In the September/October 2011issue of The Pennsylvania Lawyer, published by the Pennsylvania Bar Association, practicing attorney and technology consultant, Shannon Brown, provides a very thoughtful and informative primer on the "why's and wherefores" of cloud computing. His article offers some important background for attorneys attempting to understand the "alphabet soup" of current cloud computing terminology.

The Desktop Computing era has brought computing power into the hands of the users, but left them still dependent upon IT to provision the back-end infrastructure such as networks, servers and firewalls. Upkeep on in-house infrastructure tends to be daunting and very costly.

What's more, catastrophe can result at anytime from drive failures, viruses, corrupt databases, server patches and the list goes on. You also need to pay for all the hardware and a team to manage it.

Open Letter to CIOs everywhere:

As you've surely noticed, technology isn't just changing the functions of your employee's jobs, it's blurring the lines of work and life altogether by giving them a choice over how and where they work. We've all seen the stats, for example:

Today, work styles have become as unique as your people and your technology should reflect that. But you have choices, option #1 is to continue with the status quo. Option #2 is to embrace change and leverage the web and new technology to allow employees to be flexible enough to react to their clients needs in the most optimal way possible.

Investment banking is complex enough, anyone alive in 2008 can attest to that. Now couple that with the difficulty of sharing information in a secure and compliant way across offices and firewalls. That's the situation THiNKGREEN! Global Advisors was looking at before it made its move to the cloud.

"We used to have our own server but that was pretty dicey. It was usually reliable until it wasn't. If that went down, everything went to a standstill...Now we know that all of our documents are always available and safe in NetDocuments. Our whole idea was to be entirely in the cloud to eliminate wasted resources which bodes well with our green tech push." - Asmaa Parker, banking associate.

In the past year, NetDocuments' Partner Program has exploded from a small group of consulting firms to a global network of over 90 Partners worldwide.

Our Partners range in size from single consultants, offering a best-of-breed document management solution, to full-scale firms with multiple offices and hundreds of employees offering the end to end solution of selling, consulting, implementing and deploying the service.

Quite literally, #ABATECHSHOW is held in the beautiful basement of the Chicago Hilton. I was debating between the words 'basement' and 'bunker', because of the unique marble architecture surrounding the building – giving quite the bunker-feel at times. While feeling very safe from anything in the outside world, the downside, was a near total disconnection and isolation as my AT&T iPhone continued to read "searching…" for most of the event. I had to connect to the "outside" world so I could participate in the silent conversations happening in the room I was sitting in. Yes, Twitter was ABLAZE the entire show, and in all of the sessions. It created a type of unseen energy and current in the session, as the speaker would say something, it was instantly voted on through Twitter, giving the sentiment of the crowd, or at least those of us online.

The integration between Nuance PDF Converter Enterprise 7.1 and NetDocuments has just been revamped and I'm here to tell you about it.

Nuance PDF Converter Enterprise 7.1 lets legal firms convert, edit, share, and create PDF files, including the ability to redact, bates stamp, and quickly combine documents of any type with simple drag-and-drop into a single PDF. The NetDocuments connector provides an out-of-the box configuration to display a NetDocuments Save toolbar option. This allows a user to intuitively save a PDF file directly into NetDocuments, then select the desired matter-centric location to store the document. The connector is included in PDF Converter Enterprise 7.1, and works for all NetDocuments users without any additional installation of software or fee.

Thousands of lawyers, accountants, financial advisors and more use NetDocuments everyday to securely manage and share their content from the cloud. Salesforce CRM users are another fast growing constituency among NetDocuments users.

In fact, NetDocuments is the most popular all-time document management system among Salesforce users.

Since 2006, when NetDocuments first released its AppExchange integration, the rich customizable platform of Salesforce and NetDocuments has allowed the applications to be tightly integrated for all types of customers, including enterprise-level organizations such as Extra Space® Storage, as well as hundreds of financial service advisory, consulting and legal firms.

Extra Space Storage's business revolves around earth-based self storage units, but that doesn't keep it from using the cloud to make its business go.

With 2,200 employees spread out at self-storage locations around the country it uses NetDocuments to manage and share all of its documents within Salesforce.com in a simple and user-friendly way.

It adds over 5,000 documents a week that are instantly made available to the corporate office in Salt Lake City as well as the majority of employees that are working in their local communities.

NetDocuments has long been integrated with Salesforce.com and thousands of our joint users have leveraged this tight integration to manage all of their client data from one secure place in the cloud.

This video tells the story of Reggie, a small business owner, who sees the light when he sends he sends his documents to the cloud and manages them in Salesforce.

Let us know how you are using cloud. Find us on Twitter at @NetDocuments or drop us a line in the comments section.