a). A computer recognises them as totally different. Therefore sites could be “spoofed” using this Cyrillic method and be used to “phish” information from you.

Below is a (hopefully) high level explanation of how this new system will work.

First remember, computers work under the bonnet in numbers for pretty much everything.

So as it stands now there is a service on the internet called DNS (Domain Name System). This acts like a phonebook, turning easily understood domain names that you use into strings of computer-readable numbers, known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

There is also an encoding system that turns characters you type into numbers that the computer understands, this is called ASCII. This is what the internet DNS system uses now to translate the characters of the urls.

Technically the problem has been that ASCII was built for the Latin character set. And it is limited to the number of characters it can encode. To cater for all the worlds character sets; Latin, Cyrillic and Chinese characters etc, a new system was required. This is called Unicode. However the DNS “phonebooks” of the internet only understand ASCII**.

So to enable the new domain names to have all characters sets, a method was required to handle the conversion. The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by some clever algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode.

So take JДSФИPLДЙT, this is Unicode and so the ToASCII algorithm would be applied. Once it has been through this algorithm, a prefix is given to distinguish it from a standard ASCII name (otherwise you could end up with a totally different Cyrillic and Latin urls/domain names pointing to the same place!). The result is a unique name that can be looked up in DNS (**technically DNS can support non-ASCII but because of other limitations it has meant non-ASCII names be converted to ASCII).

Finally it is worth knowing that most of the popular browsers have introduced some methods to help with the “spoofing” by recognising when this new multi-language domain name is being used in this way.

Share