Does It Compute?

Worldox Complete Cloud Implementation

I recently implemented a Worldox Complete Cloud solution for a 15-user law firm. This sort of implementation uses an RDP connection to link to a terminal services installation in a hosted cloud and is frequently known as a “private cloud.” It has been popularized by Amazon.

The setup is not cheap and a firm considering it should consider carefully the pros and cons. It is best suited to a firm that is on the verge of having to make technology upgrades in any event (new servers, workstation). Consider carefully what your costs will be if you upgrade your current system:
    New servers
    New workstations
    IT expenses for installation and maintenance
    Cost and yearly updates for Anti-Virus
    Cost and updates for Backup software and hardware, including off-site storage
    Cost and updates for Anti-Spam filters
    Cost of upgrading to Office 2010

Compare this to the cost for the Worldox Complete Cloud. For 15 users it may come to about $2,000 per month. For this you get:
    15 licenses of Office 2010, including Exchange for Outlook
    15 licenses of Worldox
    Adobe X Reader
    Anti-Spam filtering
    McAfee Anti-Virus
    Backup in 3 widely separated locations (California, Texas and Virginia)
    Blackberry exchange server.
    Management of all patches, updates, etc.
    Support for server issues and all the above programs.

In addition, you can load other programs you use to the server, so that everything runs in the cloud.

If these two figures are within reasonable range of each other, then your firm could be a candidate for the Complete Cloud.  The Cloud offers access from anywhere (via an RDP client) and probably much better backup and security than you currently have.

At that point, there are some critical other factors to consider.

First, examine carefully whether your existing software is compatible with Windows 7 / Terminal Server. Older versions of software (in this case Acrobat 8) may not be fully compatible, and you might have to upgrade. Other programs may be only partly compatible. PCLaw, for example, says that its “core functionality” is compatible – but guess what? LexisNexis doesn’t consider printing, emailing or saving reports etc. to be a “core functionality.” Scratch that (although PCLaw 11 is supposed to fully support Terminal Services). If you are currently using Blackberries in a setup other than Exchange Server, you may have to upgrade your data plan ($20-25/month/user).  In addition, the hosted Outlook Exchange server is clustered, so the firm will not have full control over configuration issues.  Depending on your Internet connection, you may have to upgrade the size of your connection.

Pay particular attention to specialty software you use for a particular practice area. It may well not be compatible with Windows 7/Terminal Services. For example the PDF driver that the US Patent Office uses is not compatible with Windows 7. Do individual users run specific programs?  You need to examine this exhaustively to avoid surprises. You may well have to tweak the terminal services setup to make them work.

Lastly, there is a culture question: if your firm has had a wide-open policy where anyone can install anything on their PC, users will be in for a shock. With terminal services, users cannot install anything – all software and installations are centralized. This is an obvious advantage to the firm, but may meet with resistance from users. And you can be sure that it is those little “individual” programs that are most likely to have compatibility issues.

If you still want to go ahead, Worldox offers a “trial” of 30 days. You get everything installed, running operational, etc. If the setup does not work to your satisfaction you can go back to your present scheme at no charge from Worldox. In my case, even though at the end of two weeks everything was running smoothly, the firm felt there were too many niggling issues and workarounds which would have become more aggravating over time and which, combined, made of an unsatisfactory solution, so they backed out.

A Modest Proposal for LexisNexis

One of the greatest pieces of political satire ever written is Jonathan Swift’s 1729 Modest Proposal: “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.”

Swift’s proposal was to sell off a percentage of yearling children to the wealthy, to be slaughtered and eaten. Swift says he has been assured “by a very knowing American...that a young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.” He then proceeds to straight-facedly enumerate the advantages of his proposal at length.

I thought of Swift when imagining what it might take for LexisNexis to fix TimeMatters (and PCLaw). So here is a Modest Proposal to LexisNexis: that it re-hire Bob Butler to manage the Practice Management division, with a mandate to restore Time Matters to its former grandeur. This would include dropping the Annual Maintenance charge to 20% of the price of the product and abandoning any pretext to yearly upgrades (instead using PCLaw’s standard of incremental point updates) the better to be able to fix bugs and make adjustments.

I can see the following advantages to this proposal. Other consultants may come up with additional options.

