Here are a few gems from the World Wide Mind that should interest you on a Wednesday morning.

Businesses Could Thank YouTube One Day. Nowadays we enjoy our T1s in the office and broadband connections at home, and perhaps pine for some more bandwidth when you can't get your e-mail because your co-worker is watching a video on YouTube. Don't rat out your mate just yet, because YouTube just may be making it worthwhile for telecoms invest in bandwidth and up your connection speed. It seems you have Napster to thank for what you have now, but the real payoff comes when the online document review with co-counsel in three different states moves at light speed.

Don't Go Changing, To Your Clients, Customers...In another great example of pushing a metaphor to the limits without jumping the shark, here is great post on not letting your client-firm relationships become like a bad marriage by changing. Everyone one is so attentive and considerate while dating (selling), but then don't listen or send flowers once the deal is sealed. Avoid this by paying attention to detail, really listen to what they are saying, and behave like you want to marry them all over again. (Where was this post on Valentines's Day?)

You Told Me to Do It, So It's Not Going To Happen? Ever wonder why clients and customers don't take the advice for which they paid us hard money? The psychological terms is called the Principle of Reactance: reactance: a person's tendency to resist social influences that they perceive as threats to their autonomy. This explains why many people act contrary to good advice, even if they commissioned it, and can occur unconsciously. The anecdote is to couch the advice in terms that doesn' appear to encroach on their freedom, but expands it.

Don't Practice Law, Be A Manager. This post discusses the pros and cons of using non-practicing lawyers in management positions like CMOs and CIOs. While they bring business and management experience and skills practicing lawyers often lack, often it is hard for them to fit into the culture and be accepted in it.

…or IT Director, or Administrator whose duties include IT. It sure can be a thankless job: No one notices when everything is running smoothly but one little thing goes wrong like the Blackberry server crashing, and everyone points their finger at you. Here are some more professional hazards from both the top and bottom…

Are you leading changes in technology and how your company uses it, or are you just setting “acceptable use” policies? There is a tension between innovation and operations that IT Directors, CIOs, et al have to manage. Leadership wants a tight ship, but at the same time might want a few more suggestions out of you for productivity improvements. In a recent Forrester survey, 60 percent of CEOs like their CIOs, but less than a third of the time viewed them as leading the charge in innovation or process improvement.

The Young Bucks think you are the Dinosaur. Another tension is between generations within companies, between those who have learned IT on the job and those that have grown up with it. Those young people who grew up with Instant Messaging question why that port is blocked and why they can’t Skype their friend in Europe. They just don’t understand that to ensure a consistent experience for everyone, certain limits need to be set which means locking down the desktop.

So the lessons learned from these criticisms: keep the lights on but be proactive about have to help the business improve through technology; and be a little more open to ideas from the young ‘uns. So to manage all that you will probably need a little help every now and then from vendors and consultants unless you already walk on water.

Here is one for your long term radar. Google’s nascent office suite is going to a paid model called Google Apps Premier Edition and is in testing with corporate players like GE. While challenges to Microsoft’s hegemony in office suites have come and gone, Google’s challenge is qualitatively different because it comes through the web browser rather than sitting on the desktop.

The advantages of this method are:

• Google can control the user experience while maintaining most of the code on their servers.
• This means a subscription model rather than licensing (reportedly around $50/year), that could undercut Microsoft's pricing.
• Goodbye to the days of large refresh projects upgrading everyone’s workstations to the latest version and less maintenance for individual computers.
• Updates won't be every three-five years, but will be added whenever Google rolls them out.

While other professional services firms may be interested in this model, we don’t see law firms rushing out to adopt Google’s approach until security and confidentiality concerns can be met. Not to mention the fact that functionality on web-based office applications will need a couple of years to mature. As we mentioned before, a hybrid model where firms can host the office applications on their own servers for delivery through web browsers would be the best method.

While we won't like seeing our technology refresh and upgrading business go away, web-based applications will likely play a very large role in IT in the next few years. Even Microsoft is in the game with the new version of Outlook Web Access and their Live web-based applications.

Last week, Microsoft matched its record of fixes in its monthly security update.  With all the updates coming from Microsoft, “Patch Tuesday” is getting up there with “Hump Day,” but still lagging way behind “Manic Monday” and “TGIF.”

With all these patches, here is a corollary to the law of unintended consequences: test any patches before deploying them to servers and workstations on the network. This is now become one of cardinal rules of IT. Don’t expect Microsoft or any other vendor to have exhaustedly tested any patches they have released. Patches themselves are often rushed fixes to vulnerabilities and exploits, where speed is generally more prized than quality or stability. To be fair, accounting for every possible computing environment is impossible. Microsoft will even push the envelope on what is considered a “critical patch”: like releasing Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) as a critical patch. IE7 broke many web applications due to changes in its architecture.

As part of our SAGE OnSight service, we test all patches before deploying them to the networks we manage for our clients. This practice has been instrumental in the high degree of up-time, stability and reliability our clients enjoy.

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.

A couple of posts we came across today in the blogosphere made us think about the type of people we hire at SAGE.

Since its inception over ten years ago, SAGE has always hired engineers and staff that are not only experts in their field, but excellent communicators, take the initiative, and place a premium on customer service. We feel that this has been instrumental in SAGE’s success, and why our OnSight service is taking off. You would expect communication and customer service skills in the great folks who man our OnSight Support Center, but it is just as important for an engineer to explain the business and operational implications of complex technical issues and understand the customer’s needs, usually expressed in completely non-technical ways.

This is the culture SAGE has fostered over the years. It doesn’t matter whether one works in IT, law, final services, or the restaurant business. Check out restaurateur Danny Meyer’s hospitality quotient for new hires (via Signal vs. Noise). Meyer sees the hospitality quotient as 51 percent of the job, the other 49 percent being technical ability. For the most part, this is what SAGE looks for in its employees.

• optimism and kindness,
• curiosity about learning,
• an exceptional work ethic,
• a high degree of empathy, and
• self-awareness and integrity.

We also look to our people to take the initiative, because many times they are on-sight at the client and must react quickly but intelligently. We don’t hire sheep. Seth Godin explained the perils of hiring sheep in this screed against what he has termed: “Sheepwalking.” It is a great read for any organization.

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!