Officially joining the browser-based productivity game, Microsoft late Monday released the browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

The Office Web Apps, as the programs are dubbed, are slimmed down versions of the desktop counterparts, allowing for document viewing, sharing, and lightweight editing. Consumers get free access to the tools, along with 25GB of storage as part of Windows Live, while businesses can also host their own version of the Web Apps using the latest version of Sharepoint. The main catch is that using the browser-based versions require an active Internet connection.

Find the full story over at CNET News.

One of the most interesting this from a Corporate IT perspective, is that now millions of Hotmail users will have access to more modern word processing tools than they do in their work environment. What will that mean for corporate IT?

This post is part of a weekly/bi-weekly an occasional roundup of things that I read and found interesting. There won’t be a lot of comment from me, but hopefully you will find the links useful. Enjoy!

Interesting stuff I came across this week:

Twitter for Law Firms – “Law firms, unfortunately, are doing a lousy job with Twitter, every day, in growing numbers. I’ve reviewed dozens of law firm Twitter accounts, some owned by global giants and some by midsize or smaller operations, and in almost every instance I’ve come away shaking my head… A good law firm Twitter feed keeps two things in mind: (1) it’s all about the clients, and (2) it’s not all about the firm”

How to Measure the Success of Your Intranet – Intranet guru Gerry McGovern on quantifying the value of your intranet: “Focus on service. Focus on your employees’ time. Be relentless in seeking to save it. If you do you will create a great intranet. It’s as simple and as difficult as that”. Sounds like the recipe for any successful business actually.

Survey: Tesco and Marks & Spencer fail to lure legal shoppers – interesting slant in this article, and it’s headline. Read deeper and you’ll see it say “34% [of respondents] were not tempted by the big names [brands] at all”. To my mind, that’s 66% of clients who could potentially be lured away – and that’s before any of those brands has even launched or begun marketing. Mmmm.

The similarities between publishing and legal industries have already been widely commented on. Publishers of all kinds are at a crossroads, and are busy experimenting with business models.

Today News International unveiled their new web designs for The Times and Sunday Times, prior to them disappearing behind a paywall later this year. Murdoch is banking that a traditional subscription business model will work in the internet age.

Meanwhile Guardian Media Group has launched its Open Platform – the complete opposite of the Times approach. The Guardian and Observer are providing their content for developers to reuse and repurpose in whatever applications they want. Some types of reuse are free, others require registration and licensing or revenue sharing. Just to be clear – that means The Guardian will pay you to republish their content!

The Times wants to wall its content off from the rest of the internet. The Guardian wants to see its content (re)used as widely as possible.

Which model will work?

In an age where information is a commodity you need three things to operate a paywall: unique content, great reputation and niche, targeted information from which readers can derive value. That’s real value as-in money saved, or money earned. That’s why the Financial Times can operate a paywall, as can Tessa Shepperson. But the Times? I’m sceptical.

The Guardian on the other hand is embracing the idea of a sell-through business model where revenues are shared with distribution partners. This is a proven internet business model similar to the Amazon Affiliate and Google Adsense programmes that helped cement both of them as dominant players in their markets. I am certain this will lead to The Guardian having more online readers than The Times. Could it lead them to a dominant position?

What can we learn for the future of the legal profession?

Two very different approaches. One embracing all the opportunity (and risks) of the new technology, and one betting that old models still work. Which one wins will likely provide an interesting thesis for MBA students in the future, and an interesting reference for law firms.

My take?

• If you are a large national firm, your objective should be to commoditize legal information. Give it away for free, share it as widely as you can, and use the mind-share you gain to sell services. Real services that provide real value.
• If you are a small firm of solicitors, work to build your brand as an expert, then figure out how you can provide a subscription service that provides real value to the fans you have gained.
• If you are a midsize regional law firm, you’d better decide which way to jump, because the average middle will be squeezed.

What do you think? Am I wrong? And what do you think it means for the legal profession… if anything?

Social media engagement is about having conversations. Conversations with customers and prospective customers wherever they happen to congregate on the web.

Shireen asked today how can you protect your brand if you allow staff to use Twitter, write blogs or use other social media?

Old style media and PR were about command and control. Create a brand and an image, employ a raft of people to craft words that fit the image, and then distribute them through mass media channels.

