No option for Law Firm

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).

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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)

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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.

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The results are then highlighted both in the subject and in the body of the email.

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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.

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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.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about email recently and I mean a LOT! I’ve concluded I hate the stuff, both on a personal level and on an enterprise level. It’s like sand, it gets everywhere and you can’t get rid of the stuff. And even if you put it in a sandbox, you’re still finding the stuff all over your feet and clothes for days.

The worst thing is that email plays to our natural instinct to hoard. We actively go and collect the stuff. Then we keep hold of it for years! I know of lawyers who have mailboxes running in the Gb’s and have inboxes with tens of thousands of items in them. I remember doing a rollout in 2005 and noticing PST’s in lawyers mailboxes going back to the early 1990’s!

So what does it matter if we collect the stuff? Well let’s ignore the fact that as a lawyer there should be an organised file somewhere (PDF) and just look at the pain they cause…

First off the performance nightmare!

The chances are you’ll be storing all the stuff in Microsoft Exchange and Outlook like most corporates.

Matt Cain, lead email analyst at Gartner. "We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial email market by 2010”

Bottom line is big mailboxes equal bad performance (unless you’re lucky enough to have a quad core desktop with a solid state hard drive at work!). There are a number of factors involved in Outlook performance, but basically big in size (Gb) is bad and big in number of items is bad!

Sure Exchange 2007 brought improvements as did Outlook 2007 Sp1 on the desktop. And Outlook/Exchange 2010 may bring more, but if email usage continues to grow then they will just be playing constant catch up (also I bet most of you are on Office 2003!).

Then you have to worry about storage!

There are probably gigabytes or terabytes (or petabytes!!!) of the stuff that your organisation collects. More and more money thrown at playing catch up with shelves of discs to collect all the emails you hoard. Sure if you’re a small firm you can outsource your email to say GMail or as a large corporate perhaps to a hosting company (it might ease the hassle but probably not the cost). In fact I suspect that maybe this is the future, we will treat email as a utility like with we do electricity. But that’s not addressing the problem is it? It’s like buying space at Big Yellow Self Storage because your back bedroom is full and you can’t bring yourself to throw away your shoe, comic, book, record (delete as applicable) collection!

So what’s the future?

Can’t we just kill it off? As well as performance and storage there’s the time sucking controlling nature of the stuff. I was hoping instant messaging (IM), wikis or social media would kick in and reduce emails dominance (like facebook has virtual killed my useful home email, I say useful to distinguish from the almost spam messages I get from sites like LinkedIn, Amazon etc). It’s starting slowly in firms but IM is like the healthy vegetable sat next to the krispy kreme doughnut of email!

I don’t have all the answers for the problem above unfortunately. But if someone can solve them for me, then from a lawyers perspective I did come up with an idea for organising the stuff that would require virtually no effort on the lawyers time. No filing, no tagging, but that’s a post for another day ……

Such a dull title, but that was the title of one of my final year modules at University. The textbook is probably in the loft somewhere. It was all about designing applications to be intuitive and easy to use (a much harder job when everything was DOS based!).

A couple of things over the last week got me thinking again about the design of applications from a user perspective and how important this is.

First off was the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series.

Clearly Microsoft finally “got it” with this release. They went back to the drawing board and designed something from a users perspective. Grouping things together in a logical human way (rather than technical grouping). Take a look at the video over at MSDN.

Second though was the interface with the most potential, Microsoft Live Labs Pivot.

Basically it is an interface into huge amounts of information. It allows you to slice up information in different ways, allowing you to go from huge amounts of data down to small amounts and back out in logical and connected ways.

It’s quite difficult to explain how this works using text, so take a look at the video over at the Microsoft Pivot site – http://getpivot.com/

In a law firm the possibilities for this are huge.

Law firms have huge amounts of data in documents and emails that this kind of interface would be perfect for. Imagine this being the main interface for Outlook or your document management system. You could slice up your emails quickly to find the information you were after. Or slice up your documents to collect together specific types of agreements, in specific jurisdictions etc.

On the developer page there are a number of challenges. One of which is a front end to SharePoint. I’m going to put my own challenge out there for any legal software developer to front end Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite, imagine this being the user interface of DeskSite!

Are you ready for WWW.JДSФИPLДЙT.CO.UK

As of this month the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) agreed to allow non-Latin script web urls. This means the address above could be a perfectly valid web address (domain name).

This gives a whole raft of opportunities for cyber squatters to snap up domains of companies, especially those that are based in the emerging markets of most international law firms, the eastern European, Asian and Gulf region countries. And as well as squatters if you have clients whose brand names are non-Latin character based or who trade in regions where the writing is non-Latin, it could be an opportunity to advise them on protecting their brands.

