practicehacker

This recent piece in ComputerWorld highlights the growing interest in hosted Microsoft Exchange. No surprise; but why now? And if you use Hotmail or Gmail, you may even ask why hosted Exchange is worthwhile at all. If so, consider this:

First, hosted Exchange offers full-featured contacts, calendaring, and e-mail in tight integration, just like the Outlook on your desk. Meanwhile, it spares users the typical pain in the ass features of a self-hosted Microsoft product: compatibility issues, upgrades, backup problems, disaster-recovery, smartphone support, spam filtering, patching, etc. In effect, with hosted Exchange you get your own “virtual e-mail server” in a secure, faraway datacenter, but only pay for what you use, usually on a monthly basis. Microsoft has been using this deployment model for some time in the educational market and it has worked.

Second, whereas Microsoft takes a top down approach to security, Google generally works from the bottom up. For instance, Google generally starts with consumer-facing products and scale them upwards until they can work in an enterprise environment. Thus Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk, and a host of Google consumer toys has been integrated and reborn as Google Apps. Microsoft on the other hand usually starts with enterprise products, makes an obscene amount of money via licensing, and scales down to smaller business and consumers. This was the genesis of Outlook.

Third, consider that the gap between Google Apps and Microsoft Office is getting narrower all the time. And with its Office 365 product Microsoft is blurring the line between it and Google even further. Office 365 retains the look and feel of MS Office, while saving the organization tons of money and virtually eliminating the need for beefed-up IT departments (sorry IT guys).

As with all technology, lawyers are the last to know. Once the cat is out of the bag though, news spreads fast. Your opponents are going to take every advantage they can, so you should too. Ultimately hosted applications such as Exchange and web-based applications like Office 365 and Google Apps are the future. And why not: law firms are about serving clients, not endlessly fiddling with their IT infrastructure.

As most readers know, I write a column for NYC-based TechnoLawyer called SmallLaw (formerly known as, no joke, “Crazy Mazy”). Anyhow, as TechnoLawyer’s intrepid Chicago reporter I’ve written about the ABA TechShow since 2008; and before that for this blog.

Here are the 12 videos we shot at this year’s TechShow. Feel free to subscribe to my YouTube Channel for more legal tech news and check out my TechnoLawyer pieces as well.

• ABA TechShow 2011 on YouTube
• TechnoLawyer Covers TechShow 2011
• TechnoLawyer Covers IgniteLaw 2011

You’ve heard about Q&A phenom Quora, right?  Well meet Opzi, the site started by Attorney Euwyn Poon that aims to bottle that Quora lightning and put in on your desktop.

Opzi is part bulletin board, part wiki, part e-mail in-box, part whiteboard, and part real-time-collaboration. The site threads, tags, and organizes every question and answer, then applies a powerful search engine and some machine intelligence. Voila – your office knowledge base grows effortlessly with every new question and answer. The possibilities are staggering. Deployed in a firm or across a group of solos and small firms, for instance, Opzi can draw information and resources, then deploy them when and where needed. In other words, instant knowledge-sharing.

Opzi is currently in closed beta. I’m just starting to appreciate it myself. If you’d like to join the experiment check it out here and let me know your thoughts.