Peer to Peer Magazine

68 A D D E D V A L U E A s previously established in Part 1, my firm uses ProLaw. It does a lot of things very well, but has room for improvement. Something we realized over a decade ago was that our Attorneys lived a majority of their lives in Outlook. Anything we could do to get common functions and frequently accessed tools into their hands with fewer clicks would be a win. A lot of that lives inside of ProLaw and since it is a thick client app with no support for passing in command line variables to open matters or docs, we had to get creative. Looking at our options, we decided how better to do that than put that functionality into Outlook, where they already spent a large amount of their time. We called this new solution "OutLaw." There are several applications and case management systems that expose functionality that way now, but it was virgin territory at the time. We looked around at our options and ended up utilizing an add-in that was designed to allow you to host applications inside of Outlook. This was in the era of early .NET WinForms and folded in well, being similar to other desktop development we were doing at the time. Add-In Express had several built in features including hosting forms, docking in the reading pane, hooking into Outlook application events, and ribbon/ toolbar support. Each of these was important in their own ways and coupled with some other technologies, looked like they could form an overall solution. There are a lot of specifics, but I'll try to hit the high points today… In our environment, ProLaw is replicated across 12 offices and 2 data colocation sites. In all, it adds up to 16 complete instances of ProLaw kept up to date with merge replication. This is done because ProLaw is rather slow across high latency connections, and functions better when it is local to the user. Trying to keep the best user experience we possibly could, we decided to emulate this setup placing the OutLaw specific tables alongside the ProLaw ones. We already had system DSN's on all user machines pointing to the local ProLaw Blood from a Stone - How to Get Value from Legacy Applications B Y B R O W N I E A . D AV I S Part 2: Outlaw server. This was to support complex macros embedded into our document generation templates. These DSN's were kept up to date by the Windows logon script, which would calculate which office you were currently located in at logon. That gave us a reliable place from which to quickly surface the main matter metadata because once a matter is created, it is fairly static. We were left with the issue of how to access newly created documents before the metadata had replicated through the system. ILTA Brownie Davis, Senior Manager, Software and Applications Development at Fish & Richardson P.C., dove head-first into the first part of the ProLaw series. You can check out the first article in the Winter 2018 issue, and continue his ProLaw journey below and online at iltanet.org/spring-2019. T H E R E ' S M O R E O N L I N E ! Read the full-length article online iltanet.org/spring-2019

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