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.

Our creative director, resident futurist, and agent provocateur, Peter von Elling authored the article "Future Technology That Breaks With Tradition" appearing in the Jan-Mar 2008 issue of NoVa Network. The article focuses on technology trends currently incubating that will change how we work in the near future.

• The accelerating pace of technological change: change not only happens, that change is occurring faster than ever before. This trend holds true even for legal technology.
• Ultra-mobility where people are not just always available - like we are today - but "always capable" - able to perform any task on their mobile device.
• "Cloud computing," which is data and applications reside on the Internet rather than a desktop or laptop and accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection.
• Information management through social networking tools -- the torrent of information available will only get worse in the coming years. Surprisingly, searching, sorting, and filtering it will fall on groups of highly interconnected people and not intelligent software.

The article is currently available online at alanova.org, the web site of the Northern Virgina Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators.

For some of our web site clients (Washington Express and GigaBiter, for example), we have been following the dust-up over Google’s alleged change to PageRank. PageRank is the mathematical algorithm that ranks web sites in the almighty Google search engine. According to some informed speculation, Google is fighting back against people trying to game its system for higher search engine rankings, dinging the rankings of some popular sites like the Washingtonpost.com in the process. No matter what the actual cause, this is a never-ending war raging between Google and those seeking every advantage when their companies live or die by their Google ranking.

What has been our advice? Don’t get caught up in the arms race--it can only hurt you. You can’t win. Only Google knows how PageRank works and can change it at their whim. Everyone else is guessing, often badly. Trying to game the system will only lead you to do bad things, like “link farms” and writing geared for Google’s search bots rather than real human beings. The first can get you blacklisted from Google, the second from your potential customers.

What can you do? PageRank is still about links coming to your site, and the sites that link to yours. Maximize links to your sites, especially from large directories and media outlets that have a ton of incoming links to them, too. Blog. Ask your customers and partners to link to you. Work the public relations and get stories about your firm and people in trade rags, web sites, and the local/regional media. Write a case study for your customer that links to your site. Also, find a respected SEO (Search Engine Optimization) adviser, one that makes sure the basics are covered, doesn’t offer frivolous services, and offers prudent measures that don’t overstep the line. Lastly, don’t believe that the SEO firm can deliver you to the top of the charts with some cold cash but no hard work.

Here is an idea to think about and discuss. This isn’t an endorsement. Hopefully, it is the start of a conversation.

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine and the main who coined the them “the Long Tail” has an interesting post about dual IT networks—one official, the other not—at Wired’s offices. One is the corporate network that is locked down and heavily managed to protect its core functions like accounting/finance, file storage, backup and Exchange. The second is an “open” Internet connection, providing full access to Skype, instant messaging clients, and Facebook.

Now Wired magazine is about living on the digital edge, and law firms and professional services firms are not. Law firms especially need to protect data because the professional and financial ramifications of not doing so are devastating. But innovation is required in any industry, and we have touted the many advantages of new Web applications and services like RSS, social bookmarking, wikis, and more. Giving employees a playground to experiment could lead to a better way to provide client service or an innovative approach to services via these new Internet technologies.

As Anderson mentions in his blog, many corporate CIOs are implementing or seriously considering this dual networking strategy, either with physically separate networks or virtual networks. Time will tell, however, what problems could arise from this intriguing approach. At the person and workstation level those networks converge, causing potential headaches like lost productivity to fantasy sports leagues; malware pickup up from risky web sites and apps, and random questions about obscure web applications into the help desk.

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

We have been booked for a number of speaking engagements in the next few months, and it seems they all want to know about IT trends for law firms. We thought it would be fun to crowdsource our reader’s thoughts on some of the trends we see. This is what we are following:

Server Virtualization (also tied closely with disaster recovery). Virtualization technology has matured and makes real sense for firms of many sizes. Most important, it facilitates disaster recovery and business continuity efforts that many firms are implementing today.

