“It’s time to upgrade.”

Few other phrases are so fraught with peril, so steeped in emotional baggage, or instill fear in the heart of the courageous. It starts arguments and divides law firms into warring camps. Perhaps only the threat of losing your Blackberry is more sinister.

So someone in your firm wants to upgrade, but why? Is it borne out of necessity, or—worse yet—the response to a slick sales pitch or the fetish of a technology-dabbling partner. No matter how smoothly an upgrade is performed, the process is inherently disruptive to users who are comfortable and productive with their current tools. There will be some downtime and loss of productivity, plus increased strain on your help desk. To justify any upgrade, whether hardware or software, there must be truly compelling benefits such as compatibility, stability, expiring vendor support, or business reasons backed by real ROI and productivity enhancements.

So Why Are We Doing This?

In a perfect world, the decision to

upgrade technology in a law firm would be a dispassionate, well-reasoned decision that carefully weighed all the options and systematically evaluated costs vis-à-vis the benefits. But really it’s like this: the “techie” partner attended a sales demonstration and is convinced that an upgrade is absolutely vital to the firm for reasons that can’t quite be fully expressed; or a few partners claim that the network is slow and complain to the IT Director, Firm Administrator, and Managing Partner until they cave.

In light of these scenarios, here are four objective criteria to determine whether it is time to upgrade:
business needs warrant it; to become compatible with clients or other businesses; stability issues; and/or upgrades forced by software product lifecycles.

Unfortunately, only half of these reasons may result from circumstances under your firm’s control. Trends in corporate or legal information technology, or worse yet, a large software maker decides they...

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In the past several months, SAGE has bolstered our integration partnerships with class-leading legal technology providers. These partnerships meet our high standards for providing real benefit to law firms through integrating with existing processes and generating substantial productivity enhancements. When it comes to the design, integration, training, and implementation of these products, SAGE’s signature top-flight service is at your disposal.

Our current list of integration partners includes:

• Interwoven. Interwoven delivers the foundation to facilitate team-based collaboration on document-intensive processes with its innovative MailSite document management system.
• Softwise/Innova. Softwise/Innova™ is a comprehensive document automation development platform, designed to seamlessly integrate with Word 97, 2000, XP and 2003.
• Workshare. Workshare enables the fastest, the most accurate, and most secure review and exchange of business critical documents.
• WORLDOX. WORLDOX® GX is an enterprise-capable document management system featuring tight integration with the latest Windows operating systems, Office productivity suites, e-mail applications, and Active Directory.

SAGE can install and configure these applications, as well as integrate it with your current systems such as MS Outlook, CRM applications, and others. SAGE adds value in custom development and additional functionality targeted precisely to your firm. When it comes to getting your people using these applications to their potential, SAGE can provide top-flight training and support.

Although SAGE has partnered with these industry leaders, rest assured that our founding and operating principals of putting the client first will not be compromised. We have always prided ourselves at SAGE

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From the Help Desk

The SAGE OnSight Help Desk fields many calls from users. Here are some tips to work smarter.

Create a Contact from an
E-mail Message
1. Open the e-mail message.
2. Right-click on name on From: line.
3. Select Add to Contacts.
4. Add information, then click Save and Close button.

Find a Contact Quickly
1. On the toolbar, type the name of the contact you want to find in the Find a Contact box. Press Enter.
2. If more than one contact with that name, select the contact from the Choose Contact box.
3. Select OK.

These are just some news that appears each day in “The Filter,” the place to cut through the clutter for important legal tech and admin news.

The Browser Wars are back, baby! Internet Week compares the top four challengers: MS Internet Explorer 7; Firefox 1.5; Opera; and one call Marathon or something. Check out the browser comparison screenshots.

Article on the emerging role of practice management professionals in law firms.

So what is this Web 2.0 thing anyway? Here is an overview of the many forms of Web 2.0, an idea still groping for a clear definition.

This might be the first law firm to dump Blackberries because of its legal troubles: Prudent, hysterical, or just rehab? You decide.