In the social media world of today your customers are having conversations about you in public. You can no longer control the message. But you can influence it. No policy will be able to cover all the aspects of a conversation though. Instead you need values. Values enable employees to make smart decisions by themselves about how to engage.

Don’t Zappos values say everything staff need to know about how to engage with people on social media? Microsoft’s blog policy is famously two words: Blog Smart. It’s about empowering staff to make smart decisions based on company values.

Instead of creating a bunch of command and control rules that nobody reads, think about the values that embody your company and how you can use them to enable staff to make decisions by themselves, engage customers, and win new business.

What do you think? Any other ideas to add?

Sadly I am old enough to remember when you would walk into your average corporate and be wowed by the latest technology.

When today’s Net Generation graduates walk into your firm they will probably find that they have more computing power in their home PC than the one on their desk. In some cases they may even have more computing power in their pocket!

For the last decade IT departments have been driven by lowering costs, reducing risk and delivering a “good enough” experience. But as Jason writes, today’s graduates are not about to accept this.

Some of today’s smartest graduates are choosing to forgo corporate careers for entrepreneurial endeavours. And who can blame them. With just a laptop, an internet connection, and free or low cost consumer-focussed software from the web, sole traders and small businesses can appear much larger than they are, and effectively compete with the big players all at much lower cost.

How can Corporate IT Compete?

First realise that IT is no longer just about cost reduction and lower risk, but also customer service and staff retention.

Look at delivering value to the business across a wider range of metrics: increased revenues, increased customer satisfaction and increased profit per customer. Look at how your IT systems can help the business in terms of new talent recruitment and retention.

What you can do:

1. Enable staff to work flexibly, from home, from the coffee shop, and yes, even the office. Remove the need for employees to be physically at their desk during office hours.
2. Provide tools that make it easy to find expertise and knowledge – tools that mimic the consumer tools they are used to: blogs, wikis and personal sites not dissimilar to LinkedIn or Facebook.
3. Provide tools that enable staff to connect in real time, from any location via audio, video and IM.
4. Deliver on-demand self-paced training materials through short snippets such as podcasts that can be easily integrated into hectic lives. Enable staff to upload their own best practices and ideas and use social computing techniques to enable the best content to bubble-up to the top.
5. Provide corporate-class social computing tools to enable Net Gen recruits to express themselves in a way that is natural to them.
6. Enable staff to stay connected, wherever they may be from the device of their choice. Let staff select their own IT equipment and use virtualization technology to stay in control of corporate assets and security.
7. Provide platforms for staff and customers to communicate and meet customer expectations for rich online experiences that help create a sense of community.

Related information:

• Gartner: Consumerization of IT: The IT Civil War – Special Report
• IDC: The State of Social Business 2009
• CISCO: Proliferation of Consumer-Based Social Networking Throughout the Enterprise and a Growing Need for Governance and IT Involvement

This post is part of a weekly/bi-weekly roundup of things that I read and found interesting. There won’t be a lot of comment from me, but hopefully you will find the links useful. Enjoy!

Interesting stuff I came across this week:

Who will invest in Law Firms; Not Private Equity it Seems – Law firm partners needn’t think about a golden goodbye just yet. According to Richard Susskind, private equity don’t want the hassle of managing law firms based around the billable hour, so instead their money is headed towards legal process outsourcers and fixed-fee lawyer boutiques.

The Collapse of Complex Business Models – Clay Shirky on what happens when business models stop adding client value and just add cost. Be sure to read the ATT anecdote about a third of the way through. The ATT approach precisely reflects what I am hearing from one law firm after another that tell me they don’t want to do commodity, process driven work. Shirky concludes “When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things… it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future”

Microsoft have confirmed that the launch date for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will be 12 May 2010. This is the date that business customers will be able to buy the product, with consumers getting to buy the product around a month later.

I have been running the Office 2010 Beta for around a six months now, and I have to say it is without doubt the most stable Beta I have ever used. I don’t think I can recall a crash that was due to a fault in Office itself, and that probably makes this Beta more stable than the likes of Office 2000 and Office XP that many folk are still using.

