practicehacker

Remember Gtriage, the startup that helps manage inbox clutter by highlighting important messages? How about the Gmail Priority Inbox?  In fact the idea behind Priority Inbox seemed so similar to the concept behind Gtriage that I even speculated that Google may have bought the startup outright.

Looks like I was almost right. Today AOL took the initiative and bought Gtriage. I know … AOL? But Eli, the President and co-founder of Gtriage, seemed genuinely excited. An d it sounds like AOL still has a few tricks up its sleeve.

So this is Practicehacker’s way of saying congratulations to Eli and the crew at Unblab. Good luck guys. Keep us informed about your new project. Finally, let’s see if I get this new Internet business model:

• build a product
• build a buzz
• sell out
• move on

Now that’s a strategy.

Check out the video at Google Apps for Business

Hey Microsoft, stick this in your hard drive! Google Apps for Business, already fast gaining ground with both Fortune 500 and SMB customers with its dead simple suite of cloud-driven, maintenance-free business applications, just brought the smack down, introducing over 60 new applications (all Google properties) to every account for the bargain price of $0/month.  Game, set, match.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

The Problem: E-mail Overload

The Solution: That depends …

Finding too many new messages in our in-boxes is a stubborn, universal problem for lawyers: an occupational hazard if you will. I’ve examined various solutions to this problem, including as Outlook plug-ins ClearContext and Xobni, but was never satisfied with their performance.

Take ClearContext for example. It produces excellent coordination between contacts, attachments, tasks, and appointments, but requires way too much work. Basically for CC to work well, the user must do all the classification and draw the connections. By the time I’m done advising the program of what’s important, I’m already exhausted.

Xobni on the other hand, magically organizes e-mail and attachments by contact without the need for any input at all. It really is impressive at showing you who is who, and the history of your communication with them; but it cannot help me make sense of the 100+ new messages I get every day. And without visual clues as to what is worth reading I can’t even find the important messages, much less put them in context.

Finally, these applications and others like them are designed exclusively for use with Outlook; a notorious memory hog that can single-handedly slow down and crash my system. No thank you.

Then I read about Gtriage in a FriendFeed post a few months ago. Gtriage works with Gmail or Google Apps to identify important messages and give you visual cues with which to find them. Just sign up and within minutes Gtriage learns your e-mail habits, applies its machine-learning algorithms, then identifies and labels messages so you know which ones to attack first. Amount of work required on the user’s end: none. That’s more like it.

Gtriage takes less than 3 minutes to set up. Since it learns automatically there is nothing to do or worry about once you have signed up; but if you are the creative type you might want to see how it can be combined with Gmail plug-ins like Multiple Inboxes for spectacular results (see this example).

Special Offer for Practicehackers: At the moment Gtriage remains in invitation-only beta, but Unblab was good enough to provide the invite code for 10 new accounts. Simply go to http://gtriage.com and be one fo the first 10 readers to sign up using practicehacker as your invite code.

Let me know what you think of Gtriage by posting your feedback, compliments, or hacks right here on Practicehacker.com, send your thoughts by e-mail to mhedayat@mha-law.com, join our Friendfeed Group, or sound off on Twitter.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies:
Smart Ways to Work Together

“Law practice is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process”
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle

Summary: The Lawyer’s Guide offers a solid list of resources for lawyers seeking to collaborate. It is practically jargon-free as well, and frames its discussions with a look at the past before discussing more modern modes of collaboration. The book is also a great introduction to technology for lawyers of a certain age (i.e. Baby Boomers), although younger lawyers may find it to be a little too basic.

The Good: The authors of The Lawyer’s Guide display sensitivity to attorneys who came of age before the Internet was pervasive, and they do it without over-explaining or being too didactic.

The Bad: The authors do their best to treat the products attorneys have been using for decades, such as Microsoft Office programs, as collaboration tools. By today’s standards these programs are more likely to obstruct collaboration than to enable it. In the age of Twitter, Wikis, Zoho, SaaS, and Google Wave, they are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Ugly: As I read The Lawyer’s Guide I kept asking myself why the authors didn’t treat technology-enabled collaboration as a smart way to business instead of like the Rubic’s Cube of law practice (perplexing, complex, exasperating). It really isn’t that hard.

Evaluation: Keeping in mind what the books sets out to do, I give The Lawyer’s Guide a hearty endorsement and 4 hacks out of 5. In places it is a bit too basic but overall you can’t go wrong giving this book a read – either because you are a lawyer of a certain age or because you work for one.

“The practice of law is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process” according to Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell, authors of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. True enough. And collaboration in the Internet Age is not what it used to be. In their book, Dennis and Tom have compiled a guide for lawyers who want to keep up with current tools and methods of collaboration that take advantage of the technology. For example the book discusses

• Document collaboration in a lawsuit
• Internet meetings and file-sharing
• E-mail productivity including GTD
• An overview of the Web 2.0 phenomenon
• Strategic planning using technology

With an-easy-to read-format, short chapters, and full glossary and index, in addition to a complete list of tools and resources, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies is exactly what it claims to be.