To paraphrase Steve Jobs in his “challenges of starting Apple”
“[Lawyers] couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”
Have you ever seen that annoying security message for a program that you run all the time: “Security Warning – Do you Want to Run This File?” You uncheck the “Always Ask Before Opening This File” box but that does no good.
I finally found out how to fix this (thanks to Amicus Attorney tech support).
If you right-click on the file in question and select “Properties,” at the bottom of the screen, you will see two options. First, uncheck the file as “read only.” Secondly, there is a box that says “This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.” Click the “Unblock” button. You have to do both these steps for it to work.
That should fix your problem.
Faced with repeated and ongoing complaints about Time Matters Pro in version 9 and earlier (some consultants wouldn’t even install the Pro version), Lexis converted all Time Matters editions to a SQL database. This has gotten generally positive reviews in terms of stability and speed. It has, however, created some issues in particular regarding backup.
SQL is not for the faint of heart. Firms that were accustomed to simply manipulating the TM database location, backup, etc. can no longer do that just by moving things around. You have to use the SQL Management Studio, a whole different piece of software with a not insignificant learning curve and stiff penalties for mistakes (loss of data).
The issue of backup is an especially critical one. TM now includes tools for backing up the entire database. However, by default the backup is stored under the SQL directory, which by default is stored on the C: drive. So if your hard drive crashes, your backup crashes as well.
Users would be well advised to find a knowledgeable Time Matters and/or SQL consultant to set this up. Once it is done, however, it should need almost no attention in the future, so it is essentially a one-time charge.
There has recently been a significant increase in on-line training offerings. LexisNexis is offering the “On Line University,” the recently formed Affinity Consulting Group (a conglomeration of leading consulting firms for various programs) has launched the Affinity University. Many other consultants have sponsored videos and other training materials. Why is this and just how good is on-line training anyway?
The “why?” is pretty clear: It’s the Economy, Stupid. Virtually all software companies have eliminated printed manuals in favor of massive help files, so there is no “reference manual” people can consult. Law firms don’t want to spend money on training (however shortsightedly, but it’s a fact), and legal programs such as Time Matters, PCLaw, Amicus Attorney, Practice Master, etc. can’t really be rolled out without training, so on-line training appears to offer a way out. It offers the illusion of being cheaper (although, at $99 for an hour’s session, if you have ten users, it is hardly cheaper, even with discounts). In many cases it can be scheduled at a convenient time, you do not have to leave the office (or your desk). Some firms (such as LawBill) offer training CD’s for a fixed price. Other companies, such as PCDocs, offer “how to” manuals which can be purchased for a fixed price. Probably the best on-line training solutions are 3-5 minute video snippets such as Time Matters “help cam videos.” If you are in a relatively isolated area, it can make training available from people who really know what they are doing, as opposed to mediocre training or no training at all – this is really the main thing on-line training has going for it.
However there are three major drawbacks to on-line training.
• The first is that most often, in-house training uses the firm’s actual data. This makes the training and examples more real to users and consequently more effective. In addition, it encourages people to ask questions (an integral part of training) because they know what they are trying to do in various scenarios.
• Secondly, when sitting at your desk instead of in a classroom, it is all to easy to do something else while “watching” the training – make a phone call, answer an email, shuffle papers, etc. I know I’ve done it during webinars. This dramatically reduces the effectiveness of training.
• Lastly, from an instructor’s point of view, with on-line training there is no way to tell when people’s eyes glaze over and you lose one or more members of the “class.” Classroom training is considerably more interactive and hence effective. Although most web-based training solutions offer an option for questions, somehow it isn’t the same as a real classroom. The 3-5 minute video snippets on a single topic are one form of on-line training that avoids a number of these pitfalls.
All things considered, on-line training is a second-best, fallback solution. If you are isolated or a solo it can be a reasonable alternative. And it is certainly better than no training at all.
I recently had an issue with setting up Practice Master to integrate with Worldox for a demo for a prospective client. I called STI and explained that I was a consultant, that all I had was a demo version of Practice Master and that this was for a prospective client. Tech Support was extremely helpful, made no protestations about licensing, and rapidly came up with the answer (a issue with the Worldox API that had subsequently been fixed). Sure enough, I downloaded the latest build of Worldox and problem solved.
That’s what really good tech support should be like.
