Category Archives: File Management

Greplin Goes to Full Indexing

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Posted in Document management, E-mail Management, File Management, Research Management, Search | Tagged , ,

If you use Google Docs or Mail or store your files in Dropbox, you should be aware of Greplin. It enables you to search your mail and documents stored in the cloud (here’s my previous post about it). Greplin recently announced that it was now indexing full content stored in Dropbox. Before this, a search in Greplin would return just documents whose titles matched your search query. Now the results will be based on an index of the full text of your documents.

As before, Greplin is a personal tool. Although you can access it from anywhere you have an Internet connection, you log in to your account to search across your other cloud services. No-one else can search Greplin and see your information.

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Use Qiqqa for Quicker Management of Research PDFs

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Posted in Case Law, Document management, File Management, Research Management, Windows

Users of Mendeley or Zotero are probably already managing articles or case law or other documents downloaded in PDF format.  An interesting newcomer to this area is Qiqqa.  Unlike academic researchers, for which all of these tools appear to be primarily designed, I’m always curious to see how they do with law-related PDFs.  While they will handle a law journal nicely, I test them against case law.  Zotero, for example, has the ability to capture an item as a case, with special feeds to store date decided, and reporter volume.

Qiqqa does not have a specific case law attribute but offers a lot of other ways to get into the documents you have.  I downloaded an opinion of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in PDF.  It was easy to add to my local library – there is also an online sync function available, so you can have your library stored online – and Qiqqa automatically will perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the document.

It displays this information in interesting ways.  First, it shows a tag cloud of terms that occur frequently in the document.  For example, the case I used – Johnson v. City of Detroit – dealt with housing discrimination and was a Section §1983 case.  The tag cloud displays a large 1983 among the other keywords it highlighted in the case.  You can click on any term in the tag cloud and Qiqqa will highlight that keyword wherever it exists in your document.  You can also search across your library for a keyword to quickly bring documents together.

Qiqqa’s metadata sniffer didn’t extract any useful metadata but, with the PDF of the case downloaded from the Sixth Circuit’s site, when I clicked on Google Scholar, it ran a search and retrieved the same case.  That can help you quickly get into other citations, using Google Scholar’s How Cited feature.

Like Zotero, Qiqqa isn’t ideal for legal research management unless you are primarily dealing with traditional journals and articles. However, the features it has for handling PDFs are quite useful and I could see this being a great tool for managing a case with a lot of downloaded PDFs or for internal functions, like managing articles or knowhow that you have found that relate to your practice.

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Rethinking Your Desktop Search

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Posted in Business Information, Document management, File Management, Google, Research Management, Search, Windows | Tagged , ,

Google has announced that it’s long running Desktop search tool will no longer be supported.  It was a great product for a number of reasons.  It improved over the operating system search and ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.  You can download it until September 14th but current installations will not be supported after that date.

Why Desktop Search?

Why would you want desktop search, you might ask?  It provides the ability to search beyond the files on your computer, to make your searching experience more powerful.  As an example, a search with Google Desktop would return results both from your local machine and the Web, without you having to do searches in two places.  The Desktop tool was also extendable, so that it could look into files that the Windows operating system search couldn’t, improving your results.  It could also search network folders, so you didn’t have to clear that first obstacle of figuring out where you saved a file.

Still not convinced that desktop search is worth worrying about?  A LexisNexis 2008 workplace productivity survey of lawyers and non-lawyers found that nearly a third of lawyers spent between 1 and 2 hours a day looking for documents and e-mails.  Another 16% reported spending 2 to 4 hours a day.  That’s a significant amount of potential revenue, whether billable hour or lost time in an alternative fee arrangement, that can be improved by applying better search to information management.

Many lawyers have not yet migrated to Windows 7, and so are limited in their choices for alternatives.  Windows Desktop Search 4 is still available as a free download and is a huge improvement on the search within XP.  Windows 7 users have it built-in to their operating system.  Windows 7 users also have the benefit of additional search configurations, including forcing Windows 7 to index ALL the files on their desktops, and to add search connectors to enable you to search other sites from your search box.

One of the best known alternatives is Copernic, which has a commercial license for their Desktop Search Professional version.  There is a free version but it’s only for home users.  It is a more powerful tool than Google Desktop was, without some of the limitations on the size of file it could index.  It also has additional options for customizing which files are searched.  Copernic is a Windows-only product.

X1 is another well-known alternative to Google Desktop and has a range of fee-based products, for searching your business files or your Sharepoint server, among others.  Both Copernic and X1 have an e-discovery review focus, so if you are replacing Google Desktop, you may be able to get a replacement tool that can do dual duty.

Cloud Search

Another possibility is that your information is no longer stored on your desktop.  As lawyers and others move their files onto hosted Internet servers, the so-called cloud, they may not need to use desktop search any longer.  A great option is Greplin, which will search many of the most popular document and file storage sites, including Google Docs and Dropbox.com.  Here’s a quick video I made of how it works.  Another service similar to Greplin is Cloudmagic, although it searches fewer services.  I would expect to see more of these sorts of offerings appear in the future.

This is the latest in a progression of products to be sunsetted by Google.  Operating system search is improving and the Google ecosystem has been a bit sprawling, so this weeding certainly makes sense.  It’s been a good 7 years.

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Windows Mesh and Microsoft SkyDrive are Dropbox Alternative

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Posted in Document management, File Management, Windows | Tagged , , , ,

Online backup and file synchronization have gained a lot of interest since Dropbox came on the scene. Lawyers who are comfortable using the cloud for file storage can drop a file on their computer and have it automatically copied up to Dropbox’s servers. When you are out of the office, you can access those files from anywhere with an Internet connection. You can also have those files automatically copied back down to another computer, keeping your home and office PCs synchronized. There are a number of other products that edo the same thing, including Box.net and Sugarsync.

Windows 7 users can also use Windows Mesh, which provides a synchronization tool to your Microsoft Skydrive account. While Skydrive provides 25 GB of free storage space, you can only sync 5GB of it using Mesh. This is comparable to the free storage of 2GB at Dropbox and 5GB at Sugarsync.

Why would you use Mesh instead of Dropbox? There is no question that Dropbox is the pre-eminent storage utility site, having been extended with extra scripts by its users or integrated into other products, like Rocket Matter’s practice management. If you need that extra space, though, it is nice to have some archival storage space up in the cloud. Using a Microsoft sync product may also mean that your overall environment is simplified by relying on their products for more of your functionality.

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