Does It Compute?

My New Kindle

My daughter bought me a Kindle for Christmas. Due to the back order, it just arrived, as a Kindle 2. So of course I immediately downloaded a book to try it out (books are the new Kindle razor blades). My initial impression is very positive – and you can change the font size for bad eyes, etc. I spent over an hour reading – very easy, no eyestrain.

The text is extremely clear, although it does take a bit of getting used to, as does navigation. You do have to be careful about light reflecting off the screen. The battery is supposed to last 4 days with wireless on and 2 weeks with it turned off. The Kindle comes with a USB cable and a plug attachment so you can plug it into a socket to charge the battery. The plug attachment is about the size of a heavy-duty extension cord plug – no more recharging brick! And of course you immediately have to rush out to buy a holder so the screen doesn’t get all scratched up.

You can not only buy books from Amazon, but also send them PDF, *.doc or various other types of documents. These will be kindelized (or is it kindlerized?) and downloaded to you “for a small fee.” I tried this with a couple of items with no problem, although depending on the formatting of the original and the font size you choose to read it at, you may get odd line breaks. To avoid the fee, you can send the file to “free.kindle.com.”  You will be notified to download the result to a PC and from there to the Kindle.  Apparently you will soon be able to archive files to a PC, which means that you could give a book to somebody else when you are done with it.

The Kindle is supposed to hold up to 1,500 books, but it is extremely unclear how they might be organized if you have any significant number. You can sort the table of contents by Author or Title, but it would be nice to be able to have categories.

The book selection is spotty – there are a bunch of things I would not have expected (James McPherson on the Civil War for example), some I would have liked to have seen (the new book on Darwin and slavery was not there) and a number of best-selling authors are simply not there at all (Patricia Cornwall, John Grisham).

But for travel, vacation, etc. it will really be great – instead of having to take and throw out four or five paperbacks on a cross-country trip, the Kindle will be enough.

Autonomy Acquires Interwoven - More

The Orange Rag recently had a post on Automony’s acquisition of Interwoven. In addition to speculation on possible reasons for the acquisition and the future/changes to Interwoven (including possibly renaming it back to iManage), one of the most interesting points it makes concerns the role of a Document Management System in the e-discovery process.

To the extent that a DMS can claim to be organizing ALL your documents, and has mechanisms for organizing them and performing complex searches, it can serve as a significant step up in the EDD process. This seems to me an important point which has been neglected.

Two Time Matters Tricks

In customizing a system recently, I had occasion to dig out a couple of old Time Matters tricks that are worth repeating.

The first is to have a calculated date field that will tell you how old a person is without having to do the math yourself

The default shipping template has a date of birth field. Under it, or in some convenient place, create another field and make it a calculated field.  Make it a text calculation and for the calculation put in:
  '&AGE(DEFORMAT(CON:CON1_03_03,@D2)) &'

where “03_03" is the date of birth field and the operator is: Appended. The second field should be listed as Text, but left blank.

Note that if the date of birth field is not filled in, the person will be listed as being 2009 years old.

The second trick is displaying client photos.  Create a directory in some convenient place and call it “photos” or “clientphotos.”  Create a Time Matters field that is a “launcher” field. In the “prefix” area put the location of the photos directory, for example c:\tmw9\photos.

I use the Picasa3 Photo Viewer which can be associated automatically with file types such as *.jpg or *gif.  However, you can use any similar viewer as long as it is linked with the file types of the photos.

For each photo you want to view, put the name of the file in the field, such as “jhhead.jpg.”  When you click on the launch button the photo is launched in a nice large display, not a small thumbnail.

Why Does "Acquire, Merge, Destroy" Exist?

A reader recently asked me: Why do companies acquire other companies only to destroy them? It doesn’t make sense.

Well of course every acquisition is different, lots of peculiar circumstances, etc. But in fact there are several global reasons which tend to fit most acquisitions in one way or another. Companies acquire (usually smaller) companies because:

1.  To get their hands on a given technology and/or specific developers. Microsoft is the leader (if that’s the word) in this sort of acquisition, with Ray Ozzie as the prime example.

