Before deciding on Keno Kozie, [Dechert CIO Mike] Shannon and a few Dechert colleagues went to Chicago to visit Keno Kozie’s facilities. “We didn’t want to get sold on a sales pitch [but] on real analysts supporting real law firm applications like Autonomy’s iManage and Sage’s Carpe Diem. We asked them to give us three analysts so we could ask each of them sample help desk calls, such as, ‘How do you do this in [iManage]?’ or ‘How do you style this Word document?’ Then we chose three random analysts, which made [Keno Kozie] a bit nervous, but they did fabulously, too,” Shannon says.

Shannon says that the analysts’ expertise in all the applications Dechert uses sold Shannon’s team on Keno Kozie’s capabilities. “My level-two help desk manager can trip up some good analysts, but he had a hard time tripping up [the Keno Kozie analysts],” Shannon says.

According to Shannon, Keno Kozie hires analysts with ample experience either working in law firms or supporting them and then provides them with in-depth, hands-on instruction from professional application trainers. In addition, Keno Kozie analysts get more specialized training whenever they join a specific client team and as applications and technologies evolve.

For example, all of Keno Kozie’s analysts either have Microsoft Office Specialist Certification or are in the process of getting their certification. “There are so many nuances in Word with regards to tables, formatting, and so forth that it’s difficult to learn them all,” says Shannon. “The [analysts] at Keno Kozie understand the specific way Dechert styles its documents, and Keno Kozie analysts are expert with the use of styles and know our specific needs.”

Shannon says it helps that Keno Kozie is a full-service law firm support organization that includes engineering staff, Citrix specialists, document management experts, and advanced applications support. “Keno Kozie has a depth of legal technology experience that cannot be easily found in other support organizations. When complex calls come into the help desk, the support analysts have extensive resources and experts that they can consult with or bring onto the call in support of users,” Shannon says.

Complete Article: Dechert Trades Help Desk for Keno Kozie

Minneapolis-based advertising agency Preston Kelly boasts a client list that larger firms in Los Angeles and New York might envy, including Roundy’s Supermarkets, Taco John’s, Physicians Mutual, Health-Partners, STAGG Chili, Hormel Foods, and the Minnesota Zoo, among others.

In December 2008, the agency introduced a new holiday game for its partners and clients, an online version of the White Elephant game that lasted for a week. Clients could virtually steal and resteal one of three-dozen mostly gag gifts as many times as they could during the time period in the hopes of getting a Wii Fit or an iPod. Those who won canned goods had their gifts turned into a cash donation to feed the hungry.

However, the agency ran into a problem as the week wrapped up. “We had traditional hosting, [where] we had to pay for it based on what our average traffic is. Our average traffic is fairly low, but during those last 10 minutes, people were hitting the servers so hot and heavy that the game didn’t fail, but the servers were so slow that it didn’t register that you had actually clicked to steal a gift until the game was ended,” says Melody Lentsch, director of interactive at Preston Kelly.

Despite the glitch, the game was a success with Preston Kelly’s clients, and the agency decided to bring it back the following holiday season. But the agency didn’t want to pay $10,000 for 10 minutes of traditional hosting. During its search for a solution, the agency came across ReliaCloud (www.reliacloud.com), an Eden Prairie, Minn.,-based cloud provider with a hosting solution that was just going into beta.

“We told [ReliaCloud] our dilemma, and they said that because of the way cloud computing works, we could pay for a model that would meet the needs of our game,” Lentsch says.

Ultimately, Preston Kelly decided to take a chance on ReliaCloud, and according to Lentsch, the agency was thrilled with the results. “Sure enough, our game did not fail. We had thousands of hits to the server every second during the last 10 minutes of trading, and the game functioned at about 100% during that entire time,” she says.

Complete Article: On-Demand Cloud Hosting: ReliaCloud Offers Ad Agency A Burst Of Affordable, Reliable Computing Power

About two years ago, [St. Michael’s RC School in London] migrated to Google Apps for its school workflow. In the past, students would complete work on Microsoft Word or Open Office, save it, print it, bring it to school, give it to the teacher, and then wait for the teacher to mark it up. During this process, Kelly points out, too many glitches were possible—students could lose the flash drive carrying the homework, students often had to hold up their progression waiting for teachers’ annotations, and those annotations could get lost in transit.

With Google Apps, students now can seamlessly share their work with teachers and fellow students by accessing it all through the cloud. When a student finishes his or her homework, the teacher is alerted and can respond with the type of flexibility that facilitates learning.

