SAGE will be hosting webinars this Summer on a number of hot topics. These webinars are free and all are welcome to participate. Each webinar happens between Noon and 1 P.M. EDT, so please spend your lunch with us.

First up is our popular Metadata 101 webinar, "Your Documents, Your Undoing" (7/15) which discusses the risks from metadata and sensitive content in your documents. We discuss methods and strategies to mitigate those risks using tools like Workshare Protect and best practices.

Next is our webinar on Getting the Most From Your IT Budget (7/23). In it, we provide some benchmarks for what your IT budget should be, and how to stretch it to extend your capabilities. During the webinar, we discuss where IT provides maximum value to a firm and how to balance user support, projects, and regular maintenance.

MS Office is more than just spreadsheets and documents. In August, we debut a new webinar on Doing More with MS Office (8/19). For this webinar, we describe new uses for accounting, CRM, and HR from old standbys like Word, Excel, Access and Outlook, and illustrate what can be done with newcomers InfoPath, OneNote, and Groove.

Sign-up for SAGE Wisdom webinars on our web site. If you have any topics that you would like to learn more about, let us know in the comments or drop us a line.

Here is this week's gems from around the Web:

"Core" Multiplier: Intel says look for thousands of computing cores on future chips. Intel has staked its future on multiple computer cores on a single chip. While a new 8-core chip will soon, debut, an Intel official tells software developers to "start thinking about tens, hundreds, and thousands of cores now." Now everyone needs to figure out how to program for them.

MS Tests Office Subscription with "Equipt". Microsoft is testing the waters with an MS Office subscription service at the consumer level. For $70/year, consumers can get the Home and Office version of the suite with MS OneCare security software. Could a business version be far off?

Hyper-V makes an early debut, set to turn up the heat on VMWare. In a move surely to presage the coming apocalypse, Microsoft released a product early. MS' new Hyper-V server virtualization looks to take on market leader VMWare. C|Net blogger discusses some ways MS can penetrate the virtualization market. In true Microsoft fashion, one strategy is to throw money at it. Surprise!

Have a happy Independence Day and enjoy the long weekend!

This week, an article reported that law firm Reed Smith had let go 50 legal secretaries in recent months in an effort to consolidate some administrative functions in a central, 24-hour call center in Pittsburgh, PA. Why? Reed Smith now operates around the globe--which means around the clock--and mobile technology like Blackberries give attorneys the ability to easily handle their own messaging and scheduling.

This is instructive on how technology often makes the middle vanish through contradictory forces of consolidation and distribution. Technology allows certain jobs to be consolidated to achieve efficiencies: call centers in less expensive and remote locales are feasible because of the available bandwidth (data, voice, and video) connected to "customers" throughout the world via the Internet and cellular phones. Conversely, technology can also decentralize functions. Handheld devices with increased capabilities like the Blackberry and new iPhone will allow attorneys to accomplish more "in the field, " including duties like messaging and scheduling that were once centralized under the domain of legal secretaries.

Duties and job functions that fall into the middle area are most prone to the centrifugal forces IT unleashes, and the vaunted legal secretary may be the next target.

One constant struggle firms face is spyware, adware and other "malware" infections on computer workstations. Cleaning and removing these spyware infections cost significant time and money that can be better spent on improving IT systems. Barring more draconian measures to restrict the use of web surfing and downloading files and other media, we strongly recommend the following safe surfing practices.

Make sure the web address fits the web site.  The web site address, (or "URL") should reasonably match the web site.  For example, if you on the web site of software maker Adobe, its web site address should be "http://www.adobe.com", or "https://support.adobe.com."  Web sites that claim to be Adobe's but have addresses like "http://adobe.0012441tojay.net" are likely phishing sites or web sites designed to infect your system with malware. You can also find out information about the owner of the web site address by performing a WHOIS ("who is") search.