Data-vaulting. The future of back-ups are online. Time to throw away those back-up tapes you forgot to swap anyway.

Managed IT services. Remote monitoring and management of IT for 24/7/365 coverage. Small firms get experience, expertise, and the complete package for maximum value for their IT budget, while larger firms can get preventive measures like daily server checks that would otherwise be neglected.

Online Services. Work is moving to the web. Many applications have already moved online like accounting, IP, and CRM, and more are coming. Meanwhile, newsfeeds (RSS) and search are revolutionizing information like e-mail revolutionized communication.

Outsourcing. The timeless sturm-und-drang of in-house vs. out-source extends to practically every corner of the firm, including litigation support, facilities, and even secretarial.

Paperless. Ah, the holy grail. The paperless office seems closer today than ever, but it means some drastic changes in workflow and a rethinking of your equipment and IT.

Vista/Office 2007. From the meat-and-potatoes department, the shift will eventually happen, although no one seems very excited about it.

Give us your feedback on the comments. How would you expand on our points? What are we missing?

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 a must have for every lawyer and paralegal in your office. The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization for using technology to increase transparency in the U.S. Government, published this list of “insanely useful web sites” [via LXRR] add value to the torrents of government data making it more useful, accessible, or intelligible. These sites gravitate toward the legislative arena, but include:

• a better way to search Thomas and monitor legislation through GovTrack.us;
• DOJ Documents Search (www.trainingdb.com);
• find contractor misconduct;
• searchable database of federal spending and contracting (fedspending.org); and
• search public Congressional Research Service (CRS) documents (www.opencrs.com)

These sites provide extra value through adding newsfeeds (RSS feeds) for updates not just on news, but search queries. So every time new information arrives matching a query you created—even if it was six months ago—you are alerted through a newsfeed. Others like LOUIS search multiple sources, like the Federal Register, GAO Reports, and Presidential documents. Some synthesize data from multiple sources like MapLight.org does for campaign contributions and voting records. GovTrack, which serves as the foundation for many of these sites, allows people to create their own “monitors” for bills, votes, members of Congress, and even subject areas.

Better Google Searching Tips: We humans are lazy. That is the genius behind Google. By just entering a keyword or two into a search box, it works really well. For those of us who don’t have the luxury of laziness, like paralegals, this article at Law.com’s Legal Technology has great advanced searching tips in Google.

• Choose or exclude search results from particular web sites;
• Choose the number of results per page;
• Learn how an asterisk can “fill in the blanks”; and
  
• find all the web sites linking to page or site.

30 Acrobat Tips: It’s only for Version 8 and it is promoting an online webinar for Adobe, but this PDF of 30 tips in Acrobat has some gems.

• Better conversion of TIFF and PowerPoint files;
• Choosing sheets from Excel files;
• Search PDFs in a directory;
• Optimizing file sizes; and
  
• Comparing documents.

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.

No More XP on New Computers in 2008. News is filtering through blogosphere that Microsoft will end OEM sales of Windows XP come January 2008. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, as Microsoft is in the business of selling software. Developing it is just a step in the process. What it means to law and professional firms who tend to be behind the tech curve, is to start thinking about transitioning to Vista in the next couple of years. New equipment will only come with Vista, and soon licenses and then support will disappear. The X Factor in this equation is Exchange 12 and Office 2007, which take advantage of many Vista features.

Law.com Starts Its Quest. Google got into the legal research game in a tangential way with Patents and Trademarks search, now Law.com gets into the legal search arena with Quest (via Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites) Quest searches Law.com's own extensive network of web sites, publications, and blogs, and adds in a number of law firm web sites and other legal blogs.  If anything, it provides a more narrow scope to a search, but we will wait for the reviews to see if it has value for practitioners or just a way to bolster Law.com's advertising revenue.

