The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/34686
CASE STUDIES Swimming with New Fins by Jennifer Potter, Manager of IT Business Analysis and Linda Vega, Manager of IT Support Services at Fish & Richardson P.C. F ish & Richardson P.C. was selected by Microsoft to be part of the Technology Adopters Program (TAP) for Office 2010 in May 2009 and in November 2009 for the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP). We were challenged to quickly plan, build and deploy Office 2010 (we included Windows 7 x64) firmwide, and to capitalize on the benefits the new platforms would provide. We quickly initiated a heavy planning and testing program and began our pilot in April 2009. Our firm deployment began in 2010 and was completed in December 2010. With 11 offices, this was no small task, but our stellar team pulled it off remarkably well. ONE YEAR IN Now, one year after we began our firmwide implementation, we are fully operational with our new platform, and we are reaping the benefits of a well-planned and well-executed migration. We successfully upgraded and then trained and helped our users to become fully functional with the new technology in their daily tasks. Now we are actively pursuing the expansion of our toolset to improve business. This phase involves identifying under-used or unused tools, analyzing how those tools can provide value-adding enhancements to our practices, and then educating employees on their use. Finding new and better ways to manage information and perform tasks is a joint effort between Information Technology and our broad employee base, including lawyers. Knowledge-sharing promotes best practices with these new tools that we can then share with the rest of our firm. EXPANSION AREAS One of the most obvious value-adds is OneNote, and our use of this application is growing rapidly. In conjunction with SharePoint, we are collaborating on cases, projects and management tasks. OneNote is extremely powerful due to its flexible structure and ability to consolidate any type of content into a single space. At the same time, it is exceptionally easy to use. Templates are being created at every turn and these have become an integral part of our 60 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer legal and administrative practices. In fact, OneNote was used to manage our entire Office 2010 deployment. The use of browser-based InfoPath forms and SharePoint workflows are now transforming our once paper-heavy forms base and providing us a quick way to develop efficient process improvements and increase remote productivity. SharePoint workflows have had a strong presence in our firm for some time. However, using the new SharePoint Designer template, we can now create workflows in Visio 2010, import them and actually have our workflow built for us. We have also realized the benefits of using Open XML document formats. As Microsoft TechNet states, Open XML formats “simplify the exchange of data between Office applications and enterprise business systems. Based on open standards, these XML file formats enable the rapid creation of documents from different data sources, and speed up document assembly, data mining and content reuse.” Other free tools from Microsoft, as well as other providers, have lowered the total cost of ownership for our desktops. We’re currently participating in the TAP for DaRT 7 (Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset). DaRT allows us to remotely connect (RDP) to a machine that won’t boot into Windows and provides such capabilities as robust malware removal, crash dump analysis and the ability to disable bad drivers or services while offline. DaRT is proving to be a big time-saver for our helpdesk team. We’ve also updated to Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1 for our image deployment solution. VERY HONORABLE MENTIONS With our new platforms in full operation, we now have fewer add-ins. Many vendor products were not yet compatible with Windows 7/Office 2010 at the early stage, plus dealing with fewer programs has obvious benefits. We are taking full advantage of built-in Office 2010 tools such as the Document Inspector, Document Compare and the Snipping Tool. PowerPoint’s new graphical editing feature has been a clear time saver and has reduced the need for additional tools, which has improved the general efficiency of our user base and certainly our graphics department. year in one