2.  Companies can be acquired in order to obtain a certain customer base. This is likely one of the elements behind Autonomy’s acquisition of Interwoven (Autonomy may also have been after an electronic discovery vendor, Discovery Mining, that Interwoven had previously acquired). When LexisNexis acquired PCLaw, one of the reasons that was rumored was for PCLaw’s completely dominant share of the Canadian market.

3.  To keep track of a competitor and/or to deny other people the software. Given the intense rivalry between LexisNexis and West, this could well be a factor behind some of their acquisitions.

4.  Last but not least, to acquire a cash cow and milk it dry. Large companies are sensitive to immediate profits not longer-term perspectives or anything as mundane as putting out a good product (look at the auto industry).

Do all of these underlying reasons fit all acquisitions? No. But given the history of acquisitions in the software industry at large, one or another of them is likely to dominate any particular acquisition.

Delegation Systems: Amicus v. Time Matters

People constantly want to compare Amicus and Time Matters. While this is sometimes a matter of Apples and Oranges, there are fundamental conceptual differences in how the programs work. Every once and a while I run across a feature that perfectly encapsulates this difference. The “Delegation Systems” function is one such example.

In Time Matters, Tom Rowe first developed this system for TM v. 6 (if memory serves). It was subsequently incorporated into the shipping program. Basically the delegation system involves a customized ToDo form. When you create a “Delegated” ToDo, the form changes to include a different set of fields, namely: 
Delegated By
Date Assigned
Date Started
Date Finished
Current Status
Details.
The “Current Status” is selected from a configurable dropdown, which generally includes things like: Not Started; Scheduled but not started; In progress; Waiting on someone else; Deferred; and Completed.

In order to use this system, you have to make sure it is installed/configured (it did not ship with earlier versions). The user creates a ToDo and selects “DELE” as the classification code. You can also manually configure a QuickTab so that the person doing the delegating can see all the tasks they have assigned to somebody else and the status of them. This is an extremely effective system once it is set up.

In Amicus PE 2009, the “delegated” function is built into the system.  When you create a ToDo, there is a “Priority” option – Top, Average, Low, etc. and my personal favorite, “Someday.” Let's say you simply assign the ToDo to someone else.  When you open the “Tasks” function, there is an option to view ToDos “assigned to others by me.” You can set the “percent done” to be viewable on the display. That's it. So almost everything is built into the system, but there is virtually no configuration (except for the “Priority” options which are configurable on a firm-wide basis).

So the Time Matters system is more powerful and has a lot more options. However, it requires a fair amount of time to set up. The Amicus system has fewer options, but works out of the box with no additional consulting time.

This type of difference pops up throughout the two programs. So the net result is that while Time Matters offers more options, it is also going to cost you considerably more to configure adequately. In Amicus, you get what you get, but it is a lot simpler and less expensive.

Searching for Secured Documents in Worldox

I recently had a client want to find all the documents that were secured to a given classification group. Now of course for a specific client or search you could view the security group by putting a “Classified” column on the search results (and perhaps saving it as a “Column Template” for future use. Then for a given search results, you could display the secured documents.

But what if you want to search for ALL the secured documents?  It turns out there is a way to do this IF you are a Manager (with full administrative rights -- generally only a very few people in a firm will be able to do this). In this case, if you create a search template that includes the field “Owner Inits” and instead putting in the Owner (or “last used by” as I always rename it), you put in the parameter “/p” you can search for all secured documents across your system. If you then sort by security code, they will all be grouped together. Of course, depending on the size of the firm, you may get more than you bargain for, but it IS possible.

OCR - Interesting but Frustrating Experience

OCRing normal documents is pretty straightforward. But more complex documents can be a challenge. I recently had a what I thought was a pretty clean, well-spaced 2-page, 3-column PDF document that I needed to convert to Word or Excel for editing.

So first I tried Acrobat (without much hope). Sure enough, it was a disaster. Not only did it put the text into frames, but on the first pages columns 1 & 2 were together and column 3 separate, and on the second page column 1 was separate and columns 2 & 3 were together. Totally useless.

