If you have had the opportunity to test drive Windows 8 and to see the new Start Screen, you are probably aware that Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system ships with a slew of new touch-optimized applications that leverage the Modern UI.  Bing Travel, Bing Weather, Xbox LIVE Games, and several other Modern apps are now standard features of the Windows client OS.  While these might be nice additions for the average consumer, many Modern UI applications are clunky to use on non-touch enabled devices, perform functions better addressed by deploying a full application such as the Microsoft Office suite, or add little to no productive value to an enterprise environment.

For several years now, I have been very impressed with the eDOCS roadmap presented by OpenText. They have worked consistently with Microsoft in order to develop eDOCS code while new Microsoft versions are still in beta. This allowed OpenText to add deeply integrated support for Office 2010 shortly after its official release a few years ago, and they've recently added support for Windows 8 in a very cool way.  

What if you could boil data recovery down to five simple questions? Five questions couldn't cover the entire topic, but it's not a bad place to start. That's the message of this article, published in the April 2013 issue of the Law Technology News magazine and written by Kraft Kennedy CTO Marcus Bluestein and myself.

If you have a strong data recovery plan, you'll probably have no trouble answering these questions:

Kraft Kennedy CTO Marcus Bluestein and I have written a piece about the Microsoft Surface Pro and what it means for lawyers, published today in Law Technology News.

Recently I was asked by a colleague if System Center Configuration Manager had a way we might test for the presence of a running application prior to attempting to install a piece of software. Giving it a bit of thought I came up with a simple method leveraging ConfigMgr 2012’s new global conditions ability. Global conditions are requirement rules that are evaluated in real time on the client prior to attempting any software downloads/installs.

There has been tremendous interest in the Enterprise File Sharing/Collaboration market, or as I sometimes refer to it: the "Enterprise Dropbox" market. It pains me to use "Dropbox" in the way people use "Q-Tip" when talking about all cotton swabs, but I do think it's the easiest way of describing the file sharing market.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about my experiences with working on a Mac.  I used a MacBook Air and tested using different configurations between native OS X applications and Windows with virtualization as well as running native Windows with Boot Camp.

A recent study reveals that many financial executives have little confidence in their IT investments or in their ability to evaluate the success of their IT ventures. Meade Monger, the managing director at AlixPartners, the firm that conducted the survey together with CFO research, concluded that "The message from CFOs and other senior finance executives is loud and clear - companies are spending too much on IT, and they're not getting the business information that they truly need." Office politics play a part in poor technology decision making, and so does the lack of a broader perspective that comes with being in-house.

Technology Assessments may be an answer to this quandry, as they provide law firms with specific expertise as well as a more extensive understanding of the technology landscape from an objective outside party. 

We are in the middle of a migration from Lync 2010 to Lync 2013. The migration has been very smooth and we moved several users over to the Lync 2013 environment for pilot. Shortly after migrating the users, we identified issues with our Dial-In Conferencing. Anyone on Lync 2013 that created a conference could not dial into the conference. Users would call in, be prompted to input the meeting number and then would receive a busy signal. If the user moved back to the Lync 2010 pool, Dial-In Conferencing would work again.

A recent survey of 60 Fortune 500 companies found that only 25% of their technology initiatives carried out in the past year were initiated by IT. Researchers portrayed this as a sharp decline from previous years.

The other 75% of IT projects were introduced and advocated by business leaders like CFOs and CMOs. This raises questions about the purpose of IT: should CIOs and IT directors guide their firms to new technologies and opportunities? Or is their role strictly to carry out the plans of their colleagues?

And what does this trend mean for law firms? This study focused on the corporate sector, but can those of us in legal technology learn from it? Is IT strategy no longer the domain of IT?