Know your web address. Misstyping the web address for a well-known web site or organization can lead to web sites expressly built to capture misspellings. Many of these mimic a directory of links that you may find on the site you intended to visit, but are really advertising or meant to infect your machine with malware. Also, be sure you have the domain extension correct -- entering ".net" instead of ".com" may land you on a malicious web site.   

Do not click on any pop-up windows, especially one proclaiming that you may have a virus, spyware, or other malware infection.  In fact, the intention of that pop-up is to infect your machine, not inoculate it.

Did not click on any banners, pop-up windows or web pages saying you have won a prize. Almost always it is a rouse to infect your computer with spyware or adware. At the very least, it is an attempt to get personal information for marketing or more nefarious purposes. In fact, be wary of clicking on most banner ads. You can almost always find the site running the banner advertisement on your own.

Avoid downloading software and applications from the web.  The Internet has made delivery of applications and media much easier, but stick with trusted companies, sites, and organizations. There are a host of blogs, discussion forums, and consumer web sites where people report their experiences with web sites and online software vendors to check their reputation.

When in doubt, search Google. Usually searching on the web site name or organization on Google will provide a wealth of links to let you assess the reputation of a web site and those behind it.

Just like any scam, the common sense adage that "if it seems to good to be true, than it probably is." The Web is full of great discount web sites like Woot.com, but if the price of some consumer item or software is outrageously low, likely the site is trying to scam you for your money, likely injecting some spyware or adware at the same time.  If you are bargain shopping, stick with Ebay or Craigslist.

Following these guidelines should reduce the amount of spyware and other malware. Many of the same rules apply to unsolicited emails.  Don't click on links in spam e-mails or from senders you don't know, no matter what the promises to your financial prospects or "prowess."

SAGE will have not one, but two speakers at the Annual Conference of the Association of Legal Administrators next week in Seattle, Washington.  Speaking on topics ranging from getting more out of Microsoft Office to future trends in technology, be sure to attend the sessions Monday and Tuesday hosted by SAGE President George Nicholson and Tony Buffkin.

SAGE President speaks on Monday, May 5, 2008 from 2:15-3:30 on "Future Tech That Breaks With Tradition." He will discuss how the pace of technological change is accelerating and what that means for mobile computing, tapping into the power of the Internet computing, and managing the torrent of information that will be available to us all. George opens up his crystal ball for a fun and enlightening look at technologies being tested today that will change how we work in just a few short years.

On Tuesday, May 6, 2008 from 2:15-3:30 PM, Application Specialist Tony Buffkin will discuss how to get more out of Microsoft Office for your law firm needs. From accounting to marketing, lawyers to administrators, Tony shows ways to use MS Office to make your office more productive and capable.  He will describe new uses for old standby's like Word, Excel, Access and Outlook, and illustrate what can be done with newcomers InfoPath, OneNote, and Groove.

If you are attending the ALA national conference, be sure to sit in on George's and Tony's sessions.

IT sometimes harkens back to 12th grade microeconomics class--namely, "opportunity costs." This post over at the Freakonomics's blog brings up the issue of lost time and productivity from a seemingly innocuous software update that cost the author an hour. The larger point that author makes is that the longer you wait to update, the more costs you can incur.

So are you asleep yet? Wake up!

The article highlights hidden costs in IT, where users wait for software updates or create time-consuming workarounds due to glitches, or little to no training. The longer one waits to resolve these issues, the higher the costs. Updates and patches that promise fixes or new features can often have unintended consequences that wreak havoc on your firm network or personal device. Testing, daily maintenance, prevention, and proper training are important to keep costs down, especially hidden costs.

By order of firm management, the IT department is engaged in a major project to overhaul the "backroom" systems to bring greater stability and performance. IT would love to immerse its small band of engineers and sysadmins to tackle the project, but one problem is persistently thwarting them: those pesky users.

An attorney's hard drive failed. Someone can't print their mail merge document. A marketing assistant has a question about Excel. Don't these people realize there are bigger problems to be tackled and IT can't coddle them right now?

