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.

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.

Now that you have hung your shingle you are thinking about your IT needs. Not just the laptops and Internet connection for you and your partner or two, but a year or two down the road when the practice takes off. That was the topic that SAGE's fearless leader, George Nicholson, spoke about at the 2008 DC Judicial Bar and Conference last Friday, April 11, 2008. George's advice to small firms and those attorneys looking to strike out on their own: address as many IT requirements as possible with the resources you have available.

For any small firm, IT purchasing is a matter of walking the line between getting by with the IT that will work today, or buying IT for tomorrow's growth. The accounting and finance package that works great for three attorneys will fall apart when there are twenty. The cost to upgrade to the mid-market package includes the price of the software, plus the cost of converting the current data from the old system, training, consulting, and any impact on productivity and billable hours. Viewed from that perspective, does it make more sense to buy the mid-market package from the outset?

This calculus--part crystal ball, part gamble, part investment--is the balancing act that George spoke about as part of the panel discussion. Having a good technology partner becomes vital to help you come up with a calculus that is right for your firm. Come back because we will have more posts about this topic.

eDiscovery in litigation cases means data, data and more data. The end of days of delivering data on CDs and DVDs are fast approaching.  For the past 2 years, we have been using portable hard drives to transfer data from one entity to another.

• The clients provide their data to the law firm.
• The litigation support team sends data to the vendors for processing.
• The vendors deliver the processed data to the litigation support team.
• The law firm produces their data to the government agency or opposing counsel.

In late 2005, our Director of Litigation Support Services worked on a Second Request litigation case where she ended up with 70 portable hard drives in her office containing data received from the vendor on a rolling basis. The data on them was then copied onto the server and loaded into Concordance for attorney review in house, at the insistence of the attorneys.

Your litigation support team should have a stock of portable hard drives in their possession. There is nothing worse than having to run out to a store at the last minute to purchase a drive. Lost is the opportunity to get volume discounts or good Internet sales, and what if the store is sold out?

The smaller 3.5 inch portable hard drives are very functional and easy to transport. They are small, lightweight and range in size from 60 to 320 gigabytes.  They also have nifty carrying cases available in different colors.  At the very least, you should try to stick with the same brand and purchase a variety of disk sizes.  The well known brands like Western Digital, Seagate and Lacie are usually a safe bet, although we have all heard stories about “smoking hard drives” and “bad disk drives”.

If the hard drive is used for production, the client can be charged for the hard drive and a new replacement hard drive can be purchased for in-house stock.  The hard drives can be recycled over and over again for different sets of data in one case.  If the hard drives are used for different cases, a disk wiping software like BC Wipe should be used.

If you have any other tips on using portable hard drives in litigation support, please share with everyone in the comments.

A friend of ours working in the e-discovery processing business recently received an 18 gigabyte PST that had to be processed. In the e-discovery arena, a first step with electronic data we receive is to search for any PSTs and determine their size. The larger the file, the longer it will take to process for attorney review. In this instance, the immediate problem was that the file could not be copied to the network server. Every attempt failed as the copy process kept timing out.

Our friend went to “The Oracle”, as he likes to call Google, and searched for a software solution. He found a program called GatherBird Copy Large Files. After installing the shareware version, he copied the file without issue. Whew! Today’s technical glitch solved.

We all need to be prepared before we find ourselves in a similar situation. If you know of other products available to the litigation support and e-discovery community capable of copying very large files, please post a comment and share your experiences.

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.

Here is a quick update on where you can find SAGE experts speaking on IT topics of interest to the legal and professional services communities.

A Mighty Outlook and PowerPoint 2007 – September 19, 2007 at Noon: SAGE’s Dave Carns and Tony Buffkin wrap up our three part series on Office 2007 for the Information Services and Technology Section of the ALA Capital Chapter. The focus this time is on the latest version of PowerPoint and whether Outlook 2007 is up to the daunting task of managing our email, information, and contacts.

IT Solutions for Small Law Firms – September 25, 2007 at Noon. The Small Firm Management Section of the ALA Capital Chapter is hosting this event. The question for small firms is always how to do more with less? Outsourcing, web services, and mobility provide exciting opportunities for small firms, letting them act big while still maintaining their agility. We will look at these opportunities in detail while also discussing “bread-and-butter” issues like Windows Vista and Office 2007.

We are also firming up speaking engagements on disaster recovery and other topics in October and beyond.

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.

Let’s face it: selling is a finely honed science, complete with product demonstrations and presentations aimed to disarm the most cold-hearted penny-pinchers out there. We have seen hard-nosed negotiators swoon during sales pitches over enterprise applications like document management, ready to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars in the heat of the moment. Cooler heads often prevail, thankfully, but applications always look great in general, when looking at the level of “features” and “benefits” only. When it comes to really knowing how great a fit an application is, the devil is –as they say – in the details.

