Law Office Technology

Advice for using Hosted Exchange

I have been getting a lot of questions about Hosted Exchange recently.  Law Office Technology has been using it for over a year and selling and setting it for client sites for the past 6 months.  If you are going to use hosted exchange, I recommend buying it from a company that does not force you to enter in your email password every time you open up Outlook.  I had a client that purchased hosted exchange that did that, and every time they opened Amicus, it would crash outlook.  Fortunately the hosted exchange that we resell does not ask you for the username or password when you log into outlook.  If you are linking ay product with outlook, whether it be PCLaw, Amicus, TimeMatters, Worldox, ect, you must make sure that you do not have to enter in your password every time. 

Missouri Solo and Small Firm Conference

I will be in Missouri this upcoming week for their state’s Solo and Small Firm Conference.  I will be working the Clio booth, which is Practice Management SaaS for attorneys. 

For more info on Clio, click here: http://www.goclio.com/

For more info on the conference click here: http://members.mobar.org/sasf2009/index.html

Life in the Cloud

Law Office Technology has begun the move to the Cloud.  This does not mean that I have lost my mind although I know several people who will disagree.  The servers at our office will be permanently shut down this weekend.  We are not going out of business but making the next technology jump which is dumping the servers and moving to a hosted or cloud environment.  I have run into a couple early adaptor law firms that already work this way and they can run heads and tails around a typical brick and mortars firm with much lower overhead.   

Basically the ideal is that instead of buying a server, you rent the server from a hosting company.  So, instead of a capital outlay of $5000 to install a server and paying a local company for support, you just pay $125.00 a month and get a guarantee 99.9% uptime.

I have started using Hosted Exchange 2007 and Hosted SharePoint.  All of our company documents are in SharePoint and all our email is in Exchange.   The company we use has 4 redundant data centers spread across the country which means I no longer have to worry about backups.  I will post updates on how this is going.