This is a trap some IT departments fall into, and quite frankly, they need to get over it. If they don't, they fail. Service is a long series of interruptions. IT departments are in the business of reacting, so they better get good at it. The face of the IT department is the help desk/support center. So if users feel they are being neglected, the reputation of IT will be blemished. The better IT is reacting to the needs of their users, preventing failures, and quickly resolving incidents due to unforeseen circumstances, they will have more time for projects.

In an upcoming blog post we will discuss some ways IT departments can improve their "reaction" time.

The leading article in the February 2008 issue of Wired contends that technology and personal interaction are complementary like peanut butter and chocolate, usurping the conventional wisdom that technology destroys distance. While the hope still remains that cells phones and broadband will allow introverts and traffic planners to telecommute, author Tim Harford makes a compelling case that technology makes "face-time" easier and creates more of it.

Just like how indoor plumbing and urban sanitation allowed greater density in cities, so do Google Maps, cell phones, and Facebook allow people to find other people and things in a vastly larger population. That population can be a large city, organization, or community of clients, vendors, and colleagues. Email allows someone to maintain greater communication with more people in less time, freeing up time for more meetings in person.

And face-time seems more critical than ever. If indeed the workplace is shifting to value ideas because problems and processes are becoming more complex as the author contends, then meeting face-to-face is the best way to communicate those ideas. The upshot for your business or firm, studies have found that the most productive companies have the most intra-company e-mail, which actually encourages more personal contact, not less.

Here is what has hit our radar screens in the past week:

Getting Green Computers: Because reducing your carbon footprint is becoming all the rage, how can your IT do the same?  Law.com has a green guidelines for buying and using computers, but most come from computer maker Dell.  If you don't follow one of the recommendations to donate the equipment when you refresh, we suggest you talk to a respected recycler like GigaBiter (full disclosure: they are a SAGE client).

iPhones Making Corporate Inroads: On the heels of Salesforce.com unveiled its iPhone strategy and Google revamping its search page for it, comes this article talking about how the iPhone's ease-of-use is forcing its way inside corporate walls. Integration with Exchange/Outlook may put it over the top.

Give Your IT Workers Some Attention for the Holidays:  It seems that Aretha Franklin and IT staff just want the same thing: respect. Forget the secret Santa, says this EWeek article, they just want to not work in a dungeon and feel like part of the team rather than the hired help.

You think you are protected: RAID to guard against hard drive failure; dual network cards with separate Ethernet switches, and redundant power with a couple of UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) systems in case of a power failure. But what about your telecomm closet?

Doh! Here is the scene we have seen repeated countless times: Internet router, firewall, and even your Ethernet switches are just plugged into the wall outlet! Your vital link to clients and the outside world rests on an unconditioned wall plug and an electrical grid in dire need of upgrade.

Make sure all your network electronics are protected by a UPS. This alone will save you from losing components due to power fluctuations and outages. You may need two for heavier loads. UPS's fail too, so an online spare won't hurt. With respect to potential of losing hours of productive/billable time, UPS systems in your telco closet are insanely cheap.

This great blog essay over at Digging My Own Ditch [via Found|Read] provides a primer on the value of Web 2.0 for people (or “users” if you want). Rather than being caught up in descriptions of RSS, AJAX and other technical aspects, the essay is about what “Web 2.0” dynamics mean for people, and then applies those dynamics to the archetypal IT tool: corporate email.

Here are the three dynamics that define the Web 2.0 experience for people:

• Personal expression – Web 2.0 provides people a greater ability to express their personalities to others
• Efficient connections – Web 2.0 services make meeting new like-minded people more efficient
• Information discovery – Web 2.0 software and services change how people discover information

Information discovery and efficient connections make perfect sense, but how in the world would enabling personal expression improve corporate e-mail? Turns out that as more people join communities online, they are used to posting photos of themselves (or avatars) and expressing their interests, specialities, accomplishments, and more. This aides in creating networks of like-minded people (efficient connections) that make finding information easier (information discovery).

