Does It Compute?

Worldox GX3 Officially Announced

World Software is officially announcing Worldox GX3 today at LegalTech NY. The really big news will be about Worldox GX3 Cloud (an SaaS product) and Worldox GX3 Enterprise, both coming later this summer.

But let’s look at the traditional version of Worldox, now GX3. As usual, there are a number of “under the hood” improvements, including a new set of viewers and significantly greater speed (in an already fast program). But what are the things that affect the end user more immediately?

The new set of viewers means that Worldox can now view PDF Portfolios and Binders, which wasn’t possible previously. With more firms using these functions, this is important. For example, I have a series of PDFs I compiled out of jpeg images that GX2 viewers could not display. Now they do. Some Word 2010 tables also display more accurately in the new viewers.

The new Legal Hold function could be a very big deal for certain firms, especially those involved in litigation. You mark documents as “Legal Hold” and they are moved to a separate area where they can be searched for and viewed but not changed in any way. This can be done en masse (by people with appropriate rights). When the Hold is released, the documents can be returned to the main document store.

The toolbar at the top of the Worldox screen can now be edited by users. You can change the icon, the description, move them around, etc. So you can get rid of things you never use and make the toolbar more functional.

The entire left side, formerly the “Folder Tree,” has been reorganized along the lines of the Outlook Navigation Pane, with buttons at the bottom selecting various functions. A new function is “Favorite Matters” (which reflects a “My Matters” function available in other programs). This lists the matters you have most recently accessed. No need to open up a search screen, they pop right up. It does involve a certain amount of scrolling up and down, but many people will find this extremely useful. Various functions in the Navigation Pane can be sorted and reorganized depending on how you work.

Projects, a very powerful but somewhat clumsy and underused feature of GX2 has been placed here and made much easier to use. People already using projects will really like this.

Finally, there are the usual number of small but very nice improvements. In general, the messages on pop up windows are improved and more obvious. One of my favorite improvements is the “Same Profile As” button on the save screen. This is very useful when you email someone a document and they send it back with revisions. You want to save this as a version, but how?  It was always possible, although a couple of screens deep. Now that function is right there staring you in the face.

Similarly, the “8th field” has been make more obvious. There was always a button in the comments field called “table.” This was a drop-down list that allowed users to select comments from a list, such as keywords in documents involved in litigation. Since comments are searchable as part of the profile, this was powerful, but again, under-used. Now it is much more obvious and should be very useful to litigation firms in particular.

All in all, a nice upgrade – and as Worldox users know, with the very inexpensive Worldox maintenance, upgrades are free.

iPads, Sweatshops and American Capitalism

Two recent massive articles in the New York Times (Jan 22 and 26) have documented the sweatshop conditions in the Chinese factories manufacturing Apple’s iPad and iPhone. To be fair, the article notes that similar conditions apply in factories run for Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

This should really come as no surprise. American industry has been outsourcing manufacturing as a way of increasing profits by lowering the cost of labor for years. Sweatshops and deadly conditions are merely the logical consequence of this trend. That this goes into great detail is clearly demonstrated by the article. In one case over a hundred employees were injured by being forced to use a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis to clean iPhone screens. Why?  Because it evaporated three times as fast as regular alcohol, so workers could process more screens in the same amount of time. In fact, “outsourcing” is beginning to happen even within Asia, with companies moving from previously low-wage countries to ones with even lower wages.

Nor could Apple fix this, even if it wanted to. Apple is tied to its largest supplier, Foxconn, which is one of the few companies big enough to build enough iPads and iPhones (with 1.2 million workers, it makes an estimated 40% of the world’s consumer electronics). Apple has virtually no leverage to make Foxconn fix conditions once contracts are signed. As Steve Jobs retorted to President Obama when asked about bringing jobs back to the US, “those jobs are not coming back.”