•    First, there would be an immediate boost in both customers’ and consultants’ confidence in the future of the product.
•    Second, Bob would certainly insist on fixing long-outstanding bugs and deficiencies, thus massively reducing the endless grousing by disgruntled customers.
•    Third, it would increase revenues by reducing the number of customers who are abandoning the product and converting to alternatives. When PCLaw charged 20% of the base product price for tech support, the tech support department was a profit center.
•    Fourth, it would deal a blow to the competition, thus further increasing revenue. It would no doubt be satisfying for LexisNexis to put a dent in Amicus’s successful Time Matters conversion program.
•    Fifth, LexisNexis would be in a better position to hire quality programmers and staunch the brain drain that has plagued it for the past several years. It might even be able to re-hire some of the people who have left.
•    Sixth, by providing a vision and road map for the future, Bob would help reorganize the division and strengthen it in preparation for the inevitable transition to web-based programs.
•    Last, but perhaps not least, it would increase employee morale at LexisNexis and reduce the internal consternation (which I am assured exists) every time Heckman blogs, since with the improvement of the product, there would be no reason to blog about it. Who knows, there might even be good things to say.

More on LexisNexis TM Mobility

You may have seen some of the comments to Steve Stockstill’s guest post concerning Time Matters Mobility.  Friday, Mark Deal posted a monster response to Steve (it was over twice as long as the original post).

The underlying message of his post is that you should trust LexisNexis to do the right thing. Thus Mark “assumes” once, “believes” twice, “imagines” twice and “expects” once. Mobility is twice labeled a “first step” and once more grandiloquently a “vision toward the future.”

Over the last several years LexisNexis’ assurances have remained unfulfilled repeatedly.  Even Mark notes that whereas he assumed that LN would “improve their tool based on their own customer feedback,” “this has not been the case, LexisNexis has not improved on their solution.”

This is at least in part due to the pressure of yearly releases: they have to bring out “new” features, so they bring out something that is half-baked and then never actually fix it. This is fairly common among companies who have gone over to yearly updates.  Remember Desktop Extensions.

Mark parrots LexisNexis’ assertion that Time Matters 11 Service Release 1 is “coming soon” to provide calendar functionality in TM Mobility. Let’s see, TM 11 has not actually been released yet (it is in the final stages of beta testing), but Service Release 1 is “coming soon.” Gimme a break.

Microsoft is notorious for buying up companies in order to acquire their technology. Surely it would have made much more sense for LexisNexis to purchase or license superior products such as Mobile TM or TMTools rather than develop their own inferior functionality?

One of Steve’s criticisms was that TM Mobility would be cut off if you drop your annual maintenance to Time Matters. Mark defends this as common to the SaaS model: it is by subscription, if you drop the subscription you don’t get the service. This would be logical except for the fact that LexisNexis has loudly trumpeted the “fact” that TM Mobility is “free.”  Obviously it is not free, it only comes with the Annual Maintenance Plan. You can’t have it both ways.

It is worth recalling Ronald Reagan’s famous “trust, but verify” comment. When verification fails – as it has systematically for virtually all LexisNexis’ assertions of the type “we are aware of problems, we are working on it” over the past several years – trust is eroded. This is what has happened with Time Matters. It is no longer rational to assume, believe, or imagine.

PCLaw Report Groups

A PCLaw feature that is probably underused is Report Groups. If you have a series of reports that you typically run on a regular or frequent basis, it can be a bit overwhelming to have to recreate them every time you want to run them.

Fortunately there is a way to save multiple reports and then re-run them whenever you want: it is called Report Group. If you go into Reports, the Report Group appears at the bottom.

You can create and save multiple reports to a Group.  Thus, for example, firms might have several Weekly Financial reports, or Weekly Billings reports which analyze the information from slightly different perspectives.  Similarly, Month End reports.  And many custom reports you may create for specific purposes.

Definitely a feature that is worth checking out.

Lexis Nexis Strikes Again

I have been implementing PCLaw in a Terminal Services configuration.  Everything seemed to be fine, UNTIL we tried to print reports.  The left 4-5 characters on reports are truncated, so that you can’t for example tell which client the report is referring to.

Several calls to tech support.  It turns out that PCLaw supports “core functions” via terminal services. But guess what?  Printing, exporting, emailing, etc. are not considered a “core function.”  Go figure.

The only workaround is to export reports to a text format, open them in Wordpad, change the font to 7 points and the document to landscape, and print them that way.

Worldox for the iPad

Worldox for the iPad is now available from the Apple Store. The iPad app itself is free, but you need Worldox Web/Mobile installed, which for just one or two users is not inexpensive.

I did an early review of the application which was published as a Technolawyer Technofeature. Click here

Sean Doherty recently published an extensive review in Law Technology News. Check it out.

