Credenza -- The Entry Level Drug

I recently revisited Seth Rowland’s blog “Credenza – the Entry Level Drug.”  If you are thinking about using Credenza, it is well worth looking at.

The issue is important for another reason. Gavel & Gown (makers of Amicus and Credenza) has recently announced a cloud-based version of Amicus Attorney which will eventually replace the Small Firm Edition of Amicus Attorney.  Obviously, their experience with Credenza forms the basis/foundation for this cloud-based version. Historically, one of the main issues with Credenza (and with cloud-based software generally) has been performance. Depending on your internet connection, response time can be very slow.

Gavel & Gown has committed to Microsoft’s Azure platform. The architect of the Azure platform, Ray Ozzie, left Microsoft in October 2010, about a year after the Azure platform had been released.  That would make me nervous. In addition, Azure has had perhaps more than its outages and problems, most notably the major outage this past February 29. What do you say about a software platform that can’t deal with leap years?

In the meantime, Credenza has been something of an underground hit for Gavel & Gown, which clearly hopes that small firms will want to upgrade to a more full-featured practice management program after using Credenza for a while. Enter Amicus Cloud.

It will be a great idea if they can get it to work.

Comments

[Christopher Cardinal]

John,

As always, an interesting article. However, in this case, I think it's important to note that the outage you are describing only affected the Windows Azure Management portal. This tool is used by ISVs and others to manage their deployments and subcriptions. The outage had no impact on customer data or operations. We have pursued the matter with Microsoft and are satisfied that this issue will not arise again.

Regards,

Christopher Cardinal
CTO, Gavel & Gown