It feels a really long time ago since I took time to look at new software that wasn’t in the Windows 10/Office 365/Work 10 stack I’ve been immersed in since last summer. But last week I spent the day with Riverbed (and yes I know what you’re thinking “Software? But Riverbed they’re the WAN people right?”) to do just that.

But before I talk about the software, let me put out a statement. The biggest challenge in law firms in my experience is getting the basics right and if you want to distill that down to a specific challenge, get Outlook, Word and the DMS (Document Management System) working fast and without crashing. I am convinced that this is not just our firm, in fact I know it isn’t based on the feedback from two firms at the same event (both large multinational law firms that you’ll know if I said their names) as well as others I speak to in other firms.

I also know there are other products in this space, but the one I saw today was Riverbed’s SteelCentral Aternity product. It’s a monitoring product that focuses on performance and status of applications across your firm. And the reason for the post if because from a law firm point of view you would immediately see how it could help with the above challenge as there was a dashboard that showed Outlook with various actions monitored for performance (check calendar, create email, view email etc), this gave an overall performance metric for Outlook on every PC in the firm. So straight away you could check what your performance baseline is, whether a particular office was seeing worse performance or more crashes etc etc

It sounds really simple, but that’s the beauty. How many times do you get anecdotal “Outlook always crashes” or “the DMS is always slow” from lawyers but don’t have the hard evidence to see if this is truly a problem, a one of event or a perception thing? This product could show whether those teams or offices are truly experiencing issues or not and even better allow you to be proactive about it. This isn’t just about the desktop as it integrates nicely to show an full picture (network, servers etc), so you can drill down and get more certainty as to where the problem lies.

I know products like these have been around for a while but with an IT shift from onprem to cloud and from windows 7/8 to 10 and Office to 365, having something that can help that transition would be really useful. A real evidence based answer to those “it’s been slow ever since…”

I’m definitely going to look a bit further at this area!