So then I tried my preferred OCR engine, Abbyy. Essentially the same result. Even when I told it to treat the document as a table (a good trick for converting columnar documents) it didn’t work. The first 2 columns went into Excel ok, but in the same column – not broken into 2 columns. When I tried to get it into Word, it came across as a graphic.

Then I tried WordPerfect 14 which claims to convert PDF documents. It converted the document ok, but as a graphic – again, totally useless.

Then I tried the normally very powerful pdfDocs. Even after getting some help from tech support, the result was all in text boxes and pretty much unusable, since I needed it to be in rows and in any event the text boxes would not line up properly.

Finally, I tried the Abbyy screen capture utility, with which I had previously had mixed results. I told it I was capturing a table. Bingo. Everything came over 100% correctly into Excel & I could edit it to my heart’s content. But what should have been a 5 minute process stretched out to 45 minutes.

So the moral of the story is that with complex formatting you never know what product or approach is going to work correctly. You just have to keep trying.

New Cheat Sheets for Amicus Attorney 2009

I have just finished updating my Cheat Sheets for Amicus Attorney 2009, both for the Small Firm edition and the Premium edition.

They are available on the “Cheat Sheet” page of the Heckman Consulting Web Site.

Heckman TechnoFeatures -- docsCorp products

Periodically I review products for various publications, most usually Technolawyer (www.technolawyer.com). Before it ceased publication, I did a lot of reviews for Law Office Computing.

In the past year, I have reviewed DocsCorp’s pdfDocs Desktop and pdfDocs compareDocs which together give you a great way of converting documents to pdfs and managing them. It also integrates with Worldox and other document management systems. The docsCorp system is on the pricy side for small firms, but it crosses over other solutions at about 10 users in terms of pricing.

To see these and other articles go to the “Law Office Computing” page (LOC Articles) of the Heckman Consulting web site.

Is Amicus a Viable Alternative to Time Matters?

In the course of the past several months, I have had several Time Matters consultants call me to inquire whether I still thought that Amicus was a viable alternative to Time Matters.

The answer, with the usual caveats, is YES.  Some history. When Gavel & Gown first tried to write a “dot net” program, it was a disaster and was pulled from the market almost entirely (Amicus X – LexisNexis take note). Following that, the first SQL version, Amicus 7, had many many problems and many leading Amicus consultants basically refused to sell it. However, with Amicus 2008 and now 2009, the SQL version (Amicus Premium Edition) seems to be stable, well-behaved, and most of the “glitches” have been fixed (although of course there will always be a few). Amicus Small Firm Edition has always been a good option for smaller firms and can still be had (at some extra expense) for slightly larger firms that do not have the hardware to run the SQL version. Almost all senior Time Matters consultants, on the other hand, strongly recommend the “Enterprise” SQL version, sometimes even on a single PC.

Now for the caveats.  Amicus and Time Matters have completely different philosophies of software development. In a nutshell, Amicus has always focused on ease of use even at the expense of customizability (if that’s a word) whereas Time Matters has focused on extensive customization even at the expense of ease of use. It is significant in this regard that many of the “add-ons” that make Time Matters functional (especially with regard to email and forms customization) come from third party software developers. Such a “third party” pool of applications/developers does not exist for Amicus.

However, now that Amicus is on an SQL platform, the possibility for direct manipulation of the database tables (which is the basis for third party TM developers) exists. It also lets Amicus be even more customizable than TM in some respects, with unlimited custom fields and custom pages (sort of like the User Definable Forms in TM 9 on steroids). With this of course, comes increased consulting time (thus tending to eliminate the previous distinction between TM and Amicus,  where as a rule of thumb TM required twice as much consulting and training time as did Amicus).

The contrast between the two programs came out very clearly the other day at a potential small client. I showed him both Amicus and Time Matters. It turned out that he had been running his practice on an extensive set of complex Excel spreadsheets, so when he saw the TM “spreadsheet look,” he said “that’s what I need.” Other firms react “yuk!” to the spreadsheet look and go with Amicus. To each his own.

One last caveat: if you are looking to convert, look very carefully. If you have extensive Time Matters customization, it will not be an easy task.