General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – part 2

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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

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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!

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General IT, General Legal IT, Outlook 2010 series

Outlook 2010 – a legal viewpoint – part 1

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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.

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General Legal IT, WorkSite Tips & Tricks

Using WorkSite 8.5 with IDOL? This is for you!

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If you’re an Autonomy iManage customer and you have access to the WorkSite Support portal, then there is some new content on there that will be of interest. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a direct link to it from the portal home and I’m not sure I should link from here direct to the resource due to it’s customer only nature, but have a word with your Autonomy contact for a link (also if Autonomy are reading this and don’t mind pointing out the location please feel free to add it into the comments).

The new content is a number of video webinars on the IDOL worksite indexer deployment that are worth a look if you’re on or about to go to version 8.5. There is about 60+ minutes worth of flash video taking you through such topics as:

  • Indexer Deployment
  • WorkSite Indexer Components & Key Settings
  • Initial Crawl vs. Maintenance Crawl
  • How Indexing and Searching Works with Active Content
  • Plus a number of other related topics

I think it’s a great way to spread the knowledge of this new indexer and as IDOL becomes a key part of WorkSite it is a much better than the traditional training methods Interwoven (and other vendors) have previously implemented for new products.

I’ve not had time yet to watch all the videos but colleagues have and have said they’re excellent. Once I’ve had chance to watch them I’ll post what I think in the comments.

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General Legal IT

Down to London for a look at “Microsoft 2010”

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I spent the day today in London at an event hosted by Trinity Expert Systems. The event focussed on Microsoft’s 2010 stack of products and my reason for attending was to look at Office 2010 and the surrounding technologies (I was particular keen to see what SharePoint 2010 had to offer).

I thought I would blog about a number of other products that caught my eye, not all of them were new, I’d seen some before, but it was the possibilities that came to mind that interested me.

The first session was more on the “infrastructure” products. I use quotes as these were what they traditionally were, but as you’ll see from these two parts of Microsoft’s System Centre, the end user service is becoming more of a focus:

  • SCOM (Microsoft’s monitoring solution). The pictorial view of a systems health from a business service perspective and the possibilities to monitor client machines interested me, it took it beyond what I’ve seen in MOM (it’s predecessor). The possibilities of monitoring the iManage Document Management service end to end, for example. Not just that the physical server is up and running, but that the clients can connect, the IDOL indexer is indexing correctly, the SQL database and application servers are handling transactions nicely, applications load in a satisfactory time etc. For a support team you can see the health of the service as a whole rather than just the servers in it.
  • Service Manager. A new introduction and effectively a help desk system. What I liked here was the self service portal idea, allowing the end user to “do it themselves”. So for example, install an authorised piece of software just by selecting if from the self service portal.

A couple of interesting features of Windows 7 were mentioned that I wasn’t aware of:

  • AppLocker – in my opinion this allows you to lock down desktops in a much better way. Effectively giving a white list of apps you allow on your desktops, the users can install authorised apps themselves. No longer having to manage the crude Windows XP standard user v admin user, which inevitably leads to people having admin right and a proliferation of unwanted apps in the organisation. It also allows quick but controlled authorisation of new apps.
  • BranchCache – basically this is local caching of information. So files from remote locations are downloaded once by the first person and then subsequent requests for the file are from local PC’s rather than from the remote location. I don’t know too many of the technical details but it looks interesting.

Next up was unified communications, I use Office Communicator at work and blogged at the start of the year that I think this is the year for IM in legal. But the integration into Outlook 2010 will need some thinking about. For example, do you need a separate application for communicator? It isn’t necessarily required as it gets integrated into Outlook 2010.

Also something that struck me was whether there was a need for a separate “Person” database (usually found in all firms intranets) diminishes as contact information becomes richer and exposed in many of the 2010 applications (Office, communicator, SharePoint etc)

After lunch it was the turn of SharePoint 2010, this product interests me at the moment. Especially the possibilities for real time collaboration when integrated with Office 2010. The granular way that collaboration works sounds very good, the locking of a paragraph as one party edits it removes the chaos that you got in say Google Wave. Combine this with Office Communicator and real remote collaboration becomes much easier.

I think there is a lot of potential here for Document Management System (DMS) providers to leverage this functionality. Law firms aren’t going to abandon hard core DMS systems anytime soon, but I think there will be use of SharePoint with Office 2010. So there is the real need to control the checkout from a DMS and smoothly transition to SharePoint for collaboration before finally returning that document back into the DMS with version control and audit history (the later isn’t kept by SP2010 when collaborating).

As I start to look at Office 2010 I see more and more possibilities. It’s going to be very hard to scope the delivery of this version of office as it seems to integrate so well with the other Microsoft applications!