Connections are more efficient because they are self-selected through common interests, which filters information to be more relevant and is thus more valuable. Throw in tagging, social bookmarking, and trackbacks (cross-linking)and people can find information and webs of information in ways better suited to them compared to a taxonomy or literal search engine. Applied to corporate e-mail, contacts are grouped by each person’s personal network, and e-mails are tagged for concepts that the e-mail is about but does not explicitly mention.

So what does Web 2.0 mean to businesses? Better connected employees with better access to the right information.

Here is our Friday installment of what is being said on the Internet that administrators and IT pros at law and professional services firms should know.

Where did my Excel commands go? The transition to Office 2007’s new “fluid interface” is causing some consternation with many who have become accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts and menu commands in Excel 2003. Computerworld published this handy cheat sheet mapping the old locations for commands from Excel 2003 to 2007. For more on what has changed and what is new in Office 2007, check out our free online webinar “Compelling Enhancements in Office 2007” on August 15, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. EDT.

Businesses cautious on Vista upgrade. A new poll says that only 2 percent of businesses are running Vista, and only 9 percent more planning on upgrading in the next three months. Now, we know firms that just went to XP last year, so this wait-and-see attitude doesn’t surprise us. Some reasons cited include old hardware that won’t run Vista and training.

Contracts online, should lawyers be worried? Business 2.0 has an article on a Spanish company putting contracts online to cut out the lawyers. More than that, they are throwing in some value-added with their dashboard that has a timeline of negotiations, comments, and more. Inside Opinions sees the move as complementary rather than completely disruptive.

Census Bureau information to your newsreader. Following up on our post on great government web site mash-ups, Robert Ambrogi points out that the U.S. Census Bureau has RSS feeds and podcasts on a number of statistics like “Aging Population,” “Foreign-born Population,” and more.

For more stories filtered for administrators and IT pros in legal and professional services firms, get our supplemental newsfeed, available here through Google Reader.

(At least not about your network.)

SAGE OnSight monitors your firm servers and vital systems 24/7/365, alerting SAGE’s crack team of engineers and support certain staff in the event of critical failure. Should something happen, SAGE will know about it within minutes and often can have the issue corrected remotely within an hour. In not, we will dispatch an engineer to your site to get you up and running as soon as possible, hopefully before the managing partner notices anything is amiss.

Check out our demo on this page (Click on "Time is Money Saved..."). In most cases, we will be alerting you that there is a problem with your network, rather than the other way around.  And once it is fixed, you can report to the managing partner that everything has been resolved.

This translates into very real cost savings for your organization. Under the old “break-fix” model, most problems were discovered when people arrived in the morning.  By time an engineer arrived on site and resolved the issue, it was early afternoon.  All the while, your people are idling and billable hours are being lost. With OnSight’s 24/7/365 remote monitoring, level 1 alerts can be resolved in 1-2 hours, meaning your people are back to work and billing much quicker.

Across the pond, a study of IT claims that UK businesses lose 31 days from poor IT management. Of course, that’s the attention grabbing headline [it works, doesn’t it?], and the findings are not nearly so catastrophic. The lesson learned is that IT is a great asset, but like any asset in an organization, it requires time and money for maintenance and upkeep. Failure to do so has dire consequences, like diverting resources and lowering productivity.

The culprit is not the hardware or software, but management and maintenance. In fact, any gains in productivity, efficiency, or quality degrade over time because of poor upkeep. In the survey, 77 percent cited that insufficient upkeep wasted an estimated 13 percent of their investment in IT.

Why? Projects are high profile while operations are considered monotonous and ho-hum. Smaller firms offer divert resources from operations for projects, and service suffers and gains aren’t fully realized. Operations, however, are what keep people productive and work going out the door.

So besides giving operations its due, split IT staff along projects and operations responsibilities if your organization is large enough, or call on outside help for projects when necessary.

