The Orange Rag - from Legal Technology Insider

ARMA release new information management guidelines

Charles Christian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:16:50 +0000

The risk management organization ARMA International has released three new guidelines on information management:

Website Records Management Guideline
This guideline explores how information posted on websites may constitute records. It offers records and information management (RIM) advice and best practices recommendations for managing website records. It covers roles, responsibilities, and risk management for website management, including website lifecycle issues, technologies for creating and attaching metadata, web content management, capturing and harvesting website data, and meeting the challenges of Web 2.0.

RIM for IT Professionals Guideline
Electronic commerce, emerging technologies, privacy and security requirements, and other business drivers are requiring RIM and IT professionals to join forces. This guideline is designed to help RIM professionals extend their IT knowledge while assisting IT professionals in gaining a clear understanding of records retention and archiving requirements and methodologies. It provides guidance for professional collaboration between records managers and IT to create cohesive information management solutions.

Contracted Destruction for Records & Information Media
Designed to guide organizations when contracting for destruction services, this guideline identifies the critical components that must be addressed so no records or information in any format are compromised during any part of the destruction process. For service providers, this guideline will create an understanding of the requirements for managing and processing an organization’s records and information media destruction activities.

These new guidelines and other valuable information management resources can be found at www.arma.org/bookstore

PISCES and OSCRE complete merger

Charles Christian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:41:02 +0000

The e-conveyancing standards groups PISCES and OSCRE Americas have completed their merger – and ahead of schedule. Retaining the name Open Standards Consortium For Real Estate (OSCRE), and their not for profit status, the organisation says it can now 'fully realise the vision of maximising value in the real estate industry through open interoperability among real estate information systems; an effort founded on common business interests and internationally accepted information technology standards'.

Drawing on the past experience of the PISCES and OSCRE Americas, OSCRE will be governed by a nine-person Board, supported by Strategic Advisory Groups led by principle Executive Members to align OSCRE to critical industry issues within and across real estate business domains. Over the next few weeks OSCRE will be making a series of announcements, including introducing a new Board of Directors, announcing re-aligned staff positions, priorities and 'exciting initiatives to support improved exchange of data for our industry'.

November Legal Technology Insider (digital edition) out now

Charles Christian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:23:59 +0000

The November digital edition of the Legal Technology Insider newsletter (UK & EMEA edition) is hitting desktops just about now.

One story causing a lot of interest is the report on the Law Society of Scotland's recent 12 -week trial of speech recognition software using Dragon Naturally Speaking. The Society had previously rejected this technology but following the launch of the latest version of Dragon (v10), believed it was sufficiently advanced, along with required PC processing horse power, to revisit it and explore the potential applications.

Gordon Brewster, director of central services at the Society, said “We identified five members of staff to participate following a successful live demo at the Society’s offices. The software and set up was installed by Paul Amery, of Database Design & Development. Amery highlighted the techniques and approaches to successful voice recognition noting only those key tools needed at the start as part of the one hour training session to ensure a sound start for those taking part.”

The initial trial period has since led to a full pilot involving a further five staff who have all reported it as transforming their document production processes, with one commenting that the costs for her would be recovered in a month. All staff report that accuracy is excellent, with a key feature being the ability to review immediately what has been produced, offering users a streamlined approach that results in significantly shortened document turnaround times.

The new system has been thoroughly tested in a range of situations, including using a portable Olympus digital device remotely to record dictation and then push that dictation through Dragon. This had excellent results at around 10 words per second. The system was also tested in various offices located around the Society in central Edinburgh, from shared offices – where the results were not so good – to those exposed to a lot of external traffic noise, while others are much quieter. Both worked very well.