Guest Blog: Steve Stockstill on Time Matters Mobility

I’m happy to present a guest blog by Steve Stockstill. Steve was a core developer of Time Matters programs for 8 years, and had risen to the position of Director of Software Engineering for the Time Matters business unit before he left in August 2007. Steve’s company, Data Equity, has offered a “mobility” application for Time Matters, “MobileTM,” for several years. Steve recently joined the web-based practice management program Advologix as Chief Technology Officer.

Time Matters Mobility, Too Little Too Late

by Steve Stockstill

I recently sat through the Time Matters V11 preview webinar which focus primarily on a new mobile application for Time Matters. I’ll get straight to the point; this product should not be released by a software company hoping to be taken serious about their product design competency. Lexis is continuing to prove their inability to innovate within the Practice Management software market.
While the rest of the industry has been mobilizing, Time Matters has let their mobile functionality become obsolete. If you haven’t bought a new phone in the last three years you’re OK; Time Matters will still sync via cable to your older phone (Palm, Blackberry or Windows OS). Version 11’s new “mobility” features are woefully inadequate for the vast majority of Smartphone carrying professionals.
Woefully inadequate:

1) No Calendaring - how can a mobile application not have calendaring? OK, so they say they will release it in a service release, next Christmas? Nice planning.

2) Of the 18+ record types in Time Matters, only 3 are supported; Contacts, Matters & Billings.

3) Boasts of creating billing records – Really?
    a. Someone at the office has to edit the billing to complete the data entry.
    b. What if you make a mistake? You cannot edit or delete the entry on the Smartphone.
    c. Only supports simple (qty * rate) billing.

4) Data Lists and Forms are hard coded with no customizations. They hope you like what they chose for you.

5) All connections pass through the Time Matters centralized “Kill Switch”. Prior to version 11 when you purchased Time Matters you own a perpetual license when your AMP expires. Not so for this new addition. The “Kill Switch” is designed to cut you off when your amp expires and you continue to use Time Matters.

What could have been:

Unfortunately the Lexis Nexis (Practice Management) business model does not support integration partners. A policy in deep contrast to most software business models, especially in the era of open design and software services. I should know, I have been working for three years to show them how effective and synergistic a customer focused partnership could be. As many know my firm, Data Equity develops mobility products for Time Matters. Oddly enough, we never received a courtesy notification that mobility was being added to Time Matters; so much for good will. The real losers here are the customers and Reid Elsevier shareholders. Companies like Data Equity will simply choose to partner with companies focused on customer satisfaction. Likewise many customers and industry professionals are fleeing Time Matters for products like Practice Master and AdvologixPM.

Having previously sunset very core functionality in the Time Matters product family, Billing Matters and Time Matters World (browser) Edition, it appears the core product is being set to pasture. Version 10 included very little new functionality and version 11 is nothing more than a simple service release. Prior to the Lexis Nexis buyout, Time Matters customers were accustomed to more functionality in a free service release.

Worldox Tidbits and Rock Solid Structure

For some reason over the past several weeks on new installations I found out a number of things that I thought are worth sharing.

I discovered that if you are in the habit of emailing large numbers of attachments with very long document names, you may run into a limitation of Outlook which limits the total number of characters (to 255 in Outlook 2003). If you exceed that (for example, by trying to attach 6 files each of which have 60 characters in the file name), you will get an error message about “size limits” and the attachments will fail. 

The good news is that if you start from Worldox, select the documents to be attached first, and then right-click and select “email” the documents attach with no problem. Alternatively, if you manipulate the size of your screens, you can drag and drop any number of documents to be attachments.  If you are attaching a large number of documents, you may want to use the Worldox option to zip them into a single document.

A number of firms have asked me over the years if they can list as “Author” the actual author of a document that is addressed TO the firm (which the “author” is not a Worldox user). One of my clients came up with an elegant solution to this issue.  Create one or two dummy Worldox users called “Client” or “Other” or “External.” For documents received from outside the firm assign this “user” as the “Author.”  True, it does not identify the actual author, but it does let you differentiate between documents generated in-house and those received from the outside.

Lastly, one of my clients experienced a total server crash last week. It turned out that although their data was backed up, the Worldox program was NOT.  Needless to say, they were pretty unhappy and their IT guy was more than a little upset.  Worldox operates in “Mirror” mode, so that the program information and the documents you have worked on for the last 7 days are stored on your local C: drive. So if you take a laptop with you, you can still work on Worldox, create new documents, etc.  Because of this feature, I was able to do a clean installation of Worldox on their new hard drive, then upload the client/matter and other information and (with the assistance of Worldox’s excellent tech support) the appropriate configuration files back to the new installation.  So within a little over 2 hours, Worldox was fully operational with all their settings intact.
Even I was impressed.