How many times have you heard about the next great collaboration technology? We have done it before in touting out MindPort collaboration application for documents. But wikis are getting hard to ignore since they make so much sense for business. Why? They overcome the “inbox” problem. E-mail communication is great, but having multiple copies distributed throughout a dozen people’s inboxes is inefficient to say the least when those e-mails need to be referenced at a later date. A wiki provides a single, highly accessible place to coordinate activities and share information.

For the uninitiated, the Common Craft blog has a great video (a bit “campy” though) that explains what a wiki is and how it works. Applications we are seeing clients (and ourselves) implement are knowledge bases, client information, operations manuals, and project planning. There are a number of legal specific wikis covering circuit courts, tax law, IP and more. And in case you haven’t already made the connection, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one big wiki.

There are some challenges, mostly changing the culture of writing on the wiki rather than an e-mail. Getting the right wiki software and ensuring that it is widely accessible but also secure requires some thought.

Here's another helpful tip from the great folks at our OnSight Support Center. You need to search a bunch of documents a client sent you. You figure it will be a breeze because they are sending PDFs probably generated from the original electronic documents. When you open them, they are not text based PDFs at all but images! Now the unceremonious task of running OCR, spell check, and clean-up awaits you.

The new Standard and Pro versions of Acrobat 8 make that workflow a little less tedious. Acrobat has had the ability to OCR documents for some time, (once referred to as “Paper Capture” but now the more-straight-forward-if-less-elegant-sounding “OCR Text Recognition”), but it has boosted the exporting capability to Word, text, XML, HTML and image formats. Best yet, you can batch process selected files or a folder of documents using "Tools>Document Processing>Batch Processing." That just leaves the inevitable spell check and touch-up of the OCR results.

This provides a valuable stop gap when clients provide sets of PDFs that need to be full-text searchable, but are not so large as to warrant sending out to an EDD or similar vendor for processing.

One pitfall people and companies fall into is: if I do something one way, I assume other people do it the same way. Much of the frustration we feel with interfaces, workflows, products, and services result from this faulty underlying assumption. Fact is, different people learn differently. They also approach problems with vastly different strategies.

Let’s focus on learning. Basically, people learn in three ways: audio, visual and kinetic.

• Audio people learn best by listening to people;
• Visual people learn best by looking at something such as diagrams, text, instructions, etc.; and
• Kinetic people learn best by doing something, such as taking notes or doing exercises.

So how do people’s learning methods get incorporated in the real world? Part of our OnSight service includes the Support Center (Help Desk), staffed by Specialists who—in addition to having saintly patience—will tune their learning approach to the individual. Some calls come over the phone where speaking and listening are important, but if the person needs a visual demonstration, we can remote to their machine and show them how to resolve the issue. The Support Center specialists spend a lot of time at client sites, where if someone needs to learn through doing, our specialist can watch over their shoulder as they do it and learn.

Being aware of these differences and tuning your approach to them will result in better training and processes.

While the interface is still maddening, SharePoint 2007 is a quick way to build collaborative tools like blogs, wikis, and discussion forums inside your firm. Built into SharePoint 2007 are a variety or collaborative features that can be up and running with just a few clicks. While each individual app may not be best in breed, it does provide your organization an opportunity to flirt with these “web 2.0” collaborative features to see if employees will participate on the content they generate increases everyone's knowledge and awareness.

• Blogs: create internal blogs to share firm news, client personnel changes, or developments on projects so the entire firm is “in the know.”
• Wikis: have everyone in the firm become contributors and build your knowledge base or reference library organically from the ground up.
• Discussion Forums: let the conversation happen online rather than in e-mail. It is easier for others who came to the discussion late to catch up and non participants get the benefits too.

The jury is still out, however, regarding SharePoint's "document workspaces." These collaborative sites within SharePoint are fully searchable, but the real sleeper feature is that almost everything has a newsfeed associated with it. So as content is added or updated, everyone in the firm will know.

