With the holidays approaching, your office will be abuzz with lots of activities, many of which may fall under your supervision. You may be planning activities ranging from your office holiday party to overseeing the mailing of holiday cards to the coordination of gift giving. For busy people such as yourself, this can be a particularly stressful time of the year but you can overcome many of the organizational headaches that come with these tasks by turning your Microsoft Office Suite into your Virtual Holiday Elf!

For instance, you can use Microsoft Word or Publisher to help you create the perfect newsletter, holiday card, party invitation or firm announcement. If you are in the mood for something fancier, Microsoft PowerPoint can be used to create a unique and innovative electronic holiday card or announcement that can be easily emailed to recipients for a more dramatic effect. Try using PowerPoint’s rich graphics, sounds and animation schemes for something that’s sure to make a great impression.

Microsoft Word and Excel can be extremely practical for tracking all the back-end details such as spending, budgets, checklists, and gifts received as well as those given. Microsoft Outlook can be useful in keeping track of important dates, times and deadlines as well as leveraging tasks to other employees and keeping track of milestones with your party planning etc. For example, meeting requests in Outlook distributed to all users within your firm can easily add items to everyone’s calendars to remind them of holiday milestones such as the Firm holiday party, holiday card deadlines, etc.

And then there are the holiday cards, you can combine the power of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word to efficiently address labels or envelopes for your card announcements or newsletters. See detailed instructions on one specific scenario for doing this.

In this case, a Public Contacts folder has been created in Microsoft Exchange to serve as your Firm’s holiday card mailing list. (For large organizations or firms each department or practice group may have its own public contacts folder.) Any employee within the firm can copy existing contacts into this list for inclusion in your mailing. This reduces the need for manual data entry and allows for a faster and more efficient collection of data. Microsoft Word will then be merged with this list in order to turn your contacts into data that can be printed directly onto envelopes or labels. The resulting merge document can also be saved for future uses. And as a reminder, the steps outlined may vary slightly depending on your version of Microsoft office, integrations, etc.

Workshare is a tremendous utility that should be a key component of any attorney's workflow, if it isn't already. Workshare Professsional provides document comparison, review and security, available "right-out-of-the-box" as they say. SAGE can help to get the most out of this valuable tool, from purchase through to training and support.

Know what to buy. What is the right product for your firm and for the way you work? Do you need to Professional with all of its features, or just Protect for metadata removal or Compare for document comparison? What payment option makes more sense for you - a subscription license, or a one-time fee. Based on your needs, SAGE can advise you which product and licensing scheme would be best for your firm, factoring in cost, need, and return on investment.

Configuration. At the heart of Workshare are policies – policies are settings that determine what Workshare does and under what conditions. Getting those policies right is vital to getting the maximum benefit from Workshare. At SAGE, we work closely with firms to craft Workshare policies to meet specific needs. We then provide documentation on those policies for reference, review and future revision as necessary.

Training & Support. SAGE provides group and one-on-one training in Workshare so users are well versed in the features and workflow to make them highly productive. An attorney with a quick question can call SAGE's OnSight Support Center every business day from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and most holidays.

Getting the most out of Workshare is easy with the right help. SAGE is always prepared with expert staff and our keen focus on doing what is best for your firm.

As long as there have been law firms, there has been some form of document management system (DMS).NetDocuments takes DMS onto the Internet, marking the next evolution of the concept. Instead of residing in a number of servers in your firm server room, NetDocument stores your documents in secure datacenters, all interfaced via the web, a web browser, and your Microsoft Office applications. Being an online solution, NetDocuments' provides clear advantages in availability, search, and backup.

Everywhere you go these days there is Internet access, whether through wi-fi at the coffee shop or through a 3G cellular connection and card. With NetDocuments, your documents are available securely anywhere you have Internet access, such as at home, at the client, or even the park outside the client's campus headquarters. Lose your wi-fi connection, no need to worry if you have "echoing" turned on. With echoing, NetDocuments keeps a local copy of recent documents and syncs it once Internet access is restored.

NetDocuments not only encrypts your documents stored in its secure datacenters; but uses the same encryption methods for transmitting documents across the Web that are used in security operations.

But accessibility means nothing if you cannot find your documents, and search is another area where NetDocuments excels. Too often we encounter clients who have abandoned searching their DMS system because the complex and delicate search engine (specifically, the "indexer") has broken. The client lacks the expertise to fix it, so the attorneys go without search. NetDocuments uses the excellent FAST search engine on your documents, and maintains a staff whose sole job is to make sure the search engine is operating at maximum performance. Therefore searching is always available, without any upkeep on your part.

Finally, for NetDocuments monthly subscription fee you are also getting a disaster recovery solution included. Your documents are backed up and mirrored between NetDocuments secure and hardened datacenters. Should some disaster befall your local offices, your documents are still safe and accessible. The cost savings compared to a traditional disaster recovery scenario including replicating servers and data in a remote site are substantial. Going with NetDocuments for DMS also means getting a DR solution for your documents at the same time for a very lost cost compared to traditional DR solutions.

So while some may resist the movement to data and applications available through the Internet, "the Cloud" as the current jargon calls it, the benefits from NetDocuments are clear and compelling. Google-style speed and performance in search; practically anytime/anywhere availability and built-in disaster recovery for a predictable monthly cost make managing your documents in the Cloud a better option.