This is not really a Legal IT post just a general post to mark today’s passing of GeoCities.
GeoCities : July 1995 – 26th October 2009
GeoCities was to budding web developers what the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum etc were to budding developers ten years earlier. Starting in the mid 90’s it was a place to host web pages, enabling millions of people to upload their “under construction” images and dancing babies animated gifs!
RIP GeoCities!
When I started work for a utilities company during a placement year from university in 1991/92, all personal calls from your desk telephone were banned. If you wanted to make a personal call you had to use the office payphone. That’s right you had to wander out of the office to a payphone that for us was located on a different floor at the other end of the office. Sounds ludicrous now doesn’t it? I can’t recall the exact reason given at the time, but I’m sure cost and time wasting were quoted.
So I have a wry smile when I see articles like this one “One in Two U.K. Companies Block Social Networking Web Sites”.
To me the banning of social sites is just a ludicrous as the scenario I encountered in 1991. The common reasons for blocking given are:
For both blocking sites to me seems totally ineffective. In the age of Smartphones and Netbooks with wireless internet access (either WiFi or 3G) employees can and will use their own personal devices to access sites if they can’t from their work PC.
To me more effective methods are:
I know first hand how social media can be a big distraction if not managed (I’ve started turning off my RSS reader during the day for this very reason), but it can also be a valuable source of information if used the right way. For law firms, in an age where we need lawyers to be as “clued up” as possible on social networks (see my last post!), banning them seems a step backwards!
So what does your firm do? Post in the comments and let us know (you can leave the firm name out if you wish).
You may be interested in a BBC TV program on tomorrow evening (5th October ‘09), “email is ruining my life” on BBC4 at 9:30pm.
Libby Potter investigates whether e-mail helps or hinders workplace performance, and shows how to control it rather than letting it control us.
Is your inbox out of control? Is your day managed through reaction to the next email received? Do you wish you could come back from holiday to less than ten emails?
Who said No? Can I please swap places with you?
I totally agree with the BBC programs synopsis, email is out of control. There’s far too much about. But you can’t just sit and complain, you really need to keep on top of it. Especially if you use Outlook and Exchange (if you’re using the former at work, you’re probably using the later also).
Why?
Firstly large numbers on items in your inbox, calendars etc = POOR performance.**
I usually recommend no more than about 2500 – 5000 messages in any of the critical path folders. The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder. Ideally, keep the Inbox, Contacts and Calendar to 1000 or less. This from a blog post on The Microsoft Exchange Team blog.
Secondly, if you’re a lawyer then you really should be looking after the electronic file in the same way you do a paper file. Keeping an organised inbox can help with this.
So here’s my top 5 tips on how to tackle the ever increasing deluge of email:
If you’ve got any other killer tips for keeping the email volume down, then put them in the comments.
And finally, take a look at this YouTube video that introduces Google Wave. Google Wave is Google’s attempt to look at email/electronic communication from a fresh perspective. Maybe one day email will be truly a thing of the past!
** this point is for Exchange 2003, which is still the most widespread version in corporate IT
I was reading an article yesterday, from an interview with Steve Balmer. It was about Microsoft’s direction and its competitors (in particular FireFox, Google and Linux). One comment stood out:
Yeah, we’re right now about 74 percent overall with the browser market, roughly speaking. But we’re having to compete like heck with IE 8, with great new features.
This to me showed how “off the ball” Microsoft are!
Now before I go on let me say the following. I hate seeing Micro$oft. I am not an Apple or Linux fanboy, in fact I would go as far to say I really don’t care of MacOS that much. Yes I really like the iPhone interface, but would never buy one thanks to having to have iTunes to activate the thing. So I use a Windows Mobile device. I’ve used Ubuntu and think it’s alright, but actually I honestly prefer Windows. I love the xbox. So I’m not Microsoft bashing here.
There now I’ve said that, back to the quote. In particular this sentence “But we’re having to compete like heck with IE 8, with great new features.”
My response as per the title, no, no, no, who asked for that? I don’t want more features, in fact I want less. I want my browser to be small and very fast and just let me browse. If IE8 had come out and was barebones fast as you like, I would probably have switched back from FireFox!
This got me thinking about lawyers and legal software and the same applies. Just give them the features they require. Make the next release of the Document Management System, the CRM system, the finance system, the template management system, the digital dictation system leaner.