Posting a title like that invites the cynical among us to insert terms like “cost” and “expense.” But let’s look beyond the budget line to the business value of IT. This post at ZDNet’s Between The Lines gives a few measures and ideas for defining, calculating, and getting the maximum value of IT. We couldn’t agree with the post more when they state that there is “no such thing as an IT project. They are all business projects.”

IT Projects should not be defined by whether something was simply installed, or deployed, but whether the installed application or system creates leverage that creates efficiencies or opportunities. Value comes from impact: are processes faster and smoother because of the IT project, saving time and money; or does it generate value for the customers which translates into sales or fees?

How do you know? Use metrics such as cost reductions and increased revenue. Time savings is often a gold standard in law and professional services since it invariably directly equates to billable hours or overhead. You will have to be creative in finding metrics for returns because the generated value aren’t easily quantified, unlike the upfront investments that are measured in cold, hard cash.

They also echoed something we have mentioned many times before, the value of marketing your successes. So while every project may be a “business project,” blame for poor projects becomes easily assignable. “Every time it’s wrong it’s and IT project.”

This Wednesday's SAGE Wisdom Webinar is about improving network performance through proactive maintenance, namely daily server checks.  A tool we developed, SAGE Sentinel, can cut the time spent on daily server checks in half, as well as provide accountability and network monitoring through an easy dashboard. To learn more about Sentinel and how to keep your network running at peak performance, please join us this Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 pm EDT.

If you are interested,  sign-up online here.

The Wisdom Webinar schedule can always be found at this link and is updated monthly. Upcoming SAGE Wisdom Webinars will cover managing tech migrations for minimal disruption to the firm, and using extranets like SAGE MindPort for internal projects as well as external ones. Future webinars will cover topics like virtualization, Windows Vista and Office 2007, Exchange 12, and managing newsfeeds.

The web has been inundated recently with articles about whether or not you should upgrade to Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, and/or Office 2007. After all the recommendations, are you any closer to making an upgrade decision? When it comes to updating to Office 2007, the new Outlook (and Exchange 12 server on the backend) will likely drive most firms and companies to upgrade. Outlook 2007 and its online doppelganger, Outlook Web Access (OWA), have a number of features that make the switch well worth the investment, most of all because it simplifies tasks in the applications many of us live in.

Time savers like a better search, dragging e-mails into the calendar to create appointments, and tasks appearing in the calendar should help everyone stay focused on their work. Another feature is message classifications that allow actions to be performed based on message type. For instance, messages classified as “Attorney-Client privilege” can have be “stamp” with a privileged label and a copy automatically sent to the firm's compliance officer. The web version, Outlook Web Access, closely mirrors the look and functionality of its desktop brethren (provided you are using Internet Explorer 6+), making it easy to check your email from anywhere and begs the question whether the desktop version is necessary at all.

While the new Ribbon user interface in Office 2007 may turn users on or off, we feel that Outlook 2007’s features will drive many to do the upgrade. Note that Exchange 12—that makes this all happen—has some pretty steep requirements. We will have more in future posts.

The question surrounding the impending release of Microsoft’s Office 2007 is whether it is worth the price of upgrading. The “old” version makes documents, spreadsheets and presentations just fine, and the documents are compatible. Office 2007’s most compelling feature is the “Ribbon,” an new interface that replaces the menu system that has become unwieldy from years of plugging in features that few people used.

The new interface alone is worth the upgrade, but only after you get over the learning curve. Other benefits include some cool integration between Outlook and Exchange, and an overall streamlining of what had become badly bloated software. (If you want a second opinion, check out this review.) Learning the new interface means investment in training on the front end, which will get returned in greater productivity on the back end.

Also be aware that customizing toolbars in Office 2007 will require a higher level of technical expertise than in previous versions. Customizing the ribbon interface will require knowledge of XML and/or COM add-ins. This means that getting a developer involved may be necessary, but certainly will help speed the process along. If you have a highly tailored Office installation, development time and costs should weigh in the upgrade decision, but not if your setup is largely out-of-the-box.

