No option for Law Firm

Well tomorrow I’m leaving the family at home in the UK and heading off to ILTA 2010 (International Legal Technology Association) in Las Vegas. I was one of the 5 winners of the Workshare ILTA conference scholarship competition and thus was lucky enough to have my conference costs paid for.

This is my first ever visit to ILTA and so I have decided to try and blog about the experience. I have been warned though that the conference can be exhausting, so don’t be totally surprised it this fails completely!

For the “day before post” I’ve highlighted some of the sessions that I’m looking forward to:

Sunday

There is the ILTA tweetup at 4:00pm, which I aim to attend. There are a number of Legal IT twitter folk I follow from the US (and elsewhere) that I’ve never met in person, so this is a good opportunity to meet in the real world.

Monday – aka “the Office day”

First up, for me, after the keynotes are the “Features and Functionality of Office 2010” sessions. Two sessions at 10:30am and 2:30pm (ILTAU1 and ILTAU2).

Then at 4:00pm I intend to get to the “Alignment is your strategy for a successful Office 2010 implementation” session (MIC2).

Tuesday

“Dreams can come true – email management success stories”. A session at 10:30am that is well aligned with my current work projects! One of this sessions speakers is someone I follow on twitter @KMHobbie. (INFO5).

At 11:00pm “Successful Universal Search Implementations” (INFO6). Again another speaker I follow on twitter @lawyerkm.

And then looking at a session with a very apt title “Sharepoint as a DMS: From heresy to orthodoxy” (MIC5). I’m wondering though whether there should be a ‘!’ or a ‘?’ at the end of that title?

Also on Tuesday I intend to meet up with Keith Lipman of Prosperoware to see how there Milan product is getting on.

Wednesday – aka “the Autonomy day”

On Wednesday it’ll be pretty much following the Autonomy iManage Peer Group track.

The Search is Over with iManage IDOL: Frontend and Backend Perspectives (AUT1)

Autonomy iManage Corporate Update (AUT2)

Taming the E-Mail Filing Monster with iManage WorkSite 8.5 (AUT3)

The Reinvention of Matter Centricity Through Autonomy (AUT4)

Thursday

The only session I’ve really go pencilled in for Thursday is “Next Generation Law Firm Economics” (ORG15).

I’m sure things will change and there are a number of other vendors that I’ve lined up to meet with, but details of those I’m sure will come out in subsequent days posts.

So if you’re heading to ILTA then maybe I will see you there.

This week a couple of things cropped up to remind me of my predictions for the top 5 technologies for Legal in 2010. In particular that I had search at #4 and my thoughts on why I think next year this will be moving up the charts.

First off is my first recent experience on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5 working with IDOL and using search to retrieve email out of a 30m+ document library. As I tweeted at the time it made me want to take my email out of Outlook and put it in WorkSite! The search experience was so much better than Outlook 2003 Advanced Search (although recently I’ve used Outlook 2010 and the search in that is itself so much better than 2003!).

Then on Friday night, the second thing that got me thinking about search was when my son (aged eight) found a Flipnote on his Nintendo DSi and wanted to know what the music was. I had no idea, but what happened next was an eye opener on the new generation.

I consider myself pretty tech-savvy but in this instance I was well beaten by the eight year old. First off he’d asked if he could use Shazaam, but he couldn’t wait for me to get my mobile and so he had gone to his PC, fired up Google, found the track by searching for keywords and lyrics and then found last.fm and a copy of the track. No guidance, no help from his parents, in fact I was so impressed I went and bought him the track off Amazon (which in hindsight wasn’t that clever, as it is now on a continuous playlist of one!).

The thought hit me though, that if my son was to go into law (not on his list of potential employment at all at the moment, currently being a Chef is #1) then he just won’t accept the reams of paper file or the clunky e-filing systems that require either browsing or complex search forms. No search is something he takes for granted. It’s not technology to him it’s just something, like reading and writing, that he just does.

We in Legal IT have about 10 years before these kids start arriving in law firms, think we’ll have enterprise search working by then? And for the lawyers get yourselves comfortable with search technology, as these kids won’t accept the “I don’t understand computers” argument. They’ll just look at you like you’ve just announced “I can’t read”!

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.

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:

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.

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.