RIM Ships BlackBerry Server Upgrade

This is a new server upgrade (BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.0) which should be of keen interest to all law firm technology professionals charged with supporting remote email access via BlackBerry's. Click here for more details on this product from the Mobile Pipeline site.

Software Piracy

You probably want to be sure you are not purchasing systems from any of these companies.....

http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=BGIBSQ4J5VIOQQSNDBCCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=54201177

Advice if you are outsourcing your law firm's data center operations

Are you thinking about shifting your law firm operations or data center to a third party provider to try and reduce costs and improve service? If you are, it obviously is critical that you have a solid agreement in place with the service provide and that this agreement discusses the required service levels in addition to the cost of the services provided.

Information Week has published a good article instructing IT leaders on the basics of drawing up a comprehensive, yet reasonable, service level agreement (SLA). The link to this article is available by clicking here.

Windows Update Services (WUS)

If you are looking for a better way to manage, download, organize and apply Windows patches to your law firm client base, this product might be useful. It is designed to improve on the current Software Update Services (SUS) technology. There is a public beta of this software available on Microsoft's web site if you are interested. More details can be found by clicking here on the Security Pipeline site.

Firefox - officially released

We have written about browser security issues a bit on this blog, if you want to check out the official release of Firefox 1.0 to see for yourself if and how it reduces the impact of spyware, popups, and other security issues, it is now available. It can be accessed by clicking here.

New spyware protection product from McAfee

If you use any of the MaAfee security products within your law firm and you are currently battling spyware, the new product release article from Techweb boosting spyware protection for businesses might be of interest to you.

Law Technology News Article

This month's issue of Law Technology News contains an article describing how and why Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold LLP (the parent of the Xerdict Group, the publisher of this blog) created a technology-based subsidiary. The article headline is Internet Frontiers: Pushing the Envelope if you would like to look it over.

The article describes why one would want to create such a unit, the process of creating it (including some of the hurdles overcome during the journey), the individuals involved in the project, and the current sets of products and services a unit like this can provide to a law firm.

The article is educationally oriented (not terribly promotional) and if you are interested in how to go about creating a unit like this it probably is an interesting read.

Finally, here are links to some of the excellent attorneys within Sedgwick without whom this accomplishment could not have been made. Should you wish to create a technology company, they and their legal talents might be of great value to you.

Gary Sheppard

Warren Krauss

Ken Rashbaum

New MyDoom Virus

If you have not yet patched XP by deploying the XP Service Pack 2 at your law firm, it certainly would be wise to consider doing so ASAP. There is a new version of the MyDoom worm which is being called one of the fastest ever responses to an unpatched Microsoft IE problem.

If you are not running XP yet, it would be wise to consider notifying your client base about this issue (and not to click on links from within emails) or to potentially consider other browsers which are less problematic from a security perspective.

An article outlining these issues are available on Information Week. Access it by clicking here.

Managing outsourced work

As we all know, more and more work is being outsourced. At times, it is moved outside of the United States and other times to rural areas of the United States. And, the nature of the work being moved, which was once limited to work such as technical work and call centers, is now expanding, even into the legal field.

As this trend intensifies in the legal profession, it is critically important these workteams work and communicate across organizational and physical barriers as if they were working in the same physical office. This need requires both efficient and secure communications. One common way to accomplish this goal is to deploy secure, encrypted, password protected collaboration systems allowing the team to jointly manage tasks, projects, documents, contact lists, post bulletin board items from any internet connected PC or device.

Security issues - browsers

Are you concerned about security risks, tracking cookies, spyware, pop-ups, and the like. If so it may be worthwhile to consider making your law firm's browser Firefox as opposed to Internet Explorer. Virtually all experts agree this browser poses far fewer security risks since all hackers tend to concentrate on IE since it has over 90% market share.

I would imagine that this might be especially attractive to smaller law firms that might not have the time or expertise to continually scour the web for security patches and updates which need to be applied.

There is an article on TechWeb today which discusses this topic and trend. It is located here.... http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/51202493

Online server backup services

For those of you responsible for the security of data within law firms, especially smaller remote law firm offices that might not have the data volume to support a large investment in local backup hardware/software, an online backup service might be of interest to you. These also could be used for temporary high-volume storage backup needs. If this is of interest to you, there is an in-depth evaluation of several vendors in this space which is made available as part of Techweb. The details are available by clicking here.

Promising Disk Repair Tool

A recent Information Week article describes a new tool by Logicube which could allow internal IT groups to resolve issues related to corrupted hard drives. This could provide two benefits to law firms ... a) allow the issue to resolved at a lower cost and b) provide a tool to resolve these issues in hours (not days), since drives no longer will need to be mailed out to others and placed into a queue for processing.

Fixing disks internally is a security improvement, it certainly is more desirable to correct these types of issues without having to mail a disk containing sensitive and privileged client data to a third party for correction.