Are the days of classifying knowledge over? Are the days of the once might taxonomy numbered? Upstarts like desktop and enterprise search, folksonomies and tagging are gaining the limelight, and overturning old ideas about ways to classify data. When Microsoft Vista’s becomes widespread and everyone has desktop search, will we really care about a myriad folders and subfolders? Given the proper meta data, a folder for just the client-matter may not even be necessary.

Zappos, the online shoe-retailer, is embracing search and taxonomic messiness in the physical world: their warehouse. Instead of complex organization schemes, Zappos is just filling in the next empty rack and recording where the merchandise is located in a database. The warehouse employee fulfilling an order simply queries the database and grabs the shoes wherever they are.

If Zappos can make it work in a warehouse, then with maturing search tools, the proper metadata and new ideas like tagging, certainly a little messiness in the file server can actually be an advantage.

So who will speak up for old-fashioned taxonomies? Let us know in the comments.

If the Apple iPhone’s innovative “multi-touch” interface stands up in real world use, it may usher in the shift in computing from desktops to handhelds. Laptops are already poised to overtake desktops the business world in the next few years, and sales have surged for smartphones like the Blackberry and Treo. The iPhone promises to overcome the last hurdle to widespread adoption of handhelds for most computing tasks: the interface.

We’ve discussed handheld devices and the supporting “information cloud” of data, information, and reference material that Blackberries/Treos make possible. Even laptops cannot compete with the mobility afforded by fitting snugly into a pocket. High speed cell networks and Wi-Fi have solved the bandwidth bottleneck, so the last hurdle to accessing the information in the cloud on a handheld was the interface: the stylus, small keyboard, and small, low-resolution screen. According to one tech pundit:

“[Apple CEO] Jobs is breaking the tyranny of the keyboard and trying to break the tyranny of the cursor as well. We've been able to get computers into our pockets for a very long time, but the issue has always been, 'what do you do with it?' You don't have a keyboard, you don't have a stylus and your thumbs are too big to type. This is the first serious attempt to break the tyranny of input. Until now, everybody's always focused on output -- is the screen big enough or sharp enough -- and the screens are high-resolution and bright. We've conquered that. Now the limiting factor is input.”

Simple input, fully capable high-speed web browsing, and reading documents on a widescreen display are all major advances in handheld computing. So whether you think the iPhone is the real-deal or over-hyped, if you or your employees want to be unchained from the desk, you should be rooting for the iPhone to succeed.

Did you know you can view the conversation threads in Outlook? Many of us here at SAGE didn't either, but our great application support folks on the OnSight Support Center did. As always, they were nice enough to share.

Outlook 2003 lets you view messages by thread, which is a convenient way to scan your in-box much faster. To accomplish this:

Select View … Arrange By … Conversation to see your mail arranged this way.

If you have the reading pane on the right, you can get to this setting faster by clicking on Arranged by at the top of the message list. You'll find that if each message contains the earlier messages, you can read just the latest message in the thread instead of working through each one, so you can easily clean out your in-box by deleting earlier notes and keeping only the latest one.

Here are few items that peaked our interest on the web today (including one that sucked us into Apple hype machine).

• Inside Legal Opinions has a great post about innovative lawyers and law firms that is well worth a read. Industry pressures, technology, and plain old unconventional thinking are pushing these law firms and lawyers in new directions, even proposing to get rid of the partner-associate structure.
• Say what you will about Apple in corporate (or business) environments, you have to give them credit for pushing the envelope. Today they unveiled the much anticipated iPhone and appear to have exceeded people's unrealistic expectations for the device. Sporting a new “multi-touch” interface that does away with physical buttons, the iPhone rethinks the whole mobile phone/mobile computing experience. Plus you get an iPod. We’ll watch the initial previews of the new interface, but if the phone lives up to its promise, Apple and Cingular could find people clamoring for these phones in June.
• Microsoft’s new Office 2007 releasing Jan. 30 also comes with a new document format, the clumsily named Office Open XML (or OOXML for smooth-sounding acronyms.) Problem is, it will not be backward compatible with earlier versions of Office unless an upgrade pack is applied to those pre-2007 versions. Still it remains unclear how the document conversion will happen between Office 2007 documents and older versions of the software.