Here is a tip to better evaluate software.

1. Make a list of the “killer” features that you believe will be most important and/or beneficial to your firm.

2. Have the sales rep provide references of other firms using those same “killer” features.

3. Call the references and talk about their practical experience using those “killer features specifically. Focus on the benefits they have realized; hidden costs; and user complaints and compliments.

Keep discussions specific. People can be overly complimentary when talking in general about an application. When focusing on particular items, they can be brutally honest. And that is what you need to make a fair evaluation.

Practically every web service and site worth its salt is offering its information through a newsfeed. With Google Reader or the newsreader of your choice, here are some ways to gather business intelligence on industries, clients, and competitors.

Subscribe to feeds from company web sites. You can get press release and investor information from the likes of Pfizer. Apple has a number of feeds available. Still some old economy companies like Ford don’t have any feeds, but consumer products giant Johnson & Johnson is on the bandwagon.

Create feeds from Google News searches. Keyword search and create a newsfeed from the results. Search for the term “consumer recall” and Google News creates a feed that will update every time a news story matches the query. It works just like the “Google Alerts” feature, but without adding to all the junk in your e-mail inbox.

Even “old media” has jumped on the newsfeed bandwagon. The “Old Gray Lady” herself, the New York Times, has many RSS feeds available. In the left coast, the Los Angeles Times has scores of feeds. Local media can provide intel on local markets. (See Washingtonpost.com and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune).

What others around the Net are bookmarking. Social bookmarking site Del.icio.us can provide newsfeeds based on tags of sites its users bookmark. For instance, you can grab the feeds for “biotechnolgy” and see what people want to save to read for later, share with their friends or keep for reference.

The Job Market: Great intel can be found in whose hiring. Craigslist has feeds for Job postings by title and lets you focus on regional markets. Job listings in the classifieds of newspapers are also available as newsfeeds. Nationally, Monster.com has RSS feeds for job titles and categories, and some regions.

Blogs about clients and industries: Practically every blog comes with a newsfeed these days. And some of the best news comes out of industry blogs like Techcrunch, that leads the way in reporting on Silicon Valley. Google’s Blog Search lets you create feeds based on keyword searches just like Google News. Technorati lets you set up feeds for tags and keyword searches.

Have any more? Let us know!

We have updated our separate newsfeed of IT news for law and professional services firms filtered by the experts at SAGE. You can also view it online here (Thanks to the wonder that is Google Reader).

We read a ton of newsfeeds to stay updated on the constantly changing information technology field, and we comment in this blog on just a small fraction of what we read. There are a number of stories that just don’t make the cut for the blog, but are newsworthy nonetheless for IT pros and Administrators in law and professional services firms. Those stories are available through the feed, and you don’t have to wade through all the stories we do in a given day.

Some stories appearing just today in the feed include:

• Smarter Ways to Work With PDFs
• Spam Filter Causes Lawyer to Miss Court Date
• Court Ruling Could Have Major Impact on E-Discovery
• Microsoft eyes new ways to sell Office

On Wednesday, July 18, 2007, SAGE and the IS&T section of the ALA Capital Chapter will hold our second session in a series of presentations on the ins-and-outs of Microsoft’s Office 2007 Suite. This session covers the exciting new feature enhancements to Word and Excel 2007: what is new, what has changed; and what that means for your everyday tasks.

SAGE’s Director of Consulting David Carns and Application Specialist Tony Buffkin will guide attendees through common tasks and show how the new versions of Office and Excel improve productivity and compare to the older versions. They will also discuss issues such as integration with other systems like document management, among others.

The session will be held at the offices of Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP, located in downtown, Washington, DC at 2120 L St. NW - Suite 700. To register, please contact Kenny Mitchell at 202-383-3402 (email: kmitchell@wbklaw.com) or Scott Forrest at 202-822-8282 (email: sforrest@hsdwdc.com).

This Wednesday, June 27, 2007, SAGE and the Information Systems and Technology Section of the ALA Capital Chapter kick off  a series of presentations on the ins-and-outs of Microsoft’s Office 2007. The first meeting covers the basics about Office 2007: what is new, what has changed; and what it all means.

SAGE’s Director of Consulting, David Carns, will cut through the confusion over the many versions of the office suite, the “ribbon,”, the new file formats, and other changes for which your firm should prepare. This session sets the stage for more in-depth reviews of each application: Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. The focus will be on preparing your staff and firm for the transition to Office 2007.

The session will be from Noon to 1:30 p.m. at the offices of Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP, located in downtown, Washington, DC at 2120 L St. NW - Suite 700. To register, please contact Kenny Mitchell at 202-383-3402.

