Tag Archives: sync

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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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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Extend Your Web Browser Sync

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Posted in Google Chrome | Tagged , ,

I have already talked on this site about synchronizing your Web browser preferences, which is native in Google Chrome 5 and is now a part of Mozilla Firefox through the Weave project.  One thing that none of the synchronization tools has done, though, is to ensure that you are running the same add-ons or extensions on each installation of your browser.  This is not a huge issue, because you are probably not adding and changing extensions as often as you are bookmarks.  But there are still times when you add an extension to Google Chrome and you may not remember to add it wherever else you work.

Google has released a new feature into their developer stream that will change that.  If you use Google Chrome, you have three choices.  You can go with the latest stable version, the beta version, or you can join the developer version.  The last two may not be available on all operating systems, and are more likely to have problems in them, since they are still being modified and improved until they move to the stable stream.  If you cannot wait for extension sync, you can download the developer version of Chrome.  Otherwise, sit tight and look forward to this time-saving improvement to Google Chrome.

[Via the ReadWriteWeb]

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Synchronizing Your Web Browser Experience

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Posted in Add-on, Firefox, Google Chrome | Tagged , , ,

Lawyers often work in more than one place, the office and the home being the most common.  Even if you are a mobile legal researcher, you may work on multiple computers, each with a copy of your favorite Web browser installed.  Ideally, you would be able to keep the information current and the same on each system.  While you can often synchronize bookmarks – Google Chrome has bookmark sync built in and you can use Xmarks on the other browsers – you may find yourself out of sync with your other browser preferences.

Mozilla Firefox users can take advantage of the experimental Weave add-on.  It is a project out of Mozilla Labs and is a secure sync tool that will upload your Web browser settings – what is in the Awesome bar, your open tabs, your bookmarks, and other preferences, including passwords – to a Mozilla server.  You will notice once you have installed the add-on that not only do you need to create a username and password for your Weave account, but you are required to have a passphrase to enable the encryption of your content and, without which, your uploaded information is inaccessible.

Google Chrome users can use the Sync feature (still in beta) within the Web browser that will synchronize your bookmarks, preferences, and browser themes.  This is not the Firefox browser sync add-on that Google has discontinued; they recommend Weave as a substitute!  Like the Weave add-on, it does not synchronize your other add-ons or extensions.  Unlike Weave, your information (excluding passwords) is uploaded to your Google account and is not encrypted.

Some Firefox users have gone beyond the synchronization possible through Weave and are using online storage sites, liked Dropbox.com, to store their Firefox profiles, including add-ons.  Since you can have multiple computers connected to your free Dropbox account, it means you can configure each computer to use your Dropbox folder on your computer for your Firefox profile.  Lifehacker has an older post that talks about using Portable Firefox, and keeping your entire Firefox application in sync.  Here is a more detailed method of using Dropbox to store just the profile information.

While you can avoid all of this by researching from a single computer, that isn’t always possible.  Using synchronization tools to keep your research environment as similar as possible across different computers can save you time.

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