Brewster said “We have not used Dragon to replace our nFlow digital dictation solution. It is seen as complementary with staff using direct typing, digital dictation or voice recognition depending on the material to be produced, the timescale, and complexity. I am now persuaded this technology does have an application in a legal environment and a business case can be made for it.” Paul Amery can be contacted at paul.amery@ddd-3.co.uk

Microsoft launches Azure 'cloud' platform

Charles Christian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:15:20 +0000

Microsoft has announced the availability of the Windows Azure platform at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). In his opening keynote address, Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, described Windows Azure and SQL Azure as core elements of the company’s cloud services strategy. The company also announced a set of new Windows Azure features, Windows Server capabilities, and marketplace offerings that will make it easier for developers to build profitable businesses from their Microsoft-based solutions.

“Customers want choice and flexibility in how they develop and deploy applications,” Ozzie said. “We’re moving into an era of solutions that are experienced by users across PCs, phones and the Web, and that are delivered from datacenters we refer to as private clouds and public clouds. Built specifically for this era of cloud computing, Windows Azure and SQL Azure will give developers what they need to build great applications and profitable businesses.”

In his keynote address, Ozzie described the company’s three screens and a cloud vision, where software experiences are seamlessly delivered across PCs, phones and TVs, all connected by cloud-based services. Underscoring the IT industry’s shift toward a hybrid approach of online services combined with on-premises software, Ozzie described the programming model for a powerful new generation of applications for both businesses and consumers, enabled by new Microsoft development tools and technologies. Customers and partners can build and deploy cloud-based applications and services on the Windows Azure platform for free beginning now until 1st February 2010.

Commenting on the announcement Lubor Ptacek, V-P of product marketing at Open Text said “With the exponentially rising amount of content volume and the reality of tight IT budgets, our customers are looking for cost-effective ways to store, archive and retain content. By utilizing our products with Windows Azure, our customers can now afford to run an enterprise-class electronic records management solution without the burden of an upfront capital investment in storage hardware.”

Ozzie also unveiled the next evolution of Microsoft Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications. The company introduced a new information service, Microsoft Codename “Dallas,” also available through Pinpoint and built completely on the Windows Azure platform, that enables developers and users to access premium commercial and reference datasets and content on any platform.

Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, detailed the company’s strategy and road map for extending the Windows developer platform to the cloud, which is the next-generation application model, according to Muglia. “Microsoft is converging on a common developer platform for both servers and services,” Muglia said. “Through this convergence, Microsoft will enable developers to continue using familiar .NET Framework and Visual Studio tools and technologies, as well as third-party tools such as Eclipse, to create and monetize applications that run on the server and as services in the cloud.” Muglia described Microsoft’s key investments to enable developers to move applications to the private, hosted and public clouds, enhance them with additional services, and transform them to take full advantage of capabilities unique to cloud computing.

As part of these key investment areas, Microsoft is delivering Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, a set of integrated, high-level application services that enable developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud. The AppFabric technology combines hosting and caching technologies (formerly known as Microsoft code-named “Dublin” and Microsoft code-named “Velocity”) with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control (formerly referred to as .NET Services). Together, these technologies deliver a consistent set of application services to enhance both Windows Server and Windows Azure with a common, scalable foundation for running .NET applications. Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 is available for download today at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric with final availability in 2010. Additional CTPs of Windows Azure platform AppFabric technologies will be made available in 2010.

Muglia also announced the company’s plan to offer Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure, enabling customers to more easily support virtualized infrastructure across the continuum of on-premises and cloud computing, and the release to manufacturing of Windows Identity Foundation, helping developers to provide more secure, simplified user access to both cloud and on-premises applications with open, identity-based claims.

In addition, Muglia announced the new release of ASP.NET MVC2 beta, a free, fully supported framework that enables developers to rapidly build standards-based Web applications through rich asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) integration and enhanced extensibility. ASP.NET MVC2 beta is available today at http://www.asp.net/mvc

Print edition of the Insider running late

Charles Christian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:42:41 +0000

The print edition of the November issue of the Legal Technology Insider newsletter is running approx 24 hours late – technical problem at our printers, a minion fell into a bath of orange ink and had to be de-tangoed, possibly. Should be on your desktops by Friday morning. The digital edition will be out later today.