This coming Monday Tikit and UKDEG (UK Document Excellence Group) are holding another Word Excellence Day in London.
The event is covering how the legal industry and firms are planning the move to Office 2010 and Windows 7 and what challenges and issues could arise in that migration journey. There are speakers and panel members from firms such as Allen & Overy, Ashurst, DLA Piper, Lewis Silkin, Linklaters, SNR Denton and Veale Wasbrough Vizards and Neil Cameron, CEO of Neil Cameron Consulting Group, will be chair for the day.
I will be speaking in the morning on our plans for Office 2010 and Windows 7 and then joining a panel of other firms who are running Office 2010 projects to discuss our planning experience with questions on the issues of configuration and customisation of Word.
If you will be attending then I hope to speak to some of you then. For those that can’t attend, Tikit have been publicising a twitter hashtag for the event (#WEDMay11) so hopefully there will be plenty of people on this stream in virtual attendence also.
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)
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.
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:
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”.
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!
During a recent one day introduction course to Office 2010 in Leeds, I started thinking how much work Legal IT providers are going to have to put in to really get their products to integrate successfully with Microsoft’s latest offering. The reason is Microsoft have clearly put a lot of thought into Office 2010 in terms of usability. Once you’ve adjusted to using the ribbon interface, you realise that things are exactly where you need them and that a lot of things you want to do that were previously multi clicks have been made much slicker.
Naturally my initial thoughts were about DMS (Document Management System) integration, after all this is more or less a standard add-on to Office in law firms. During the day I started to scribble down some questions in my course notes and I’ve bullet pointed a few of these below. These are areas where I think the integration of a DMS and Office has to be really slick (I’m ignoring the obvious Open, Save dialogues). It’s not aimed at any particular DMS providers solution (in fact I haven’t seen any of them running in Office 2010 yet) it’s more a general view of where I think integration has to happen well.
First off the new Office “backstage” page, particularly in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There are numerous places where integration needs to happen here.
The Recent tab – the DMS surely must replace the Recent Documents, Recent Workbooks, Recent Presentations list with the recent documents from the DMS (filtered by the Office application you are in). Also the Recent Places has to be replaced with recent folders or the Matter file in matter centric DMS’s surely.
The Info tab – an obvious place to pull in the DMS profile information of the open document from the Document Management System. Also “Permissions” on this page is calling to be replaced by or integrated with the DMS security options.
Versions – you’ll also see this on the “Info” tab and this is Microsoft adding to the confusion with what they call file versions (or if you want a true description its the saving a document that you might want in case you close it without saving feature!). The DMS providers will need to factor in the terminology to avoid confusion. Ideally they will also want to factor in the new functionality available here as the feature is a useful one!
Within Outlook there are a number of challenges for those DMS’s that handle email (which is most now as this is a big part of the electronic file)
The Conversation thread – Outlook now shows all parts of the conversation grouped together, even if some of the emails in the thread are stored in sub folders. What will happen if some emails in the thread are filed in the DMS? I think this will be a popular view in Outlook 2010 and so some thought will need to take place of how this will work with an integrated DMS.
The attachment preview tab in emails – this needs to function if the attachment is a DMS link doesn’t it?
I’ve picked on DMS providers, but the same goes for comparison tools, PDF creation tools, template management systems etc. They need to work within the new Office interface in a way that is seamless to the lawyer, rather than feeling as though it is a bolt on to the Office product. So for example a compare tool needs to be where I’d expect, in the Review section of the ribbon in Word. A template management system would integrate perfectly in the New tab in the “backstage” page.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the new generation of lawyers will start to demand better software. Software that works like an application on a smartphone with an interface designed to make things easier! If legal IT providers don’t think about their integration with Office 2010 they’ll stand out like a sore thumb (and probably give the lawyer as much grief as one too!)
Anyone in a law firm will probably have a smile on their face reading those words or possibly they will feel a shudder, it’ll all depend on what your job is in the firm.
For those that are new to law firms a short definition may be in order, so to quote Wikipedia:
a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organisation or field. The implementation of provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document.
I have one wish when it comes to house styles. One style to rule them all!
The wish for there to be one set of styles for all legal documents whatever law firm they’re from. If forced to compromise on that wish, then at least for all law firms to at least sign up to a common set of named styles within Word and an agreement to leave all direct formatting out of documents, so if a lawyer pastes from one document to another it has a matching style in the receiving document.
I’m sure I’ve heard that in Norway there are some legal documents that the state requires in one style only (please correct me in the comments if this is not so), so how about we start in the EU? Or even just England and Wales?
It’s not going to happen though is it?
I know there are plenty of tools out there to help. Two on the market I’m aware of are Microsytems’ DocXtools, Tikit’s House Style Manager and I’m sure there are many others. There are also some great bespoke applications in many firms used to apply styles. But when a document that to-and-fro’s between law firm to client you can end up with a document that has more styles applied to it than pages, unpicking this even with tools takes some skill in Word!
So what’s the answer? Well maybe Word 2010 can help a little.
When you right click to Paste in Word 2010, you get three options (click the image to zoom in).
Paste and keep source formatting
Paste and keep source formatting (left icon). This option keeps the formatting of the original document from where you copied the text.
Paste and merge formatting
Paste and merge formatting (middle icon). This option will merge the formatting and slightly modify the style of the copied content to match the document you are creating.
Paste and keep text only
Paste and keep text only (right icon). And the most useful is saved to the end! This just puts the text into your document and doesn’t bring any of the formatting from the source document!
And another great feature of Word 2010 is the preview, so in each image above I haven’t pasted the text into the document yet. Word is just rendering the new text in place, showing me what it would look like.
Maybe not an end to style woes, but a step towards.
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.
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.
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.
Request calendar permissions
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.
Appointment request
Then once you’ve decided whether to accept or not, you can do so simply by one action on the ribbon.
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.
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!
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!
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).
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)
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.
click on the image to zoom
The results are then highlighted both in the subject and in the body of the email.
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.
click on the image to zoom
There are a couple of reservations I have regarding search in Outlook 2010 searching though:
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!
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.
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!
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.