This post over at Legal Blog Watch talks about some reasons why lawyers and law firms don’t collaborate to the extent that Corporate America does. Citing culture, training, and nature of the work, the authors suggest the command-and-control structure of firms discourages intra-firm collaboration. We would add the conservativeness of the legal community toward new technology.

We don’t see law firms as the dinosaurs the post suggests. Law firms are slowly adopting extranets like MindPort for collaborating with clients, co-counsel, and experts. But if the deck is stacked against lawyers themselves, collaboration should be widely encouraged for other firm employees like paralegals, practice support staff, and other professionals and support personnel. As we have mentioned on the blog before, sharing knowledge and information is vital to productivity and work quality. Demolishing silos where information and expertise is locked up in practice areas or functional groups should be a top priority for any law firm administrator and management.

While many firms have been down the Intranet route (often poorly), extranets that are so successful externally can be applied to many projects and situations internally. New ideas in collaboration such as Wikis, social bookmarking, RSS, and more are coming to the forefront that are often inexpensive and easier to implement.

The Thanksgiving Holiday brings out the Charlie Brown holiday specials, and “Pig Pen” makes his annual cameo in the cartoons. Pig Pen has the cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes, but what if that cloud was information, instead?

Look no further than someone carrying a Blackberry or Treo and see a whole new generation of high-tech Pig Pens followed by a cloud of e-mails, contacts, documents and more. The new mobile workforce is no longer restricted by their own memory or brain power since they have access to tremendous information resources at the push of a button. Handheld computing and wireless technologies have untethered knowledge from bulky reference items like PCs, dictionaries, file cabinets, etc. Now add GPS, RSS feeds and web services like Del.icio.us or Google Notebook, and information is at the fingertips of anyone with a smartphone.

For example, Del.icio.us bookmarks can be an RSS feed, subscribed to through Google Reader, that has a mobile version accessible through any smartphone’s web browser. On the other hand, one SAGE employee visited a museum over the weekend where he ran into a person using his smartphone’s camera to photograph the plaque so they “could read them later.” With cameras on cell phone’s reaching 3 megapixels, each cell phone becomes a handheld scanner.

The challenge to IT in facilitating making all our workers like Pig Pen is thinking beyond secure VPN and Citrix, but how to use RSS and services to not only feed information, but also store and share with co-workers from practically anywhere.

The hype-o-meter is twitching recently over porting common desktop apps like word processing and spreadsheets onto the web. EWeek and others have been declaring that web-based applications are coming of age. Google appears to be taking up the standard, leading a host of smaller developers in pushing the envelope of online applications. In fact, I am writing the first draft of this post on Google's "Docs & Spreadsheets ."

So should law and professional services firms head online for word processing?

Not quite yet. But for e-mail, many firms are already using Outlook Web Access (OWA), a web-based application. In fact, e-mail went web way back with Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail. Web-based apps tend to be more focused and have less features, largely because of the technical hurdles they face being online. Inline spell checking, drag and drop, and tracking changes are there, but forget mail-merging, if you care. This simplicity has won many adherents frustrated by how complicated desktop word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications have become. Online apps play to their strength--collaboration--where anyone with a web browser and the right privileges can edit, update, or otherwise provide feedback on a document. That same opennes, however, should scare the briefs off of any lawyer worth her salt.

But the road ahead holds a lot of promise. We envision a hyrbid scenario where apps reside on a firm's intranet, rather than the big-bad World Wide Web. Some of the advantages of online apps include:

• Easier deployment and seamless upgrades