No option for Law Firm

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #10 Out of Office

OK, this one’s a bit of a cheat as it’s not really a cool new feature, more a case of “where on earth has it gone?”. Yes this one’s a bit like the big print button (you know that one that stares you in the face on the Print pane but first time in you spent ages looking for!), it’s right there on the backstage.

If you’ve got Outlook 2010 communicating to an Exchange 2003 environment, then your Out of Office will be a familiar pop-up where you can just enter your message. However if you’ve got Exchange 2010 then you get some additional options which are quite handy.

• First you can have different messages for internal recipients and external recipients. Handy when you want to provide extra contact information for employees of your firm on who to contact but which you may not want to pass onto the client.

• Also you can setup specific times for auto responses. So if you want to send auto responses only in business hours for example.

• You have the choice of using HTML in out of office replies, not sure why you’d want to but it’s there.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #9 Preview documents within the email

This feature is simple yet brilliant.

You receive an email with one or more attachments.

Single click on the attachment and the document is displayed within the email body.

So no loading up a separate copy of Word, just a preview of the document quickly within the same application!

“What if we’ve a document management system and we send links rather than copies of the document?” well from what I understand a preview of NRL links sent using iManage WorkSite is on the roadmap for development! Which is great news if it is released. If you’re reading this and work for Autonomy and can confirm this, please post in the comments.

So Microsoft have pulled out of the Legal vertical (stories here and here). It has caused quite a buzz on twitter amongst us Legal IT folk.

The question is why. I think the comment on the knowlist article sums up the two opposite conclusions: 

The glass half full position is that this is a temporary, cost cutting reorganisation exercise. The glass half empty position: Legal – too fussy, too complicated, too small, not enough dollar. 

There’s probably truth in both. Why are Microsoft in business? To sell products! Their professional services team are effectively there to help them do that.

But what is there to sell to Legal? We all use Microsoft Office in a big way and aren’t going to shift anytime soon. We’re tied into Windows as most Legal IT vendors only provide their software for that platform. And because of our dependence on the above our licencing for the most part allows us access to SharePoint (at the very least SharePoint foundation). So again, what’s there left to sell us that is specific to Legal? Email and Unified Communications is going to be pretty much the same in every organisation. So that leaves CRM, not a product to base a whole team on. Thus they can save money by closing the team.

I jokingly commented on twitter that maybe we should expect to see Clifford Chance announce a deal with one of the big DMS vendors soon, indicating that maybe this was down to not being able to get the SharePoint DMS to work for legal. I’m not sure that this is the case, but they may have seen the market fill with Legal specific providers building on top of SharePoint (Workshare, Sword, Epona to name three) and from this Microsoft can sell their product (SharePoint) and let others do the implementation work (the hard work!).

I spoke a while ago to a senior person in a well known supplier to Legal (no not the one beginning with A) who indicated that internally they were more focussed outside Legal now because there was more money in it. So if old Legal IT vendors are looking elsewhere for the money it stands to reason that Microsoft have probably drawn the same conclusions.

So is it a loss for Legal? I don’t think so, Microsoft products will still be used and there are plenty of professional services outfits that can help. I suspect this is a cold hard look at our vertical by Microsoft and a realisation that we’re going the way they want us to go without the need of a nudge. So why spend money on the team to help us along.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #8 Using drag and drop to create tasks

Alright the title is a little misleading and this one definitely goes in the category of “I just found this out but it could well have been there in Office 2007 and maybe even 2003!”, but I hope you’ll forgive the inclusion, it’s new for me in 2010 and I think it’s really useful.

It’s a quick way of using tasks rather than your Inbox as your task list.

How many times have you heard lawyers (or even people in Legal IT depts) say they use their Inbox as a to-do list? (I’ve even heard of some people using their deleted items folder as a task list but let’s not go there!). This tip is a quick way to use drag and drop to quickly create a task using the information within the email.

The scenario:

• You get an email that requires an action.

• You want to keep the information on the email with the task.

• You could (as I used to) create a task with – refer to email from Jason 02/08/2011. But you can’t clear that email out until the task has been actioned.

OR

• You can drag and drop your email to the Tasks navigation button in the bottom left, when you let go of the mouse button a task is created with the Subject as the title of that email and with the content of the email in the task body. Set your due date and then you can delete the email. Job done!

This also works for calendar items. So if you want to pull a meeting together where the email would be useful pasting into the meeting request, just use the same process and drag and drop into the Calendar navigation button.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #7 IM

Now #7 unfortunately needs some additional products to work, unless you already have said product and then this is a real bonus! As with these products in place integration into Outlook is something that every Legal IT vendor with an Outlook addin needs to take note of!

The additional product is Office Communication Server (OCS) or Lync as it’s now called, the function it provides is Instant Messaging, Voice and Video communication. And with Outlook 2010 in place the integration is excellent.

First off there is a section that appears in the “organiser pane“. From here you can see your recent and other OCS/Lync contacts and initiate an IM chat or a voice call etc. It really saves having to go back into a separate application to view the online status of a contact or initiate an IM. The only thing I wish Microsoft would have done here is put in a simple search box like in the OCS/Lync client!

Also from any email, as well as being able to reply and forward you can also reply via IM.

Finally anywhere there is an email address or contact name (in the email, on a meeting etc) you can see there busy/free status indicated by the colour next to the picture and name. As well as being able to click to email the contact, IM the contact or make an OCS call to the contact just by clicking on the contact name.

OCS/Lync is integrated in all the right places in Outlook 2010. So much so you don’t realise it’s a separate product. Now if only a couple of Legal IT products, thinking of one for document management and one for document protection could integrate as nicely within Office 2010…..