This launch also marks a significant, and potentially high-risk, change of strategy for Microsoft, seeing them tackle the threat of free alternatives with their own free editions and fully embrace cloud computing:

• Free, browser-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be available to anyone with a hotmail account. These will be called the Office Web Apps. These web apps will also be available to businesses to run internally as an extension of SharePoint 2010.
• A free cut-down version of the Office client suite will be bundled with new PCs as Microsoft Works is discontinued. This will be called Microsoft Office Starter 2010.
• SharePoint 2010 embraces multi-tenancy enabling it to be used much more cost efficiently as a cloud-hosted collaboration platform.
• The addition of SharePoint Workspace – a client application enabling you to take SharePoint sites offline and continue working when out of the office and disconnected from the web.

Microsoft took the wraps off Office Communicator ‘14’ this week – their corporate VOIP and Instant Messaging offering. One of the interesting new features is that your Communicator status updates now integrate with the SharePoint 2010 Activity Feed. Don’t know what the Activity Feed is? Think of it as the company equivalent of the Facebook or LinkedIn news feed.

In the current version of Communicator you only get to see you contact’s status in the Communicator client and in Outlook.

The default mailbox size for Microsoft Exchange Online has been increased from 5 GB to 25 GB. This 5x increase is free of charge and is automatically implemented for new users. You can increase existing users’ mailboxes to 25 GB if you need as the overall allocation for mailboxes has been increased to (25GB x number of users) instead of (5GB x number of users).

Sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Exchange Online and the rest of the BPOS suite here.

What is SharePoint?

In short, SharePoint is a business collaboration platform. It enables employees to publish, share, search, analyse and manage information all through a browser. This video gives one example of how you might use it:

What Can SharePoint Do For Me?

Search

Ever wondered why you can search the entire Internet in 0.2 seconds, and yet finding information in your own organisation is next to impossible?

SharePoint plugs into your existing intranet, file shares, databases and applications to become the Google for your company, One central location to search for everything, regardless of where it might be stored.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management

How do you make sure knowledge stays in the company if employees leave? How can you make sure knowledge is shared across the organisation instead of having staff repeatedly solve the same problem, simply because they don’t know a solution already exists?

With SharePoint you can create community sites (sometimes called communities of interest, or communities of practice) where staff can share knowledge and best practices. You can create blogs and wikis, and each employee gets a personalised home page -  just like you are already familiar with in Facebook or LinkedIn – but with all the appropriate security, and none of the risks, of using public collaboration tools.

Document Management and Compliance

Have you ever been stuck waiting for someone to finish making changes to a document before you can add your contribution? Or worse still, edited a document only to find someone else has accidentally deleted your edits because they didn’t realise they had the wrong version?

SharePoint provides one central place to store documents, track changes, group related documents, retain, archive and manage records. SharePoint 2010 also adds new features supporting eDiscovery – helping you find and place holds on information subject to legal process and enables several people to edit the same document simultaneously meaning you never have to wait for your colleagues again!

Manage Teams and Projects

Coordinating and managing teams and complex projects can be a tricky task, but SharePoint enables everyone to work together effectively with shared team calendars, contact lists, task lists and document libraries. SharePoint becomes the central information hub that staff collaborate around, rather than having documents and information locked away on personal hard drives and in email. What’s more, if you’re a mobile worker, SharePoint Workspace let you take that information and continue to work on it while you are offline.

Track Your Business Performance

How often have you gone to a meeting and looked at print-outs of charts or data, and then tried to figure out who has the most up-to-date or correct version? SharePoint enables users to upload charts and data visualisations they have created in Excel and share them across the company without sharing the underlying data set or formulas. This means you get one “version of the truth” that the whole company can use to track your monthly business goals and understand how their performance contributes to the overall number.

How Can I Try It?

You have the choice of a traditional in-house deployment, or a cloud-based subscription offering.

The hosted cloud offering has the advantage that you can get started right away, there are no up-front licence fees or hardware costs to pay, and you don’t need to spend time and money training in-house IT staff on how to operate SharePoint before you begin. Sign-up for a 30 day free trial, or learn more about our hosted offering first.

If you prefer in-house deployment we can provide you with a 180-day trial licence for SharePoint and share our expertise to help you get up and running with useful sites and solutions tailored to your business for a small cost. To find out more, contact us at info@connectegrity.com.