Your Next Network: What you can expect with a network upgrade

by Doug Hafford: Afinety+ Zine, Spring 2011

Over that last five years, dramatic changes have taken place in the IT industry.  While often slow on adopting new technologies, law firms will see more positive changes in their next network upgrade than ever before.  At no time in the past has so much improvement in law firm technology taken place in such a short time span.  So what is new for you? 

Windows 7

This is the most obvious and one of the best upgrades you can expect for your firm.  Windows 7 is fast, reliable and can run just about any software you may have – assuming it is a current version.  Most firms are still running Windows XP Pro which is now over 11 years old!  In this amount of time, the sheer amount of patches and security updates is simply overwhelming.  There are so many updates that our analysis tool used to examine clients’ desktops produces a list of updates 5 pages long!  Imagine a PC with hundreds of applications running all at once and you will get some idea of the freight train that is Windows XP.  So your firm will benefit from the streamlined operating system but there is more.  Windows 7 also offers new features such as search, pinning, snap and shake which might save only a mouse click or two per instance but, by the end of the day, you will save about 30 minutes of time!  Perhaps the best feature is that Windows 7 can see as much memory as you want (up to 32GB) on your desktop (compared to only 3GB with Windows XP).  Thus the operating system is far smaller and the available memory much larger – leaving you with plenty of room to run even the most robust applications smoothly and at full speed.


Windows 2008 Server R2

This new server operating system solves the single biggest problem servers have had for the last few years.  Most firms have Windows 2003 Servers.  Windows 2003 Servers (in most cases) can only see 4GB of memory, which is about what you buy in a desktop these days.  Most servers we examine NEED about 6GB or more of memory.   So what happens?  Remember the huge number of updates we discussed above in Windows XP?  The same is true of a 9 year old Windows 2003 Server!  The server will allocate hard disk space to use as simulated memory because it simply does not have enough to run.  This slows the entire network down significantly and can cause some services to shut down or even worse.  With the new Windows Server operating system your servers can now see up to 32GB of memory.  So finally you can have enough memory to run your system without it using hard disk space as memory. Thus speed increases dramatically and stability is improved as well.

Virtualization

This technology allows a single physical server to act as more than one virtual server.  Many firms have servers running single small applications such as Blackberry Enterprise Server, Equitrac or others.  We will often see server counts that are out of control and server rooms filled with noisy, heat producing servers that are simply not doing much.  We recently met with a firm that had 14 servers for 35 people!  This proliferation of servers means that the chances of a failure are dramatically increased, maintenance is a complete nightmare as well as time consuming and there is, of course, the environmental damage, plus high HVAC bills with which to contend. 

With virtualization, you can reduce the number of physical servers and reduce your energy footprint. But virtualization goes far beyond that simple savings. Virtual Server Sessions can be moved from one server to another quickly and easily thus improving both disaster recovery and the overall flexibility of your system.  Have a piece of software that requires the older Windows 2003 server?  No problem.  Just virtualize a 2003 server as a session on one of your 2008 servers!  Want to lighten the load on one server while utilizing unused capacity on another?  Just move some of the services to a virtual session on the lower use server.  The virtualization software is mature, reliable and easy to implement so your next network will most likely take advantage of this technology now or in the future as needed.

Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010

As you can see above Microsoft has responded to the biggest problems with their existing products and this area is no exception.  The number one problem we see at our client firms is the “VERY large mailbox.”    Your firm, without a doubt, has one or more attorneys who feel that they must keep every email ever sent to them.  There are a variety of flaws in this logic, but the very large mailbox causes major headaches for IT support.  Microsoft says no mailbox should be over 4GB, but we often see 10GB and large boxes and huge numbers of emails in the “inbox” rather than put into logical folders.  Usually some training and reasonable advice can help this type of user, however many continue to resist especially since their mailbox has probably been problematic so in turn, they have lost their trust in the system.  Microsoft has given us two wonderful tools in the new versions of the Exchange 2010 server software and the Outlook 2010 email client.

Exchange now has automated archiving features.  These features allow your system to automatically remove older emails from the main “inbox” and put them into an easily accessible archive folder.  Without the user changing habits, their mailboxes can often be instantly trimmed down to size.  Further, the archive folder offers a full search capability which helps the user gain confidence that the system is working properly.

Outlook 2010 (as well as 2007) offers full search, but the most significant new feature is Conversation View.  This view allows you to show an entire thread of emails between individuals in a single, consolidated and organized message.  When you turn on Conversation View your inbox immediately shrinks as all the back and forth messages are distilled into single mail items.   You can of course turn it on and off, opening up specific messages if needed.  Between this and the auto-archiving feature above, you should gain at least some control over those problem users that you did not have before and without any intervention by the user or IT support.

The Cloud

It is clear that the future of computing in general lies in the cloud.  For those of you who are not sure what that means, it is essentially computing providers delivering common applications online that are accessed from either a Web service or software like a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on redundant servers.  A good example would be Google Apps, which provides email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other applications via the web and stored in Google’s server farms. 

Today there are companies like Deadlines on Demand, a cloud based calendar and docketing system, which provide legal specific software in the cloud.  This is a very good delivery model since all you need is a web browser and the software will run.  It also means you can access the resource from anywhere and are therefore not as dependent on being in your office to accomplish your work. 
The challenge for these applications is integration, and the movement of large data files.  Each cloud product stands alone, and thus the integration you come to expect is not possible.  An example of this is a docketing system in house, which can integrate with your time and billing software and your Outlook calendar all at once.  A cloud based system simply cannot do this so each cloud application is an island.  If your documents are stored in the cloud, it might take several minutes to open a large Adobe Acrobat file.   As time goes on, these challenges will be met and some firms have already migrated certain applications into the cloud. 

The benefits go far beyond the simplicity and flexibility of access.  Firm data for example, once in the cloud. is generally MORE secure than in house and automatically includes features such as fail-over and sophisticated backup.  As new updates and versions come out, you get them automatically in the cloud.  Eventually, this will be the model for all software products which will mean a dramatic shift in the “in house” requirements for law firms. For now however, we have a few more years to go before that dream is realized.

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Your next network will be the best system you have ever had.  If done right, it will be fast, reliable, flexible and extremely powerful.  Your users will have more tools accessed more simply than ever before.  The question is, how long will you wait to realize these benefits?