Worldox Web/Mobile was originally designed for the PDA, and works with just about anything from Blackberrys to iPhones. Given that most people have remote access to their office, the primary function of PDA access is usually to email documents to other people.
However, since Worldox Web is platform independent and works with just about any web browser, this means Mac users (otherwise shut out from the majority of legal software) can use their browser to access the firm’s Worldox document store. It won’t be quite as slick as the regular Worldox program, but will be perfectly workable.
What exactly is a software “bug?” To what lengths should companies go to exterminate them? Should consumers have an expectation of “bug-free software?”
To take the last question first, software will never be “bug-free” for two reasons. The first is of course the Great God Profit. In the spirit of Steven Leavitt’s Freakonomics, it is clear that it is not in the economic interest of a large company to produce bug-free software – it is simply too costly. This is where smaller, individually owned companies have an advantage: they are not as tied to quarterly financial reports as larger, publicly owned companies. They are also likely to be more personally committed to producing good software if they created and developed it themselves. The second reason is more substantive. Even with all the Quality Control in the world, no company can test for all the possible configurations and uses (and abuses) the software will face in the real world. Unusual configurations can expose shortcomings that no amount of laboratory testing could reveal.
As for the key question of just what is a bug, a lot of people tend to define a “bug” as anything software does that they don’t like. Or, as one user put it recently, “a bug is when the program does something it should NOT do” and possibly also “when the program does NOT do something it SHOULD do.”
From a developer’s point of view, a bug exists when the software does not perform the way it was designed to. If it was supposed to do “x” but does not, that is a bug. If it was not designed to do “x” then it is “Working As Designed” (WAD). (You may have heard this from tech support).
No matter that the design is flawed, idiotic, etc. The frustrated question “how could they not see this is stupid” is irrelevant here (although linked to the axiom that any time you have to start a sentence concerning software with the phrase “you would think that....” you know you are in deep trouble).
This is a golden opportunity to invent two new acronyms: WAPD (“Working As Poorly Designed”) and even WAVPD (“Working As Very Poorly Designed”). Are these bugs? Not technically. Are they infuriating? Oh yeah.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has a new book: “The Hidden Life of Deer.” Well worth reading, although gardeners may be a bit upset at her willingness to let deer eat her plants down to the roots.
The book follows two others in a similar vein, “The Hidden Life of Dogs,” and “The Tribe of Tiger.” (That’s cats – based on her position that a house cat is nothing but a miniature Tiger and that if the size difference between us and a cat were reversed, we’d be dead meat in 30 seconds.) Both will show you things you never knew about dogs and cats respectively.
She is also a highly respected anthropologist, and has also recently published a book on the Bushmen of the Kalihari desert (she first went to the Kalihari 50 years ago with her parents). “The Old Way: A Story of the First People” makes fascinating reading. Her basic thesis is that a small group of hunter-gatherers has survived for over 30,000 years then there must be a reason for everything they do and they must have been doing something right (before their way of life was wiped out by the South African and Namibian governments in the 1980s).
When Time Matters 9 released the indexer as a standalone program, it created a certain amount of confusion. The Indexer is set to run on the first workstation that logs into TM, and there is no way to control it. If you try starting TM on a separate workstation “first,” that takes up a separate license, which is obviously not a solution. The Indexer, to state the obvious, is responsible for indexing all the Time Matters data and makes searches extremely fast.
It is possible to disable the indexer entirely by creating a simple text file with Notepad named norun.txt. Put this file in the ...\Data\Index\LNDATA folder on the server where the shared Time Matters data is located. While the file is in that folder, the data indexer will not start. But that is not really a solution either.
Ideally, it should be possible to run the indexer as a service, but LexisNexis has not addressed this issue in TM 10.
It is, however, possible to run the indexer with command line switches. Create a one-line text file (call it tmindex.bat or whatever) that looks like this:
Start c:\tmw9e\tmdatndxe.exe /data=c:\tmw9e\data
(obviously the location may change according to the location and version of Time Matters). You can then set this batch file to run on startup. (Thanks to Jeff Stouse). This can be done either on the server, or on a separate PC (perhaps an older PC that is being replaced), a la Worldox Indexer.
Chris Sperry has written a utility that does allow you to run the indexer as a service, but I have not tested it. Contact Chris through Jumpstartsolutions.com
