If your firm is making the switch to VOIP, make sure you have an advocate for IT on the project, especially someone who has been through a VOIP migration before. If left unchecked, VOIP engineers and consultants can unknowingly run roughshod over the IT network, dictating changes and additional network services that can impart unforeseen consequences if not done correctly.

The IT advocate will protect the integrity and stability of the network and help avoid common pitfalls during a VOIP migration. He or she can:

• create an inventory of what network services would be impacted,
• point out design changes like the proper number of switches.
• properly setup and configure network services that the VOIP systems require, something a “phone guy” may be able to do, but will likely not have the experience and expertise to avoid any adverse effects that impact a pre-existing network infrastructure.

Going VOIP also means ceding some control over the network—especially in hosted VOIP services—and the IT advocate can help smooth that transition. Depending upon the type of service you select, you may lose control over vital network functions like NAT, port access translation, VPN and Citrix service redirections. (Access to internal systems you may have come to take for granted until they no longer operate properly). The IT advocate can help map out how to handle these critical services within the new environment. At the very least, an IT advocate will represent your network interests with the experience to help guide your VOIP installation in a way that will impact your existing infrastructure with as little negative effects as possible.

The company installing the VOIP system will work to provide the best phone system, but the IT advocate will make sure that it doesn’t come at the expense of network reliability, functionality and performance.

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.

So how about extending server-based virtualization to notebooks? Neoware (and Wyse) has been building them for a while now, and has found a suitor in computing giant HP. HP has been pushing virtualization from the hardware and storage sides, but looks to be making a bigger play in the arena with this acquisition. Between the Internet and virtualization technologies, the mainframe may be making a comeback!

How about running that database on a virtual server? Maybe not. Databases require good I/0 performance, which may not be available on a virtual machine.  This Q&A reiterates a point we have been making in our presentations on virtual computing that stresses I/O intensive applications are not the best candidates for virtual machines.

So how do I compare performance on virtual machines? VMware is glad you asked, because they just developed a benchmark to test virtual machines. So now we can await the results to see if VMware continually beats out other virtual computing competitors like Microsoft, Xen, and others using their “open” benchmark.

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!

This post at Opensource.org is a great introduction to “design thinking.” What is so different about design thinking than analytical thinking, which is so highly prized in IT?

Design is a process to generate ideas to solve problems with creativity and a sensitivity to those who will ultimately use or benefit from the solution. In fact, that sounds much like any problem solving exercise, whether it is wringing more productivity from operations or coming up with the best way to provide remote access for employees. What sets design apart, is its emphasis on the person as the ultimate consumer and visualizing possible solutions to aide others in understanding its impact, use, or benefits.

So while analytical thinking—or breaking down a problem—is great for troubleshooting, design thinking is about building up ideas toward a solution. It also emphasizes visualization of possible solutions to determine the best one through mock-ups, prototypes, demonstrations, and the like. Design thinking is great for solving larger business issues that will require innovation.

First Service Pack for Windows Vista May Land Any Day Now. According to this article at Yahoo! Tech, Microsoft is rushing out the door Windows Vista’s first service pack to fix many nagging problems and hopefully bolster sales. Speeding up file copying and shutdown times are evidently the first order of business to put some shine on the OS that has met a tepid reception critically and commercially. Many firms and corporations having been waiting for this service pack before even contemplating upgrading to Vista, which is why Microsoft may have pushed it from their announced 2008 release date. Still, many patches can create more problems than they solve, so the advice remains the same: wait and see.

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).

Your document management, accounting and finance, and CRM applications are probably using SQL Server for their internal database, making it one of the most common enterprise applications that you completely forget about. Until something goes wrong, and you are painfully aware of its presence.

SQL Server is a very stable and robust program, but that is no excuse to let it go neglected. Pop quiz: how many licenses/copies of SQL Server exist in your firm? Be sure to count those licenses for enterprise applications that use it to store their data. And while you are at it, where are the databases located? Are there maintenance plans in place and are the databases being backed up? What is their current size and rate of change?

These are just a few items you should know about your SQL databases. Becoming reacquainted with your SQL Server installations is the first step. Scheduled check-ups and a full audit will ensure that the rest of the firm can remain blissfully ignorant that one application plays such a large role.

(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.

We have mentioned before that employees are bringing the technology they use at home or on the road into the firm, a reversal from a few years ago when most people were exposed to new technologies at work. New technologies facilitate new ways of working. This article at Law.com discusses the ability of the “Internet Generation” to multitask and take on responsibilities that were once offloaded to support staff.

“…I inquired whether they were using their secretaries to type letters, make edits to briefs, enter time, etc. The response we got was not unexpected. Why would they give work to somebody else when they could do it just as fast, if not faster, themselves?”

The flip side is whether our support staff and IT are keeping up with them. Supporting staff should keep lawyers and professionals as productive as possible. What could be accomplished if those multitasking capabilities were not wasted on typing and entering time? What can the most connected generation teach the firm about online collaboration and building community using the Internet and digital tools? Of course, the mythic ability of young workers to multitask is a stereotype (like the other stereotypes that they require praise just to do what is expected of them), but can we afford to ignore the ideas of a generation that grew up with computers and the Internet?

If something worked fine, used to be that you would endure its minor glitches and idiosyncrasies that came with many years of faithful service until it just rusted out, fell apart, or blew up. Unfortunately, software isn’t like that. Case in point: those trusty Windows 2000 servers chugging along, hosting our apps from accounting to terminal services. Problem is that Microsoft dropped free support for Win 2K licenses two years ago, and paid support will go black in June 2010. In other words, we are halfway to no support whatsoever.

Those workhorse servers should be upgraded to Windows Server 2003. Soon. Especially if they are hosting mission critical applications like accounting or document management. Quite simply, the cost of supporting them will outweigh the benefits, as any issue that requires Microsoft’s involvement will likely cost you. The greater danger is that the equipment that the Win 2K Server sits on is aging as well.

Drop us a line in the comments or e-mail us if you have questions about moving specific server applications from Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003. BTW, free support for Windows XP will expire in January 2008!