Unfortunately the change means that there are also more opportunities for phishing attacks through spoofing domain names.

For example, take a look at this url www.jаsonplаnt.co.uk It looks pretty normal right? However try the link, you’ll get a 404 or page not found. Why? Well the a’s are actually а’s (still confused? the first is a Latin character a and the second is the Cyrillic character a). A computer recognises them as totally different. Therefore sites could be “spoofed” using this Cyrillic method and be used to “phish” information from you.

Below is a (hopefully) high level explanation of how this new system will work.

First remember, computers work under the bonnet in numbers for pretty much everything.

So as it stands now there is a service on the internet called DNS (Domain Name System). This acts like a phonebook, turning easily understood domain names that you use into strings of computer-readable numbers, known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

There is also an encoding system that turns characters you type into numbers that the computer understands, this is called ASCII. This is what the internet DNS system uses now to translate the characters of the urls.

Technically the problem has been that ASCII was built for the Latin character set. And it is limited to the number of characters it can encode. To cater for all the worlds character sets; Latin, Cyrillic and Chinese characters etc, a new system was required. This is called Unicode. However the DNS “phonebooks” of the internet only understand ASCII**.

So to enable the new domain names to have all characters sets, a method was required to handle the conversion. The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by some clever algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode.

So take JДSФИPLДЙT, this is Unicode and so the ToASCII algorithm would be applied. Once it has been through this algorithm, a prefix is given to distinguish it from a standard ASCII name (otherwise you could end up with a totally different Cyrillic and Latin urls/domain names pointing to the same place!). The result is a unique name that can be looked up in DNS (**technically DNS can support non-ASCII but because of other limitations it has meant non-ASCII names be converted to ASCII).

Finally it is worth knowing that most of the popular browsers have introduced some methods to help with the “spoofing” by recognising when this new multi-language domain name is being used in this way.

You may be interested in a BBC TV program on tomorrow evening (5th October ‘09), “email is ruining my life” on BBC4 at 9:30pm.

Libby Potter investigates whether e-mail helps or hinders workplace performance, and shows how to control it rather than letting it control us.

Is your inbox out of control? Is your day managed through reaction to the next email received? Do you wish you could come back from holiday to less than ten emails?

Who said No? Can I please swap places with you?

I totally agree with the BBC programs synopsis, email is out of control. There’s far too much about. But you can’t just sit and complain, you really need to keep on top of it. Especially if you use Outlook and Exchange (if you’re using the former at work, you’re probably using the later also).

Why?

Firstly large numbers on items in your inbox, calendars etc = POOR performance.**

I usually recommend no more than about 2500 – 5000 messages in any of the critical path folders.  The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder. Ideally, keep the Inbox, Contacts and Calendar to 1000 or less. This from a blog post on The Microsoft Exchange Team blog.

Secondly, if you’re a lawyer then you really should be looking after the electronic file in the same way you do a paper file. Keeping an organised inbox can help with this.

So here’s my top 5 tips on how to tackle the ever increasing deluge of email:

1. Deal with it immediately. If the email is a simple question or can be dealt with in <5secs then do it, then immediately delete or file it. For anything else move to step 2!
2. Use sub folders and file incoming email immediately. Create sub folders for matters, projects or non matter groupings. Then file the incoming email on receipt. You can always use an Outlook search to read unread emails across all these sub folders. This way you keep your inbox item count low.
3. Get into the habit of cleaning out your calendar regularly. Either go into your calendar and delete old items once a month or create an “Archive Calendar” and move your old appointments into it (that is if you really want to refer to what you were doing on 7th September 2004!)
4. Get rid of junk mail. You may be lucky and be in a firm that uses a good spam filter already (if not take a look around at the personal spam filters available – I quite like SpamFighter). But in addition unsubscribe from all those vendor emails, news lists etc emails to cut down the noise coming into your inbox.
5. Finally, Archive! Get rid of large volumes of old email by archiving it. If your firm has a document management system that you can file emails to, then file them (if you’ve used step 2 this should be easier). Your firm may also have an enterprise archiving tool, get your emails in that and out of your inbox! If neither of these, then simply archive to a PST (then burn the PST to DVD and remember, only attach it to Outlook when required!).

If you’ve got any other killer tips for keeping the email volume down, then put them in the comments.

And finally, take a look at this YouTube video that introduces Google Wave. Google Wave is Google’s attempt to look at email/electronic communication from a fresh perspective.  Maybe one day email will be truly a thing of the past!

** this point is for Exchange 2003, which is still the most widespread version in corporate IT