The fact of the matter is that outsourced sweatshop manufacturing conditions, like the use of illegal immigrants in the US, are integral to the profitability of American capitalism. Alabama found that out last summer when it passed its anti-immigrant law and then no one could be found to pick crops, which rotted on the vine. Certainly, it is no longer politically possible in the US to return to the conditions that caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire just over 100 years ago, in which 146 garment workers, mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died because managers locked the exits to stairwells so workers could not leave. However, recent union-busting “right to work” efforts in states like Wisconsin and Indiana certainly demonstrate that American industry would like to move backwards in that direction. In short, sweatshops are as American as Apple Pie.

And after all, it takes a special kind of chutzpah for people in Mitt Romney’s income bracket to claim that American workers are paid too much money!

.doc and .docx - It's a Dual-Format World

I recently downloaded an extremely informative and useful white paper by Ross Kodner’s microsystems entitled “.doc & .docx – It’s a Dual-Format World.”

The white paper details the issues involved in converting from one format to the other, including the loss of numbering schemes and formatting and pagination changes. Further, the “compatibility tool” that lets people still using Word 2003 access documents from 2007 and 2010 has a number of known issues.

But most firms just plowed blindly ahead, converting or not converting with no real plan. Many users got little or no training in the new versions, not even a minimal instruction in customizing the labor-saving Quick Access Toolbar. (See my February 2010 blog entry)

Firms owe it to themselves to systematize their practices in this area. Ross’s white paper is really a must read.

iPad Revisited

We went out to visit my 91-year-old father-in-law in Phoenix in early January. I decided to take my iPad instead of a computer, since all I planned to do was check e-mail and Google.

The basic principle, not to have to schlepp a full-size laptop around, worked great. After that it was all down-hill.  My web-based e-mail didn’t work with the iPad (or vice-versa). I could look at the e-mail, but could not reply to it because I couldn’t type a message. So in order to reply to an e-mail I had to forward it to my gmail account and then reply from there. And of course trying to type on the iPad is still an adventure. Fortunately it was just a long weekend, so it was not too bad.

Since the iPad has no “back” function, using Google or Google maps was also a pain. I constantly had to exit out and start over.  Very clumsy to manipulate.  And for directions I could just as easily use the navigation app on my Droid phone.

So was it better than a laptop?  For this very limited purpose, yes. This iPad was a gift. Would I ever actually buy an iPad?  No.

If I needed certain legal-specific apps for the iPad, such as the Worldox app that lets you access the document store in your office from the iPad, it might be different. But without those add-ons, the iPad is little more than a convenient toy.

Biggest Cloud Outages in 2011

I recently saw an article on the biggest Cloud outages in 2011. Since outages (loss of connectivity) are typically one of the reservations that many people have about moving to the cloud, I was curious.

The biggie of course was the 5+ day Amazon outage in April that affected a large number of major companies.  Microsoft cloud services – Office 365 and the Business Productivity Suite – suffered 5 outages (4 in the month of May), perhaps enough to raise doubts about the reliability of those offerings.

Other than that, there were two outages caused by a major lightning storm in Ireland. Google Docs and related apps went down for about an hour in September, and Gmail lost some 150,000 mailboxes in February. Other of the “10 biggest” were in fact pretty minor – half hour to an hour, or simply multi-hour delays in delivering email.

What this all means is that cloud-based services are pretty reliable, almost certainly more reliable than the systems in the average law firm (or Comcast cable). The lightning-storm outage is noteworthy because the backup power systems failed to kick in.

This of course is no consolation if you DO get hit with an outage.  Which raises the question of what sort of reimbursement do you get from the cloud service if you get hit with an outage? Most contracts provide for reimbursement as a percentage of the monthly fee – if you are out for 1 day, you get 1/30th of your monthly fee returned. This is essentially worthless to a firm.

Software vendors long ago faced this issue and most agreements limit liability to the price of the software.  However, cloud-based services are in a slightly different category. One could reasonably make the argument that if a 10-attorney firm suffers a 1-hour outage, and half the attorneys might have been unable to do billable work during that time, then at $300 an hour the firm has lost $1,500 in billables. Obviously no vendor is going to give this sort of guarantee, but you might be able to improve your agreement over the standard chump change for outages.