Barely Legal Substance: IT Archives

September 21, 2006

ONE MIIIILIONNN DOLLARS

An actual IM exchange today, held today in our secured offices high above the Mississippi River:

Weichbrodt, Noel says:
Step 1 of my evil plan to take over the world: Convince Dave to check the project back in so that I can check it out and keep him from working.

Beeblebrox, Zaphod (TASCSD) says:
Ok...but only for ONE MIIIIILIONNN Dollars.
Weichbrodt, Noel says:
Step 0 of my evil plan to take over the world: Convince Bill Gates to give me ONE MIIIILIONNN dollars because Visual Source Safe doesn't support non-exclusive checkouts.

Posted by Noel at 11:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 04, 2006

I Love Programming, but I Hate Configuring

Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not a configurator. Microsoft needs to stop making me spend as much time configuring its products as I do programming them.

Yes, I'm looking at you, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Reporting Services Configuration Manager is only half a solution.

Everyone else: let me do easy and gratifying things immediately, and difficult things shortly thereafter. Consider iLife your holy grail. There is no step 3.

That is all. You may return to your homes.

Posted by Noel at 05:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 27, 2006

When Wikis Suck and Don't Suck For Law Firms

After posting about why wikis suck for law firms, I'm finding my concerns both ignored, addressed, and transcended. But one use of wikis that I did not consider was to do cross-firm collaboration on legal matters. Thanks to Evan Schaeffer for promoting this to my attention.

I have also had a little more experience with wikis since my original post, and would like to modify my thoughts regarding their use. Mainly, wikis work best when they create a resource for a group, rather than replace, supplant, or build off of existing resources.

That's my experience with smaller (< 100) groups using wikis. When your group is greater than 100 (eg wikipedia), then the criteria shifts to making a resource organized and accessible for the entire group. Hence, for small wikis in a traditional law firm environment, wikis won't create original resource (in most cases. I’ll examine the exceptional cases, where wikis could create a resource, in a later post.).

Here’s a red herring: ”We don't do wikis because we have no control over them.” Control may be distracting, but its not a worthwhile objection. All but the most Enron of places want to leverage the skillsets of their employees. Sorry, that's my attempt at corporatese. Anyway, once you frame social software in terms of knowledge management and project collaboration, the red herring of control dries up.

Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

IT: We Understand Business

I have been surprised over the last couples of months to find out that there are IT departments and consultants that don’t really understand how their law firm does business. In some of these places the standing excuse uses the size of the firm (> 200 attorneys, etc). Whatever; that's not how we roll here.

That's a bit of a crow for me, but to be transparent my naïveté is due to the unquestioned commitment of my coworkers and managers to accurately capturing, understand, and wisely implementing business processes and requirements for IT initiatives. In my experience, the software we write is only as successful as the business process it embodies. When we are off the mark or the process is broken, our software is a mangled zombie corpse. When the process is good and our software captures that, it sings a sweet aria.

Towards reflecting the importance of correct understanding of the business of law firms, Adam Smith, Esq revises the list of top CIO traits to put understanding at priority #1.

Posted by Noel at 05:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Brainstorming the Social Bookmarking Law Firm Intranet

How can social bookmarking benefit the lawyers and their staff? Thanks to Jon Udell for asking the question. My beginning thought is this: if I gave my users a social bookmarking button on their IE toolbar (no, not those buttons), what would compel them to begin using it, and what sort of compelling network effects would emerge upon use?

Posted by Noel at 05:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

Impressive List of Languages Ported to .NET Runtime

As Worf would say, most impressive.

A couple of thoughts. First, if you are designing stuff for the long term, going with one of these ports (eg a non-.NET-native language) should be considered. You always have the native runtime to fall back on. The reverse is true of C# thanks to Mono. Second, the .NET programming stack may now be officially certified as robust. Haters now dismissed, lesson over.

Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 09, 2006

Job Opening: Network Systems Engineer

NETWORK SYSTEMS ENGINEER- Local law firm seeking a professional to fill a Network Systems Engineer position. Candidate must have good written and verbal communication skills, 5 years relevant experience, be a responsible and motivated individual, and well versed in all aspects of Windows and IP networks.

Also, the servers have to like you as a person. As do we.

The office in question has a window with a nice street view.

Leave a comment if you have a lead, or email noel dot elissa at gmail dot com.

Posted by Noel at 05:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 02, 2006

Hair Stories V

From: Noel
Sent: 12:31 PM
To: Zaphod
Subject: FW: I signed YOU up for this one...

OTOH, all my other friends had to *cut* their hair when they worked for a law firm.
I'll probably start getting better service at Lupi's too.
Still, I feel...used.

N

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Zaphod
Sent: 12:31 PM
To: Noel
Subject: FW: I signed YOU up for this one...

I told you that you are a valuable member of our team. Here's proof.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Ford
Sent: 12:27 PM
To: Zaphod
Subject: RE: I signed YOU up for this one...

I plan to grow diversity by forbidding Noel to cut his hair, thereby having one IT member with an Afro.

--Ford

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Zaphod
Sent: 12:10 PM
To: Ford
Subject: I signed YOU up for this one...

Women and Technology: Dream, Code, Run
Day/Time: Tuesday, September 13 11:45 AM- 1:00 PM Room: 402 AB
Session Type(s): Lunch Session
This panel covers how women have used their intelligence and creativity to excel in the software industry. Hear from women IT professionals who are successful in a male-dominated industry. Learn, connect, and engage at this networking panel where your questions drive the agenda, and hear tips and tricks on how to succeed as a woman developer or technical professional in the computer sciences and technology marketing. Both men and women are invited to join in the conversation, and learn from each other about how to grow diversity in the IT industry.

--------------------------------------------------
Zaphod Beeblebrox
IT Application Developer
Ext. XXX
--------------------------------------------------

Posted by Noel at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

You're Welcome For the Fish

My boss, who I've blogged about before, is leaving our firm for the big-city life in Chicago. He's accepted a position with a remarkable firm as their Product Architect. I have mixed feelings about this, and will definitely miss his rare mixture of technical ability, managerial vision, and trust. We’ve lost half of a developer, a designer, lots of vision, and a friend. Godspeed.

My head will be down the next few weeks as the rest of the team picks up various pieces of the heavy load he capably carried until now.

Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 06, 2005

Wikis Suck For Serious Business

We've been kicking around using wikis as ad-hoc KM/collaboration tools for the firm. My boss and I discussed it at a bit of depth on a fine sunny day this last summer as we drove to one of our other offices. We both concluded that, as they stand, wikis are not ready for the sort of use we want out of them.

He made two points. One, current wiki UI is not lawyer-friendly. WikiWords are stupid, especially to a profession who trades in fine wordings. HTML-like markup and syntax are usable for only those who are already geeky enough to know the real deal. Once you can get the UI of a wiki to the level of Word, then we can talk. Hmmm, I smell open source project idea. Two, wikis are knowledge sinkholes. Getting data into them is kinda easy (see One), but getting data out of them is hard. I know Jotspot is working on that, for one, but when you are trading in PDFs and Word docs, XML export doesn't cut it (at least not currently).

I made a single point that sort of gets at both of his. Wikis are great for ad-hoc arrangement and re-arrangement of data, but they don't respect existing data. And with 2-million-plus documents in dozens of formats sitting in our document management system, we need to respect existing data. Wikis will be useful to the extent they enable us to re-use, remix, reorganize, review, and extend those documents. What is needed is a wiki that is created, edited, and saved in Word.