Finally at the end of the day we got a quick run through security and Direct Access. This allows seamless access into the business network from your firms laptop wherever internet access can be gained. No more convoluted token/password access! It also ensures that the laptop is covered by all your corporate policies, deployments etc whenever the laptop is connected.

So overall a good day. Plenty learnt about the new technologies from Microsoft. But now, from my point of view, we just have to work out how we avoid getting too carried away with the possibilities for Office 2010!

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General Legal IT

Breakfast with BigHand

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On Thursday myself and a couple of colleagues attended a breakfast briefing from BigHand at Gordons law firm in Leeds, accompanied by plenty of bacon butties from the Roast! It was one of a number of briefings that they are doing throughout the UK on the back of their recent acquisition of nFlow.

As well realising that it’s not just Herbies that have hot meeting rooms, there was information on the nFlow acquisition. But for the most part we were shown demos of some of the new features being planned for future versions of the BigHand software (I think most were for v3.4). Below are some of the key functions that stood out for me (I was making notes on my touch screen Windows Phone whilst trying to keep up with the demos, so if you’re interested in a specific feature I’d double check my understanding with BigHand!)

  • MS Office Integration. This allows a document to be attached to the dictation and passed through the workflow. Also there is the the ability to create and manage profile information to go with the dictation. These combined allow the Fee Earner to provide information to the secretary on the dictation that the system can then use to, for example, launch a template and fill in details such as document name straight from the dictation in the queue.
  • Then combine this with the SDK and you could enable integration into the DMS (Document Management System) to transmit the document in the dictation workflow, yet maintain the security and version control of the DMS.
  • Escalation function. The ability to set global rules in the system to escalate work. So for example a folder could be given a rule that after a certain time all outstanding dictations are moved to another folder (e.g. out of hours team or the team in the firms Asian offices for example).
  • Reporting has been bolstered by the addition of an analytics module. This stores more information than before in the database (no longer limited to last 30 days) and has improved reporting (no longer using Excel). The module allows you to drill down on results obtaining more detail.
  • In the mobility clients for BlackBerry and iPhone you now have the ability to attach documents and photos to dictations. Taking the devices further into general workflow than just pure dictation (e.g. you could dictate meeting notes that referred to notes on a whiteboard that you’d photographed on the phones camera)
  • Finally the speech recognition module. This was brought in with v3.3 but it’s worth a mention again as it still impresses me. It’s way beyond the old desktop versions, but the addition in the newer version is the ability to chose to either send the transcribed document back to yourself for proofing or send it onto your default workflow for proofing. So the “training” can be done by a secretary checking and correcting your document.

The briefings are still being run, details can be found on their site.

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General IT

Take time to be bored!

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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!

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General Legal IT

Stop printing your emails – the iPad’s a game changer!

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paper
A big pile of paper!

Law firms print paper, in fact they print LOTS of paper! I recently heard of a secretary printing off 6-8 inches of paper for the file (you know you’re printing a lot when your margin of error is 2 inches!!). I am therefore pretty sure that the cost of printing is rather significant cost for law firms.

So why on earth do it? There are two main reasons I’ve come across:

1) Keeping a good and proper file

“All the emails and documents must be printed for a paper file, it’s been like that for years and it isn’t changing on my watch.”

Come on, there isn’t any reason to do this. It’s not a regulatory requirement to keep a paper file, a good and proper file yes, but that file can be electronic. The only reason I could understand is maybe in a small firm, one that doesn’t have a document management system (DMS) to organise the electronic file. But why are lawyers in medium and large firms still doing this? Do people think it’s more secure? Well it’s not, not even in the slightest. An electronic file will be backed up a number of times with all documents and emails in a number of locations for security. A paper file is in one place and there is just one copy of it. Damien Behan’s article here sums up nicely the increased risks of keeping paper based files.

I really can’t see the need to print off reams of email, if you must still keep a paper file just put in a file note indicating the location of the emails in the DMS. But save the paper and the cost (of the paper, storage and secretarial time) and don’t print them off!

2) It’s easier to use paper

Now this is where I can agree with the lawyers, shifting through paper copies of email to locate the correct one can often be much easier. The average DMS (and even Outlook) doesn’t make it easy to wade through vast numbers of emails.

I posted the why print question to lawyers on twitter recently and got a good comment in reply that backs up my view from @ljanstis

“paper can be read anywhere – in court, with client, on the the road. Can’t guarantee that if just in electronic form”

And here is where I do a big u-turn on a previous article and lay out what I think could be the answer for lawyers – the iPad! I’ve been reading peninsulalawyer’s blogs on his first impressions (here and here) of his iPad as a tool for lawyers and I’m more and more convinced that it’s going to be a game changer in legal.

