June 2004 Archives

I recently wrote an article for Searcher Magazine called "Managing Your E-Mail Remotely - Advice on Maintaining Your E-Mail Relationship." (Sorry to say the full-text is not on the Information Today web site.)

In the article I discuss web-based email, as well as remote desktop access via tools such as GotomyPC.com. So I was particularly interested in a PC World article this month, "Access Your Desktop From Wherever You May Be" which describes how to use free tools to remotely connect to a computer at another location.

If you're still looking for the perfect RSS reader, or just want to get started using RSS, take a look at the PC World article, News on Demand. Editor's Pick is the feature-rich reader called FeedDemon.

But don't just go for the easy choice. You'll want to review the article carefully as each reader reviewed has it's advantages. If you want your RSS feeds delivered to Outlook, Newsgator may be the one for you. To access RSS feeds from different computers and different locations, you'll like my choice, Bloglines, which ran a close second to FeedDemon for Editor's Pick. Pluck RSS Reader displays feeds in Internet Explorer, another interesting option.

What's YOUR favorite RSS reader?

My postings have been a bit sporadic this month due to several trips to Sacramento to visit a litter of pups sired by our Belgian Tervuren, Raider. Last weekend, to Raider's utter disgust, we returned with a little girl from the litter who we've named FlashFire's Casablanca Rose, or Cassie for short.

She's been quite the distraction around here, but she has to rest sometime, so I'm trying to use nap time to catch up on my blogging or sometimes even shower. In the meantime, I thought I'd share a picture, okay, two pictures, so you can see that I'm not biased when I say she's the cutest puppy in the world.

The results are in and the votes have been tallied. Matthew Parsons, in conjunction with excited utterances' Joy London, recently conducted an online survey of the legal KM community. A discussion of the findings is published this month in Legal IT in an article entitled Share the Knowledge.

If you use Word you need to understand the ramifications of using Word's tracking feature. While track changes is helpful for monitoring every change to a document, and is especially useful when collaborating on a document with others, it has a dark side. If you don't remove the tracking when the document is done, anyone who reads it can go back and see what you removed and changed. In legal situations this can be critical, but even with less contentious parties you might want to be more circumspect.

PC Magazine's article, "Revealing Codes", details what can go wrong, and tells you how to avoid revealing more than you intended by using Word configuration options and tools. However, they don't mention one alternative that seems simple and reliable; don't send the document to the recipient in Word format, instead save it to PDF, especially if it's going outside the firm.

I'll be giving a presentation in July at the American Association on Law Libraries conference about Adobe Acrobat, similar to what I did last year at Internet Librarian. But I'm in a quandary regarding which version to show, 5.0 or 6.0. So do me a favor, take this month's LawLibTech poll and let me know what version, if any, you have on your desktop. You'll find the poll on the right-hand side of the front page.

Confused about the differences between Adobe Acrobat's free reader and the software? Then take a look at Dennis Kennedy's Frequently Asked Questions on Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Lawyers.

June 27, 2004 - Thanks to those who answered the survey! The results are...

On April 1st, Google announced their free web-based email service called Gmail, currently in "preview release and limited test." An astounding 1 gigabyte of space is included as well as, what else, but a robust search engine designed to make archives and folders for organizing email, and for that matter, the act of deleting email, totally unnecessary. (Most free web-based email offers storage in the one-digit megabyte range.)

Incredulous industry watchers were uncertain....was this actually an April Fool's Day joke? It's been almost two months now, and I think it's safe to say that Gmail is no joke. But the hub-bub surrounding the product has been entertaining. If you haven't been following the Gmail controversy, let me summarize for you. Of course, it's all third-hand....I wasn't one of the select few who received and invitation to take Gmail for a spin. [sigh]

At Paul Hastings we spent considerable amount of effort last year reviewing various search technologies, both in terms of "universal" search (that is finding information/data from a multitude of sources) and more targeted search solutions, such as West KM. This said, we found the problems that the various approaches are solving are different and thus we elected to pursue a two-prong strategy covering both types of knowledge searches detailed below.

Document management systems (DMS) typically promise to provide robust full-text searching across entire document collections in an organization. In larger firms, which arguably have the most to gain by leveraging the knowledge housed in their DMS, that promise hasn't been realized, at least in part due to an inability to search across libraries in different locations, the lack of an intuitive search interface, and incorrect profiling by users. In connection with our discussion of enterprise search engines, Dennis Kennedy asks whether DMS are broken, and if so, what this means given the money spent on such systems. Very good questions...anyone have any answers?

External content, including news, is often an important component of corporate portals. Content vendors such as Factiva, Lexis, Westlaw, etc. try to accommodate customers by creating "portlets", or small, modular applications, for the various portals their customers might use. But as the number of portal products proliferate, this task becomes more burdensome and perhaps unrealistic. (Sorry, I just read an article on alliteration in the L.A. Times, and I couldn't resist.)