bruceb news

Previously:
Fear of Exchange
Moving Mail Online With Microsoft Online Services

Small businesses should strongly consider having their Outlook mailboxes hosted on Exchange Servers run by Microsoft for a small monthly fee. I’m going to recommend this to a number of my clients and I encourage anyone interested to contact me to talk it through. I’d like anyone in a business with 2-20 employees to read this carefully!

For businesses currently running Exchange in an onsite server (usually as part of Small Business Server), the move to hosted services does not significantly change the experience of using […] continued

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Previously:
Passwords: computer login
Passwords: e-mail
Passwords: Google Accounts & Windows Live ID
Passwords: password managers
Passwords: online passwords and LastPass

Let’s go over a few facts of life.

No one is enjoying the need to have a lot of passwords. It’s hard to remember the passwords, of course, but in our complicated world it has become even harder now to understand when passwords are required or what they’re for.

I feel your pain but I can’t change the world. At the moment your passwords are your defense against identity theft, financial loss, […] continued

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It feels as if the smartphone revolution has happened overnight. I am simply astonished at the number of business people and lawyers getting iPhones from AT&T and Android phones from Verizon. I rarely saw them in businesses a year ago – they were still perceived as gadgets, not serious business tools. Now it’s starting to seem unusual not to see them in everyone’s pocket.

The phones are capable of many wonderful tricks but almost everyone tries first to set up over-the-air sync of mail, contacts and calendar. It doesn’t always go well!

• Individuals who have fully

[…] continued

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Previously:
The Sad State Of Law Office Software
Law Office Case Management In The Cloud
Advologix Practice Management
Postscript On Cloud Computing

Larry Port, founding partner of Rocket Matter, dropped by the news page yesterday and gently suggested that Rocket Matter is actually a fine name for a law office practice management program. (He might be right. It does have the advantage of using words in the English language, which seems hard to come by for new products these days.)

It drew my attention to a short collection of articles that can be […] continued

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In June I wrote an article about LogMeIn Express, a free and extremely easy to use service being tested by LogMeIn for quickly sharing a screen with one person or a small group of people.

When I went back to look at it recently, I discovered that the service has been renamed “Join Me” and moved to https://join.me, which is odd but certainly easy to tell people on the phone. At the moment they’re trying to make it look hip by rotating a selection of big photos (beach sandals, water coolers) and cute slogans on the […] continued

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Previously:
The Sad State Of Law Office Software
Law Office Case Management In The Cloud
Advologix Practice Management

Take a step back and look at the technology in your business. There has been a large shift that you may not have noticed in technology costs.

Here’s the idea in this article (which happens to stand opposed to the idea of cloud computing, but never mind that):

“First recognize the old rules for the cost of computing have been reversed.

“The greatest cost components from highest to lowest:

• “Past:  1) hardware  2)

[…] continued

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If I’d thought about it, I would have realized that Google Translate had to exist. It does exactly what you’d expect from an online translator: type in a phrase and it can be translated into another language; type in a web address and it will present the entire page translated into another language. Try it! It’s fun to see your favorite web site in Turkish or Lithuanian.

Google has been updating it frequently with additional languages until now it’s possible to go back and forth between dozens of languages, including a couple of Chinese variations, Japanese and other […] continued

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Previously:
The Sad State Of Law Office Software
Law Office Case Management In The Cloud

I called Deepa Patel of Halak Consulting looking for a LexisNexis Certified Independent Consultant in the Bay Area who could help whip a client’s Time Matters installation into shape. The conversation quickly turned to the new product that she is also trained to handle, the one to which she has committed her own office and is clearly excited about.

Within a week I was looking at a demo of AdvologixPM and feeling my own sense of excitement about […] continued

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Previously:
The Sad State Of Law Office Software

I’m going to work up to specific products, but let’s start with the concept of storing valuable, confidential data in the cloud, on servers run by some big company.

As a lawyer in a small firm, think of the scariest example you can imagine – say, your highly sensitive letter to a client outlining the risks in your litigation strategy, or notes on the phone conversation with a client where she confessed to killing Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick. Save the file as a Word document on […] continued

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When I joined Facebook, I was asked if Facebook could rummage through my Outlook address book looking for a match with other Facebook users. I politely responded, no, absolutely not, thank you very much, and I thought that was the end of it.

My Facebook page fired up right away, empty except for the suggestions on the side of the page listing Facebook users that I might know. I assumed it would suggest people based on common schools or common employers; since I hadn’t supplied that information to Facebook yet, I didn’t expect to see any familiar names. […] continued

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