Posted by Noel at 05:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 02, 2005

SELECT * FROM work

I've spent the last few weeks hashing out some advanced (for me) T-SQL code. And actually, only T-SQL code. Which is odd for an Application Developer. Usually T-SQL code is written to read from or write to a database, which my apps, coded in another language (.NET-based usually) and targeted at another platform (Windows XP, Web, etc) will then call when they want to grab or put something in the database.

But this code is not such glue code, but instead a set of applications that live entirely in the database. Permit me an explanation.

My boss wrote a T-SQL email engine a couple of years ago that lets me construct and send an email entirely from T-SQL queries. I can also use plain-text or HTML or XML templates for the emails, and put the results of the T-SQL queries into them. The emails are constructed and sent using a pair of stored procedures, one for setting up the parameters of the email and the other for creating an email that uses those parameters. The email engine (a simple SQL Job) runs every five minutes, popping stuff off the incoming queue and sending it out.

The users get these emails courtesy of T-SQL, the humble behind-the-scenes workhorse of a language that just gets things done. Obviously they present a static view of the data, but I think it's interesting to deliver information, targeted and personalized to the highest possible degree using SQL cursors, directly to the user's inbox, which for most users is the single most watched and important node in their entire computer system. This is an interesting class of applications, ones who drop the usual Windows-based UI for one that is email-based and SQL-driven.

Posted by Noel at 05:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Technical Managers, or, Why I Like My Job

"Technically competent, technically current managers are rare. If you work for one, do whateer you can to keep your job. It's an unusual treat."

--Steve McConnell, Code Complete, p. 686.

Posted by Noel at 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 08, 2005

Seven Lessons Learned From Outlook/Mailsite Migration

This summer, I helped migrate our firm to Interwoven's Mailsite/Worksite Web product, magically turning our KM into a matter-centric maven. Here are seven lessons I learned, in short snappy form.

In order to understand why we force change, you have to understand the big picture. However, some roles in a law firm require focus only on the small things.

There is no perfect solution. There is no perfect set of software that will work exactly like every single one of us wants.

Patience is a virtue.

Once the stakeholders are behind you, everyone else will simply have to accept it. But that doesn't mean there won't be screaming. My ears are still ringing.

A successful software rollout may be defined as one in which most of the software works as expected and no one responsible loses their job. Measure twice, cut once.

You will have to go to each individual computer and hand-modify at least one thing, even if you're good.

If you're going to do it, you need a good manager who gives their life to the project. Handling the politics, the management, and the technicalities demands ability and sacrifice.

Posted by Noel at 05:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 09, 2005

The Partners, They Are A-Changin'

It occurs to me that I am working with perhaps the last generation of lawyers (and any other white-collar, services-based type of person) who are technologically disabled. When these guys (yes, males, as a rule, except for the few members of the pioneering generation of women in law) die off, there will be no one else to ask what 'copy and paste' means, or not be able to accomplish the same abstract task using different programs. I won't have to show another Of Counsel where the Reply button is located in Microsoft Outlook, having changed locations and icons from Lotus Notes. There will be no more web-based evaluations printed out, hand-filled, and sent across cities and time zones to the evaluation supervisor to input into the 'Internet'.

Heck, the amount of paper consumed by law firms everywhere will drop by 75%, at least. In my mind, there's the diminished, hoary, antediluvian lawyer who says to his young paralegal, "Do you know anything about this 'Internet', son? I heard Old Crotchitkins mention it to Knoobly-Knees at the [Ye Olde Closed-Membership] Clubb yester-evenin'. Said you could find out just about anything on it regarding my favorite pass-time of dominos. Also said that his son even found out the Anneballon's secret mint julep recipe. I've been trying to get that out of that son-of-a-gun for years." The bow-tied-one coughs. "Could you go and print out that 'Internet' for me so I can read up on it?"

But that just might be the last time that request is ever made. Strange to think that we might have to shift from dealing with an extreme lack of savvy to an extreme over-use of savvy, like those enterprising Stanford applicants who are now calling up their 2nd-tier schools. Just something to think about.