Lessons from the Eye of the Storm. Since it's Friday the 13th, of course we come across a disaster recovery story. This article has some practical business continuity advice from law firms that have faced hurricanes in Miami. Their formula: a bunker(!), lots of laptops, and satellite office space for lawyers. Also on display is both sides of human nature, from managers instructed to call employees and ask them what they need in the wake of disaster, to clients who call to inquire about the condition of their documents without care for the attorneys or staff.

With the official release of Windows Vista and Office 2007 today, here is our round-up of news you should know from around the Web:

• The new Office Ribbon user interface that debuts in Office 2007 will be heading to other MS Office applications such as Project and Visio.
• In case you like a lot of opinions, here is a round-up of all the Vista reviews.
• More details are emerging on the first Service Pack (SP1) for Vista, which will be security updates and hot fixes, but no improvements like the WinFS file system.
• Stories are already appearing on how to disable Vista's User Account Control (UAC). They don’t mention the bad things that will happen if users do this, just lots of fuss about how annoying UAC is.

And now for something completely different…

An effective search is all about using the right keywords. This article focuses on e-discovery but the great searching strategies—frm knowing your synonyms to checking for misspellings—will work in any search environment.

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.

This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) added full-text searching to public company financial disclosures going back the last four years in their EDGAR database. They have gone all Google with a single search box with results appearing below.  But that's about where the comparison ends.  Simple searches will yield thousands of results, quickly sending you the "Advanced Search" link to narrow down the list.  While it appears the search engine will need some honing, I imagine having full-text search capability will be a huge boon to lawyers, paralegals, accounts, and financial professionals dealing with SEC filings.

For more detail, check out the FAQ page for SEC's EDGAR full text search.

Sharing bookmarked web sites within an organization can be tremendously valuable because it unleashes the collective wisdom of its people. Each person probably has a few gem web sites or pages that others would find very useful. Unfortunately, those gems are locked up in each person’s web browser.

Using the web service Del.icio.us, however, those bookmarks are freed from the browser and can be shared quickly and easily across the firm. Those shared bookmarks are then turned into RSS feeds that can be easily distributed.

Here’s an example. An employee finds a news article on a web page that discusses developments in your market. Using the Del.ico.us extension for either the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, she bookmarks the page by clicking on a button. Up pops a dialogue box where the employee adds tags and summary information about the bookmark, and also adds it to the company’s master Del.icio.us account. Over the course of the day, 12 new bookmarks are added by various employees to the master account.

Employees (or even clients) can stay abreast of these new bookmarks through the RSS feed coming Del.icio.us, either in their newsreader, the firm’s intranet, portal or website, or to an extranet like MindPort. Even better, each tag within an account has its own RSS feed, so employees can focus on specific issues, news or client information. For instance, they can subscribe to the feed on a particular competitor to monitor its moves in the market.

This is win-win for everyone. The employee benefits because bookmarks are available wherever there is Internet access—from the office, home, or on the road. Sites and pages that they may have overlooked were spotted by someone else’s eagle eyes. Because sharing bookmarks are so simple, the organization benefits because all its employees scour the web on a wide variety of topics. Tags are a flexible organizational tool compared to folders, and can provide very targeted information.

In upcoming posts, we will explore other novel uses of RSS, such as re-mixing RSS feeds and using them to share with your communities of employees, clients, and potential clients.

This article over at CNET is a good reminder that technology is a tool for people, and people are crucial to any good process. Google, LexisNexis, Ask.com, Yahoo and other search engines will spew forth an ton of links in response to a keyword search, but your librarian will give you authoritative answers, knowing how to check credibility of sources and cross-reference with multiple sources. Even the web search companies know that there is no replacing people when it comes to searches requiring expertise, synthesizing information, or complex search strategies. They use people to augment their electronic searches with services such as Google Co-Op, Mechanical Turk, and About.com.

Also, your law librarians are changing with the times, providing great ideas for using new technologies and web services like RSS in the law office. So hug your law librarian today, and ask them for help with a search or how you can better use information in your organization.