Adobe’s “Acrobat for Legal Professionals” blog announced that they will be conducting a webinar on May 24 on document security that may be worthwhile. They will cover discerning whether PDFs have been tampered with, revoking PDFs and other security features. Many of the basics like restricting printing and copying will be covered as well. Registration is through Adobe’s web site.

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.

We at SAGE are excited about all of the advances in web technologies.  Between Outlook Web Access, LegalKey's Attorney Desktop , Google Maps and GMail, we all know that today's web is nearly a replacement for desktop applications.  That realization will shape much of the thinking we do for future software and hardware deployments. 

So that's the good news.  The bad news is that the more sophisticated the web gets, the less we know about how secure it really is.  In the early days of the web, the technology was so simple, that there were very few security implications - it was a "READ ONLY" web.  Today, not only can websites allow you to read and write data (thanks in large part to the AJAX revolution), but they can do so without you knowing it.  Hackers picked up on this pretty quickly and there are now many Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks that plague unsophisticated web developers.  The biggest problem with XSS is that there is nothing you can do to prevent the problem, since the problems the hackers are exploiting are actually the very features in web that make it so useful today.

What should you do as an individual?  The web is here to stay.  You cannot avoid it: clients require it, coworkers prefer it and, chances are, you have too much invested already (family photos on line, personal email, etc).  So the best advice is to always visit reputable web sites that take security to heart, such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.  Those companies have headed the hackers off at the pass and have all but eliminated XSS vulnerabilities in their products.

What should you do as an IT Professional?  Ask your web-based vendors what their web security strategy is and what measures they have against XSS attacks. They should be happy to share with you the details of their approach.

The newest engineer to join the crack troops here at SAGE is Colin Marks, who as a certified Cisco Network Engineer brings a wealth of networking and WAN experience. One appliance he has found that can help large firms is PacketShaper. It allows companies to easily manage their bandwidth to maximize performance and ensure quality of service. PacketShaper and other like applications let you prioritize, segregate, and otherwise manage your bandwidth. For example, dedicate a certain percentage for the VOIP system and give priority to Citrix applications over web surfing, especially on draft days for fantasy sports.

Another advantage to this class of network appliance is the easy management, bypassing the arduous task of manually configuring your routers. A GUI (Graphical user Interface) to set priorities or limits, monitor performance and get reports makes optimizing performance a much easier endeavor.

Just a quick plug for our SAGE Wisdom Webinars that we conduct every Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 pm Eastern time.  This week we are discussing managed IT solutions using our SAGE OnSight service.  In particular, we will be emphasizing how you don't have to give up control of your IT infrastructure and assets will getting the benefit of managed services, like remote monitoring, support center, and site visits.

If you are interested,  sign-up online here.

Upcoming SAGE Wisdom Webinars will cover Sentinel, our tool to perform daily server checks and some monitoring; 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 Wisdom Webinar schedule can always be found at this link and is updated monthly.

We get our fair share of Acrobat PDF questions in our OnSight Support Center. Some of the most asked questions we receive also seem to be on Adobe’s priority list for Acrobat 8. From Adobe’s Blog Acrobat for Legal Professionals are a couple of valuable how-tos:

Creating a Transparent Signature Stamp: since many documents never touch paper these days, knowing how to place your “John Hancock” on an electronic document is valuable. This post walks through the steps for creating a stamp in PDF that is transparent so it will fit in boxes and on lines in forms.

How to insert an image into a PDF document. Why this wasn’t easier to do before floors us, but the process has been streamlined in version 8.

When Interwoven updated its WorkSite 8.2 Resource Kit late last year, they made some enhancements to the WorkSpace Generator that are real time-savers for people administering Interwoven DMS. We only wish we had these tools earlier for a few prickly projects.

• Greater flexibility in creating or modifying workspaces from templates, such as creating or deleting certain folders to tailor the workspace – this is really if you initially set up the workspace incorrectly or the requirements change. Before there was no easy/low cost way to change existing workspaces before this. Now, you can change the template, then go back and adjust workspaces based on that template
• Additional wildcard fields in folder meta data that permits dynamically building different types of workspaces. For instance, if the folder structure is the same for different practice area workspaces, but the names of some folders is different, you now only need one template and the wildcard fields can be used to customize the name
• Repopulating the content of existing workspaces: important in rebuilding corrupted or accidentally deleted workspaces. The catch is that the original workspace needs to be created by the 8.2 version of the WorkSpace Generator.
• Use existing workspaces as a template for new workspaces.

These improvements make managing and administering workspaces in Interwoven much easier and address some very tough problems we have encountered in implementations for many of our clients.

The good folks at ALISM have invited us to talk about virtual computing for their 2/21 Luncheon in Washington, DC. SAGE's own Doug Daniel will be surveying the landscape, exploding some myths, and discussing the real advantages virtual computing has for law and professional services firms.

