I saw an in-person demo today by RBRO Solutions on the new Interwoven Universal Search. Nice product.

Pros:

– it can crawl and search pretty much any type of data or document management system (i.e., it is not limited to Interwoven for DMS searching)

– the “universal” element means you can choose to search, for example, on “motion to compel” on your internal document management system, on Lexis or Westlaw, the World Wide Web and your internal library catalog, all in one search (the product comes “out of the box” with a fairly large number of “connectors” to allow . . . [more]

I couldn’t resist immediately checking out docstoc when I received Robert Ambrogi’s post on the topic just now. The site, as mentioned, is like a “YouTube” for “professional” documents, including legal documents. I remain skeptical, but who knows? . . . [more]

Many law firms appear to have implemented or will be implementing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) for online network collaboration and search.

A Google Blog Search on: *sharepoint law firm* has any number of interesting and relevant posts on its applicability to a law firm environment.

From a recent post (sorry, can’t remember where from) I saw mention of a fairly recent “pedia” (or is that “wiki”?) for SharePoint called SharePointPedia that I don’t think has yet been mentioned on SLAW. They describe themselves in these terms:

SharePointPedia.com is a web site where people discover and

As I take a moment from battening down the hatches here on the East Coast today, I simply want to ask a question of Slaw-ers out there. What is the Quota of your institutional or company email account?

Not your gmail, hotmail, yahoo or whatever interweb service, but the email account supplied to you by your employer or institution. Here at Dalhousie I have a 97.66mb limit and after being on a little hiatus recently, I had to fight to get my inbox under control but also to stay under the quota. So I’m just curious as to what the . . . [more]

The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by Anthony Grafton called “Digitization and Its Discontents” that discusses the ongoing “tension” between the traditional print library model versus the Google Book projects of the world. The article is well written and provides an excellent general overview of the issues. . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne’s Extreme KM column this past week on Everything is Miscellaneous – A Must-Read Book enouraged me to move forward my plan to read the book. I read it last night and agree with Joel that it is “must reading.”

As Joel mentions, David Weinberger’s central premise in the book is that the “power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order [note: what the author of the book means as our current era of digital information], everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata” (p. 105).

My initial cynical reaction to the book . . . [more]

David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002) ((Weinberger, D. (2002). Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.)) and one of the four contributors to the Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2000) ((Levine, R., Locke, C., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2000). The Cluetrain Manifesto : The End of Business As Usual. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books.)), published a new book this year: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007). ((New York: Times Books.)) The central argument for the book is that a new order in organizing . . . [more]

“You can’t do much without a brain. Decapitation is, in most instances, associated with a decline in IQ.” (my emphasis)

Hmmmm…..

Never mind.

On the other hand (so to speak)

Still, I’m going to assume that the emphasized phase shows that the writer-author of this bon mot has been in court recently. A tip of hat, so to speak. . . . [more]

KM Space, the excellent BLOG of Doug Cornelius, has a post today on the Microsoft purchase of a 1.6% interest in Facebook.

It’s easy to stop at the fact that this purchase values Facebook at $15 billion. Discussions with colleagues have yet to reveal the importance of Facebook in the business world (admittedly, I also thought that the internet would never last.) On what basis did Microsoft come to the conclusion that this investment makes sense?

Doug’s post suggests that an enterprise version of Facebook, delivered on the SharePoint platform, may be the goal. While SharePoint doesn’t have the name . . . [more]

I’m blogging from the LexUM conference Conférence Internet pour le droit / Law Via the Internet Conference, live. At the moment, Justice Bastarache is telling us that the Supreme Court of Canada is planning to make factums available online next year, at least in some measure. He is explaining all of the issues that the Court is currently considering, as it struggles to develop a workable policy concerning the electronic publication of these documents. The Court has not yet decided whether and how to “clean” the files of sensitive business or personal information; they are still consulting, but a . . . [more]

Here’s a Library Journal article, referenced by Steven Cohen of Library Stuff on how to use 2.0 tools to help manage some of the flood of incoming info.

While librarians and users have been inundated with advice on how to produce content for MySpace, blogs, and other Web 2.0 services, there’s been much less discussion about using newer technologies to consume all this new content efficiently.

I thought I was on top of the management/leadership literature but was surprised to have only come across the concept of “servant leadership” (while at a KM meeting in New York last week that I recently mentioned) when a colleague mentioned the concept in a list of suggested readings.

Although the Wikipedia entry for this topic notes that the principles date back thousands of years, the concept entered the management literature a number of decades through writings by Robert Greenleaf. It is a philosophy of “serve first” and then lead by seeing that other people’s highest . . . [more]