Take Word or any Word Processor. How much functionality does the average lawyer need? Most law firms will also have multiple add ins to provide more functionality. The integration with the add ins should be slicker and removing of the unnecessary proprietary options easier.
Most people want to get on with the task in hand, the software should help that both quickly and easily. So with the browser, it should help me browse, end of! The DMS should help be file and retrieve my documents. Outlook should let me manage my email. etc etc
So no more new features please unless it’s going to make the task I’m using the software for easier and faster!
It might not be with products that directly relate to law firms, but Microsoft does seem to be positioning itself for a fight back against Google and Apple. There have been three stories in the last few weeks that I think point to this:
Microsoft are starting to join the “Free” business model in the consumer market and could really start to fight back in the battle against Apple and Google. I think this is a good thing, competition makes better products and if Microsoft really can bring ideas from the excellent xbox division into their business offerings we may get some real improvements in usability over endless extra functionality.
From a law firm perspective it will be interesting how the development of the web based Office goes and how the consumer model of a “cloud” for all my documents and emails evolves in the business environment.
After all if I’ve unlimited email capacity with no performance drop off (e.g. GMail/Hotmail) and access to my documents and word processor anywhere (e.g. Google Docs/Office online) at home, will I accept the storage constraints and performance constraints of the desktop products at work?
I read my copy of Computing magazine today and the comment section caught my eye. It was an article entitled “Focus Resources on what really matters” by Martin Butler, the basic premise is that IT has become caught up in a drive for efficiency at the expense of business success. In the current “economic climate” there is of course a natural tendency for cutting costs, corporate IT departments are usually large cost centres and thus are prime targets for cost savings.
It reminded me though of an article I read some years ago about the shift of IT to a utility function akin to the railways or electricity companies (IT Doesn’t Matter by Nicholas G. Carr published in the Harvard Business Review). The premise being that these businesses “open opportunities for forward-looking companies to gain strong competitive advantages. But as their availability increases and their cost decreases – as they become ubiquitous – they become commodity input”.
These are opposite views of IT, one as a continuing driver for business growth and one as a driver for business efficiency and cost savings.
Now, I’ve started reading Richard Susskind’s “The End of Lawyers?” and I’m currently at the point where he talks about “technology lag”. This is the lag between two forms of technology: data processing and knowledge processing. The former (data processing) he puts as the “use of technology to capture, distribute, reproduce and disseminate information.”, the later (knowledge processing) a “set of technologies that help us analyse, sift through and sort out the mountains of data that we have created and helps make them more manageable.”
Richard Susskind points out that we are between these two forms of technology, in law firms I agree. And I think Martin Butler’s view of the IT function is the one that will facilitate this move and be able to supply the “Knowledge Processing” in law firms. I’m afraid that Nicolas Carr’s IT function will give us very efficient and cost effective departments that are stuck in “Data Processing”! It’ll be interesting as we climb out of the recession which law firm IT departments become.
OK the new kid on the block has grown fast, 974% last year apparently! Everyone’s talking about it, in the legal world it’s on every conference agenda. It’s big news.
So it comes as a shock when people question its value. And judging by recent articles and posts on the web the time is ripe to try and knock twitter from its podium:
And thus it get’s articles written about it, repeated and quoted in blogs and twitter itself (yes I understand the irony!)
To me though people are missing the point, twitter isn’t facebook or myspace so comparisons with them doesn’t work. It is just a brand for micro blogging (there are plenty of others out there: kwippy, plurk, jaiku, identica etc). Yes, twitter as a brand may fail but micro blogging is here to stay.
Face-to-face, letters, telephone, fax, email, instant messaging (IM) and twitter (micro blogging)
They’re just all just forms of communication, nothing more nothing less. People will prefer one over the other, over a period of time one form may get used much more than others. But none of them are going away.
IM has been around for years, but it’s only just starting to move into the business world (outside IT depts). But in a short time it will take off in businesses and we’ll see email usage fall away, just as we saw the use of telephones fall once email exploded on the scene (don’t believe it, just ask any 16 year old how much they use email!).
Micro blogging will start to appear too in corporate environments as people experiment with laconi.ca and jaiku.
My guess though is that Larry Bodine doesn’t necessarily think twitter is a waste of time, he’s in marketing and one sure fire way to get your name out there is to shout the opposite to what everyone else is shouting (after all it was only 5 months ago that “Twitter is valuable to legal professionals”) . And everyone has taken notice, I bet Larry has more speaking engagements and requests for articles than at any time in the last 12 months!
