HotDocs and Groove

As I wait in the airport to fly to ABA Tech show I thought I would write about a great new collaborative product I discovered a couple of days ago.  Our firm uses HotDocs to generate all of our documents.  That includes proposals, engagement letters,  fax cover sheets, and technology audits.  I am the HotDocs CIC in our office, so it is my job to create and maintain these templates which our consultants keep on their laptops in the field and also desktops in the office.  The big problem we had in the past is that as I update the templates, they rarely get pushed out to all of our consultants and pretty soon everyone had different template sets. 

I just got a copy of Microsoft Groove which has solved this problem and made us way more efficient.  Basically I install Groove on everyone's laptops, desktops and our file server.  On my computer I choose to share certain files and folders.  Whenever I am connected to the internet, Groove automatically syncs my files with all of my other teammates so everyone has the same templates.

Another good example on how our office has gotten more productive is that every Tuesday our firm has a weekly meeting.  We have an agenda that we used to email around the prior week to come up with topics to discuss.  Now everyone can just edit the agenda on their workstations and it will update the changes to everyone else.  Groove really brings collaboration to another level.

Comments

[Grace Suarez]

If you don't have the money for Groove (or just prefer free stuff), check out FolderShare. It does the same thing in a smaller scale and it's free (it's been bought by Microsoft, and I imagine it's going to be folded into Groove soon).