The first full day at ILTA started with a keynote speech from Jason Jennings who shared his “5 Secrets to Put Strategic Unity on the Fast Track”, you can search for soundbites from the keynote as well as the "5 secrets on twitter as the #ilta10 hashtag has been in full use this week (I expect on Tuesday the hashtag will be busier as the WiFi problems that dogged most on Monday seem to be sorted!). But to save you searching the 5 were:

1. Everyone in the company shares a common noble purpose – this is not a mission statement or a vision.
2. Letting go – don’t hold onto things that once served you well.
3. Everybody (inside the company and out) knows the strategy – if people don’t know the strategy they won’t know why they work.
4. Everybody thinks and acts like an owner.
5. Leaders are not leaders at all. They are stewards of the organization.

After the keynote it was off to the many sessions. The first two I attended were run by the Payne Group and were hands on sessions with Office 2010 (#iltau1 and #iltau2 on twitter). In it we ran through a number of the new features in Office 2010, which was less a structured run through and more a quick dip in to each application and focus on a few features.

I’m not going to go into all the features that were highlighted, but what did stick out though is that this is a big shift (especially if you’re on 2003), it’s akin to the shift from WordPerfect to Word rather than Word 2000 to 2003! Throw in the challenge of one stat I heard, that in the former shift from WP a firm had their secretaries for 4 days training and yet now they are only allowed to be freed for 2 hours, and you can see the difficulties firms will have this time round.

Then it was onto a virtual desktop session. The one thing that stuck for me working in a large law firm was the stat from the firm with just 100 employees. There requirements were a 4 server setup to serve virtual desktops to their employees. Big firms are going to need one big server farm for full virtualisation and thin clients!

Then finally finished the day with another Office 2010 session. “Alignment Is Your Strategy for a Successful Office 2010 Implementation”. There was some real good information from firms who had gone Windows7 with Office 2007 an Windows XP and Office 2010. But I noted some interesting bullets:

• Out of 469 respondees of a survey to law firms 349 said they’d be moving to Office 2010
• Top influencers for driving a shift – 1. DMS upgrades, 2.Windows 7 testing, 3. Integration challenges
• One of the most important drivers for success : Building Support Competency

Later in the evening I went to a dinner with Microsystems where I spoke to the Nixon Peabody employee who had been a presenter at the earlier session and chatted a bit more about their Office 2010 implementation. In particular about their use of comparison and meta data cleaning.

Before that meal there was a regional ILTA meeting for Europe. And discussions on the challenges of getting more people to attend ILTA. I’ve only been here one day and the benefits are easily apparent. The sessions that are run and the people you can talk to are invaluable (take for example an adhoc session that has cropped up tomorrow to discuss iManage 8.5). The difficulty though for most people is the cost and the travel time.