Be sure to sign-up over at ALISM's web site, ALISM.org.  Registration is $25 for members, $45 for non-members.  It's a real deal when you figure in that lunch is included!

Virtual computing has been around for a long time, but only recently has it become one of the most exciting areas of IT. Below are just some of the virtual computing news on the Web in the past few days:

• The virtualization market is very real and growing;
• You may be just getting into virtualization, but others are already pushing "Virtualization 2.0";
• Leading virtualization software developed VMware has released with a small and medium business (SMB) bundle;

We will be touching on those news items and more.  We hope to see you at the February 21, 2007 ALSIM Luncheon.

Here is another handy tip from our wonderful application specialists and support staff manning the OnSight Support Center.

Need to swap the second and third paragraphs in the document you're working on? Don't waste time cutting and pasting or dragging text around within your document using the mouse.

• Click on the paragraph you'd like to move
• Hold down Shift+Alt plus the Up or Down arrow key depending on the direction in which you want to move.

Each time you press the arrow key, the selected paragraph to jumps over one adjacent paragraph.

As an added bonus, you can use the same keystrokes to transpose rows in a Word table!

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.

For Election Day, the great folks in our OnSight Support Center have two tips for you... but having nothing to do with elections. Anyway, here is a way to format cells in Excel quickly and how to save all open Word documents at once.

Format Excel Cells Fast

If you want quick access to the Format Cells dialog box in Microsoft Excel to modify items like type style, alignment or borders, select the cell you want to format and press CTRL+1.

Save All Your Word Documents at Once

If you know the "secret" key, you can save or close all of your open documents in one step.

• Hold down SHIFT and click the "File" menu. When you hold down the SHIFT key, two new options appear on the File menu: "Close All and Save All."
• To save all open documents at once, select "Save All." Or to close all your open documents, click "Close All." Word will prompt you to save your changes before closing any documents.

Note: Some document management systems may not allow you to use this trick.

Earlier this month, we posted on how to use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia to capture the collective intelligence of your employees and turn them into news feeds for everyone to see. Today we will discuss how you to use social bookmarking to put your firm, organization, or department at the heart of your network of clients, colleagues, or employees.

Sharing bookmarks through del.icio.us provides an easy and low-cost way to keep up a constant stream of valuable information. Some examples are:

• Keep employees aware of tips,tricks, tutorials, workarounds, or reference materials.
• Stay in constant contact with clients by feeding them important developments or identify opportunities and potential hazards.
• Attract prospects and establish your expertise with them.

Since del.icio.us creates newsfeeds (RSS feeds), everyone in your network stays current without the need for update e-mails that might be ignored or trapped in spam filters.

Social bookmarking also allows you to tap the collective wisdom of your network. With del.icio.us, you can invite each member in the group or other colleagues to share their bookmarks with you. Be sure to edit those bookmarks so they fit your purpose or theme. Everyone benefits from having more eyes keeping watch, and more brains thinking of useful and thought-provoking content.

As the fountainhead, you will become firmly established as the hub of your network, and will become indispensable to your clients, employees, and colleagues.

Today, Doug Daniel and George Nicholson are giving a seminar on the maturation of virtual computing technologies for the ALA Capital Chapter's Information Services and Technology section. Server rooms of the future will be incorporating virtual machines in addition to physical servers. From the presentation, here are some of the uses for virtual computing:

• Test and development
• Server consolidation
• Production servers
• Remote office
• Disaster recovery
• No more “desktop” servers
• IT agility and responsiveness

Doug and George make the point that forget the hype of huge savings that many virtual computing vendors tout, the real payoff is in the agility and responsiveness that virtual computing affords the IT department.

We will be posting with more from the seminar, so keep checking this blog.

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.

In Part 1, we discussed the many things IT has to “sell” internally. What makes selling IT particularly difficult is that those things we have to sell can be costly to purchase, implement, and maintain. This forces IT to argue on the basis of return on investment (ROI), rather than immediately realizable cost-savings or profits. Much more difficult, however, is that IT often has to promote behavioral changes to employees that aren’t necessarily beneficial to either the individual or firm in the short term, but are tremendously so in the longer term. Promoting proper e-mail management and document profiling often feels like trying to sell paying down the national debt.

Training in particular is the great bugaboo for attorneys and other professionals, who often cite the alpha excuse of billable time to avoid sitting in a training session. However, they think nothing of the lost productivity (i.e. billable hours) when they cannot use the application or have lost data because they did something incorrectly. IT also has to sell the value of “profiling” documents for DMS systems, which has negative value to the individual because of the time involved, but has tremendous beneficial value when that document is retrieved much quicker later on.

One suggestion: don’t just sell on the merits alone. Get allies. In particular, find a non-IT champion who is a partner or peer that has high credibility within the firm. Sell them, and others will follow their example. Your allies can also help translate the benefits into terms non-technical people can understand.