ILTA's Annual Conference at the Gaylord Convention Center in D.C. is coming up fast. Hopefully you've booked your travel and are intelligently planning your time. There is always so much to do, so many people to connect with, and so many sessions to see that the flurry can be overwhelming. Take the opportunity to meet and chat with NetDocuments Management Team at the following events … not to mention the gadget giveaways at booth 901 – 903 and in our Executive Briefing Room AZALEA 3.

Whether you're a small firm with a few people, or part of a global company with many offices, you've likely felt the good and bad effects when new technology is purchased, implemented, or force-fed to users. The technology itself may be the perfect solution to a problem, but this doesn't always translate into user adoption, efficiency, or the increase in productivity that you'd hoped for.

Why? Your answer will be different from the company across the street currently shaking with the pain of tech adoption and withdrawals from their "old way" of doing things, but in both failed scenarios, disaster could have been avoided with a few simple concepts. This post is a precursor to a formal whitepaper NetDocuments will produce. Our Professional Services Department and community of channel partners have implemented well over 1,000 firms. They have boiled it down to five key ingredients every successful tech rollout needs.

 

Alvin Tedjamulia, CTO, NetDocuments, will demonstrate the NetDocuments powerful searching technology and efficient methods to increase awareness and better analyze content from across the organization. He will also train on using NDSearch Analysis, which automatically

exposes unknown content as it extracts and displays relevant topics and content choices that match the user's interest. This webinar is extremely beneficial for existing customers but also for anyone who wants to stay current on the latest in NetDocuments functionality and enhanced design and learn why the most prestigious of firms are migrating to NetDocuments.

NetDocuments released a brand-new interface to the public on September 30th, and we think it's pretty awesome. Feedback from firms that have adopted the new interface is that it is "very intuitive, easy to learn, and much more user friendly in daily operations."

We took it for a spin ourselves, and agree it presents significant usability improvements. We'll share our observations:

The basic unit of navigation is your "Home Page". This is now a customizable, easy navigation page that has default sections of Favorite Workspaces, Favorite Items and Active Matters. One of the most exciting features in this new interface is the ability to click on a yellow star icon next to any of your Files, Workspaces and Projects; they are then automatically added to your home page.

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.

If you're heading out to Orlando next week for the ALA Conference, make sure to come swing by and say hi to the NetDocuments folks at booth #311 . Aside from the normal booth stuff, we'll be giving away an iPad.

A number of our partners and customers will be speaking at the conference including Rajiv Mukerji, of Smart Solutions, who is speaking on cloud computing for law firms on Tuesday, May 24th at 12:15 PM. For those of you not attending the conference, you can follow the #ALAConf hashtag and the @NetDocuments Twitter stream for real time updates. Other notable Twitteratti to be sure to follow include @RL_Wood, @MonnicaWofford and @Vic_Maurer.

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.