Category Archives: Operating System

Zimbra Desktop an Interesting Microsoft Outlook Alternative

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Posted in E-mail, E-mail Management, GMail, Macintosh, Outlook, Postbox, Thunderbird, Ubuntu, Windows | Tagged , ,

Microsoft Outlook remains the most popular e-mail software used in law firms. The growth in Web-based e-mail used and the continued curiosity of lawyers in using cloud systems means that there is a greater chance that Outlook will not be on a lawyer’s PC. Zimbra is a great, free alternative. Originally a Yahoo! product, it was sold in 2010 to VMWare, which is a leading virtualization software company. They also offer an open source e-mail server called Zimbra.

IMAP & Backup

There are a number of things to like about Zimbra in addition to the price. Since it supports IMAP and POP, you can use Zimbra with a Google Mail account or one from your ISP. This is pretty common among e-mail applications, including Postbox Express and Thunderbird.

However, Zimbra has a particular function that seems unique which is that it will do a regular backup of these IMAP e-mail accounts, not just for offline use but for business continuity purposes. This may make lawyers who are cautious about using the cloud feel less at its mercy.

Social Media Support

Another unusual feature is the built in social media support. While you can add RSS feeds from Twitter to your Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird programs, Zimbra has a social tab. You can add your Twitter and Facebook accounts to the software and it will show your message streams on this tab.  If you use Twitter like I do, as a research tool rather than an interaction point, having this information within your e-mail software may make you more productive.

Universal View

Another feature common to Zimbra and Outlook is the ability to look at messages across different folders and mail accounts. For example, if you have both your ISP and Google Mail accounts in Zimbra, you can quickly see all unread messages in either account, in any folder. This cuts down the need to go into each e-mail account and look for messages that you have filtered out of your inbox.

Slow

One aspect of Zimbra that I found a bit troubling was that it seemed slow. Admittedly, I was testing it on a netbook with 2GB of RAM and Windows 7 but I would have expected it to be a bit faster. If your work computer is a bit older or underpowered, you may want to test Zimbra for awhile to see if it meets your needs.

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Print Off Your Research Through the Cloud

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Posted in Android, Apps, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh, Windows | Tagged , ,

One of the challenges lawyers will face as they become more mobile is how to manage their information. There are obvious ways if you can keep it electronic: print to PDF or save it in its native format and upload it your cloud-based storage or e-mail it as an attachment. There are some documents that you may need to save in print and we are starting to see some interesting options developing for printing from anywhere. While Google Cloud Print is getting a lot of press, it is not the only game in town.

Let’s look at Google Cloud Print first.  When it was initially released, it would only find locally-connected printers.  So despite leveraging the Internet, networked printers weren’t available.  That’s changed and – once you’ve configured it through Google Chrome – I can now see both my networked laser printer as well as my locally installed printers, both physical and virtual, like PDF printers.  It’s free but it’s usefulness is limited.  It will only work from Cloud Print enabled resources, and there aren’t many.  It’s obviously early days, though, and this is going to have a big impact for mobile researchers.

Printershare is an alternative and it has a free version that is essentially a trial.  You can print 20 pages and then you need to upgrade. Mobile users may be particularly interested in Printershare because you can print from just about anything and it will find nearby printers using WiFi and bluetooth networks.  Using the Printershare Android app, I could locate nearby printers as well as printing back to my own, remotely shared printer.  Printershare is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android.

PrinterOn is another print-via-the-Internet resource, based here in Canada.  You can download and install your own free version of their PrintWhere software.  They also offer an iPhone/iPad app as well as one for Blackberry.  Once installed, the PrintWhere software discovers available printers.  When you send a print job, it is encrypted and sent from PrinterOn’s servers to your printer.  I wasn’t successful at getting their software to run, but I’m inclined to see it as a problem with my machine (and perhaps Windows’ firewall) in light of the success they’re having bringing PrintSpot (printing hot spots) online.

There are other ways to print remotely by configuring your network to allow Internet-based print requests to come in and find your printer.  That’s great if you’re comfortable managing that set up, but I’m going to keep my eyes on cloud-based printing as it seems to be the easier way to have printer access when I’m away from my network.

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Mine and Store Twitter Messages

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Posted in Business Information, Search, Twitter, Windows | Tagged

There is a huge amount of information being churned out by Twitter users.  Many of the messages are casual, informal communications that you might want to know about.  I’ve already mentioned how you can use Google’s Update search to narrow your keyword search by geographic location.

Visitmix has released a desktop client called Archivist.  You can run a search within the Archivist to retrieve Twitter results related to your keywords:  client or opposing party, corporate executives.  The search is not that unusual, although the results are nicely displayed.  The feature that really helps the researcher is the ability to export your search results to a tab-separated text file, which you can open in Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets.

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Bookmark Synching

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Posted in Add-on, Bookmarks, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Plug-in, Windows | Tagged

Bookmark synchronizing can be an important tool for any lawyer managing online information.  As soon as you use more than one Web browser or more than one device, you may want to have access to the same bookmarks, no matter what software you have open.  I’ve covered both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, the two Web browsers that embedded bookmark synchronizing into the application.

In the recent disappearance of Xmarks (and its possible resurrection), there has been a lot of chatter about bookmark sync’ing.  Makeuseof created a list that included all of these, and one that works for Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is rather unusual.  It’s not a terribly positive review but Microsoft Internet Explorer users don’t have many options.  Another Internet Explorer sync tool is Zinkmo, that has been around for awhile and can sync both between two copies of Internet Explorer and between IE and Firefox.

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