He may actually be right on twitter not being an effective law firm marketing tool, but as for being “sucked into the black hole of buzz about twitter” it isn’t a black hole, twitter or micro blogging will be just like the telephone here to stay for a long time!
I suspect there are a number of organisations that lock their Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices down, stopping people installing applications on them. There are plenty of valid reasons for this, but there are some great applications that I think should be installed as default by all companies.
One of these is the Google Maps application (available for Windows Mobile and Blackberry), it’s especially useful if your devices have GPS chips in them (which a growing amount do).
I spent this last weekend in Stockholm with some friends, on one of the days we went our separate ways during the day and then arranged to meet up later.
I got a call about 4pm :
“We’re in a pub called The Londoner”
“Where is that?”
“Not sure, it’s just down from the Olympic Stadium”
“OK, do you know the street?”
“Nope sorry….”
There were some directions given at this point but as we couldn’t work out the starting point accurately I wasn’t hopeful!
Anyway the point of all this was to explain the benefits of Google Maps.
I fired up the application on my Windows Mobile device, the GPS located my position in a city I’d never visited before, I then used the integrated search function to find “The Londoner”. This searched was location aware and only searched for places and names near my location.
The description given showed I had found the correct place and from this point in the application it was a simple click to show directions and immediately highlight the path from where I was to the destination.
As soon as you move a little arrow shows your direction on the map so you can tell you’re heading off the right way.
The interface is extremely intuitive and on a 3G connection very quick, there is no jumping off into the mobile browser it’s all done in the Google Maps Application. And if the city has street view you can even access that on the mobile device.
Now clearly there is little business benefit of finding directions to a pub, but a travelling lawyer could use the app to easily find directions to a clients or the firms offices in a different city. There could even be savings if staff were encouraged to walk rather than jump in a taxi (which I bet is common when in a new city).
Now if only it integrated with your internal CRM systems ……
What started as a business request for a “tickertape” application on the intranet has led us to the verge of implementing laconi.ca in our firm.
What is laconi.ca?
It’s basically a twitter-clone, a “Free and Open Source microblogging platform”, take a look at identi.ca which is a public implementation of laconi.ca. For us though the laconi.ca application has been implemented on the homepage of the intranet, but the beauty of laconi.ca is you can just as easily use one of the twitter clients that support it (e.g. Thwirl).
At the moment the implementation is just in pilot with one practice group, but I can see word of mouth spreading this virally within the firm, like twitter has spread on the web.
Although I can claim some credit for thinking there was scope for a “corporate twitter” behind the firewall (see my post on Jaiku back in January), I can’t claim the credit for this implementation. Either by being the person to suggest the solution to the request for the “tickertape” application nor for being the team looking after it.
Our application architect saw laconi.ca as the solution and has implemented the application, here are some of the technical details:
laconi.ca is installed on the intranet on IIS/PHP5 utilising ISAPI_Rewrite from Helicon Tech (http://www.isapirewrite.com/), to a MySql 5 Database.
A javascript ajax front end was developed to laconi.ca’s twitter api utilising the jquery framework. All ui updates are via ajax – as it had to be compatible with IE6 🙁
User authentication is performed by NTLM challenge/response and delegated (via javascript header manipulation) to laconi.ca in order to avoid prompting the user for a login.
The javascript/html/css is bundled as a SharePoint content webpart which is displayed on the Firm’s intranet homepage.
Laconi.ca user accounts are kept in sync with AD via a java based ESB (enterprise service bus) message listener.
The application itself looks simple (just like twitter!) and that’s the beauty of it. It just does what it does without any complicated UI to learn.
I really hope it takes off, as I think microblogging will prove to be an invaluable tool for a law firm. I’ll post an update down the line to update on how it goes.
There is one thing that has been on our teams “future” or “background” task list for quite some time, “Bible” creation. The ability to pull together documents, emails, PDFs, maybe even pages of documents into one final “Bible”.
Today I find the genesis to a solution on the Workshare blog.
This looks excellent, ability to add different types of documents, entire folders of documents and even individual pages of a document. Clear the meta data and add PDF security. Access to the DMS. All this needs now is the ability to generate a hyper linked index page (maybe that could be template based for branding) and that’d be a perfect solution!
Now pity we can’t get our custom 5.2 SR1 package to install and uninstall properly, but that’s another story…..