For legal IT departments I think there will soon be a trickle of requests either to provide iPads or at least enable them to access the corporate network and as with the iPhone the trickle will become a stream and I’m betting an eventual torrent as people see the possibilities of this device.

Imagine. You could use some of the functionality of Adobe Acrobat 9, it’s email archiving feature that allows you to convert email in Outlook into a PDF Portfolio (a Portfolio contains PDFs of email messages which in turn contain the attachments to the message). You could put this PDF portfolio onto the iPad and browse through your emails with ease. As peninsulalawyer says in his post:

“I could zoom in on a PDF document on a netbook, scroll backwards and forwards and highlight text, but the speed and ease of doing this on the iPad is like nothing I have ever seen on a laptop or notebook.”

This could be the perfect tool to finally eradicate the piles of paper from a law firm. For a firm of 1000 lawyers it would cost under £500k to provide an iPad for each lawyer. And if that sounds a lot I suggest you find out your printing costs, I wouldn’t be suprised if it suddenly looks a good deal!

ipad
iPad

And yes, to all those that know me well, I do realise it’s an Apple! 🙂

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

You know I never knew that! A tip for WorkSite searching in FileSite

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You work with a product for years and every so often you find something new, something so obvious you probably should have known but it had escaped your notice. And that’s exactly what happened to me with iManage WorkSite last week. Finding a small feature in v8.2 to do with searching.

Basically if you use FileSite then you have the ability to use the Advanced Search in Microsoft Outlook to search your folders/workspaces.

Just simply select Advanced Search:

Outlook Advanced Search

And then you can use the Browse to select folders etc from within the FileSite. The limitations of Outlook are the same as if you have a PST (archive file) attached, in that you can only search something in the Inbox OR FileSite but not both at once.

This feature is pretty useful for searching for emails as you can use the From: lookup to select email addresses to search for.

As far as I know this is available in v8.5 as well. That is it’s on page 28 of the User’s Guide (it probably is in the 8.2 Guide but being a techie I’ve never picked up the manual for the current version! I just dived straight in), I just haven’t used the feature in our v8.5 test environment yet.

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General Legal IT

Simplicity rules

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Anyone use Spotify? For those that don’t it is a service that allows you to play thousands of music tracks for free (with adverts) or for a small monthly cost (without adverts).

It recently launched a new version of its application that integrates a range on new social features.

So what’s this got to do with Legal IT? Well Spotify has done what a whole host of legal IT vendors have done for years, they’ve gone and over complicated what was a very simple application!

Software vendors (and I suspect this can be levelled at Legal IT depts too!) tend to feel the need to add functionality on release of a new version. Which is fair enough, but if you do your key task extremely well (like Spotify previously) why add to it?

There is a lot to be said for just keeping applications to the functions they do well, if you want to deliver a new version maybe think “what can we take away?”. As I quoted in a previous post : “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

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General Legal IT

Workshare and Office 2010

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Last week I attended a Workshare user group event down at Herbert Smith’s offices in London. If you’re a Workshare customer I can say that (apart from Herbies meeting rooms being far too hot even with the aircon on) the user group is worth attending. It was a good mix of user feedback, product direction and case study and definitely not too heavy on the sales.

The point of this post though is to look at a couple of interesting products on the horizon. Both in my opinion take Workshare up against vendors that traditionally haven’t occupied the same space in Legal IT.

First up is “Document Doctor” (I’m not sure these are actual product names as yet).

This is a product they are working on to look at restyling and repairing documents. The idea being that it would work as part of the flow of what you are doing e.g. a comparison fails due to corrupt document and then it would prompt to try a repair. It’ll be available as standalone and also integrated into Workshare Professional (WSP). I wasn’t sure if it was an additional cost bolt on to WSP or part of WSP 5.5.

To me it’s clearly looking at an area currently held by another well known legal IT vendor, maybe not in direct competition but if they get the licensing right it could be a viable alternative for a lot of firms.
Next up is the integration with Sharepoint 2010. And there are two parts to this:

First off document collaboration, workshare becoming the glue between your DMS (Document Management System), Word 2010, traditional Workshare functions and Sharepoint 2010. Allowing you to leverage the collaboration features of Sharepoint 2010 and Word 2010, yet maintain the control your DMS gives you. The thoughts I had were of collaboration portals for clients. So you could use an extranet version of Sharepoint for collaborating on documents with clients, yet keep full control of versions etc within your DMS. This could be very exciting.

Second for me was the biggest surprise. This is where Workshare enter into another new legal IT arena, one I wasn’t expecting. It’s their product that adds matter centric working to Sharepoint. Allowing you to work on and store your documents in a matter centric content management system.

Some of this functionality was announced in conjunction with the Office and Sharepoint 2010 launch.

A very interesting development indeed!

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