Google Apps, however, had one major flaw that kept it from being a complete solution for the school. “It had only one level of access—one password—and then you were straight in,” Kelly says. It couldn’t handle confidential information, such as that of a student’s learning disability, so that the student’s teacher could be informed of it in a confidential fashion. “We needed to find an easy way to add another layer that would be simple for the school to use without the complexity of having additional servers in the school or having to pay for the expertise to set it up,” he says.

After looking at several potential solutions, Kelly came across myOneLogin by online identity services provider TriCipher (www.myonelogin.com). “The biggest thing with myOneLogin is its simplicity,” says Kelly. “It takes a click of a button to integrate into Google Apps, and then it just physically works.”

Complete Article: A Single Point Of Entry: TriCipher’s myOneLogin Lets Students Log In To Google Apps Privately & Securely

[Troutman Sanders CIO Barb] Kunkel feels especially comfortable with Intelliteach because its founders, including CEO Lance Waagner, are former IT directors of major law firms, and the company provides help desk services exclusively to law firms. “You feel that you’re dealing with someone who understands my world and what my problems are,” Kunkel says, adding that she feels comfortable handing over this portion of her business to Intelliteach so that her department can focus on serving the firm’s attorneys and clients in more strategic ways.

Kunkel points out that although she joined Troutman Sanders in 2006, three years after the migration, she was already familiar with Intelliteach because her previous law firm had outsourced its evening help desk coverage to the company. And she felt that Intelliteach could be even more effective for the firm than it already was. “I told Lance [Waagner] that we can strengthen this partnership and improve our statistics and measurements if one of his team leaders came to our office for a full day every week and spent [it] with our engineers,” Kunkel says. “I said we could build it into our agreement, and Lance said, ‘Let’s give it a try. We don’t have to put any additional costs.’”

Kunkel set up Intelliteach’s employee with his own office, and once a week the employee shadowed members of Kunkel’s IT staff, talking with them and watching as they handled various problems. This employee then gave his team updates on Troutman Sanders and ultimately offered the firm suggestions and adjusted Intelliteach’s services to satisfy Troutman Sanders’ unique needs.

Complete Article: Outsourcing the Help Desk at Troutman Sanders

Since its founding in 1963, Donatos Pizzeria has grown from a single restaurant in Ohio to about 200 of them across six states. Of these restaurants, about 60% are company owned, while the other 40% are franchises; however, as the chain continues to grow, more of these new restaurants will be franchised.

Donatos’ COBOL-based PoS (point of sale) solution increasingly was becoming both dated and expensive, explains Mike Born, senior systems engineer at Donatos Pizzeria (www.donatos.com). “We were looking primarily at the fact that we were getting ready to do some significant growth, and the product we were using . . . was going to be cost-prohibitive to grow out and had issues in terms of some of the new functionality that we were adding,” Born says. “The traditional system has been just a text-based thing, and we have modified that to use a touch front end by using Web services in the back end. The old COBOL didn’t help us get there, basically.”

Born searched the Internet and trade publications to find a replacement for Donatos’ current system. Most of the COBOL-based solutions he evaluated were either too expensive, posed compatibility issues, or both. Fortunately, there was one exception: isCOBOL Application Platform Suite by Veryant (www.veryant.com). “The isCOBOL was by far the easiest in terms of taking our code base and making relatively few minor tweaks and getting the product up and running,” Born says.

Complete Article: Joining COBOL & Java: Veryant’s isCOBOL Helps Pizzeria Deliver Updated Point-Of-Sale Systems

The City of Gastonia, N.C., a city of almost 70,000 residents, has grown into a bedroom community of Charlotte, the state’s largest city. Among its more notable natives is NBA Hall-of-Famer James Worthy. Like most cities of its size, it needs to support services for Gaston County as well as a public safety infrastructure, including police, fire, and 911 services, that works seamlessly for city employees.

A staff of about 30 handles the IT needs for the city and county’s 1,000 employees. Although that number is typical for an SME, these IT professionals have more things to monitor than the average organization of this size. And it didn’t help that the city fire department, EMS, city and county police, and county sheriff’s departments each used their own Active Directory servers.

Moreover, the provider of Gastonia’s previous endpoint VPN solution had recently gone out of business, and it became imperative to find an effective and vendor-supported replacement, says Bobby Loveland, network engineer for the City of Gastonia. A timely cold-call from network access security provider Avenda Systems (www.avendasys.com) led Loveland to Avenda’s eTIPS appliance and platform, a near-perfect solution to Gastonia’s needs.

“I was looking at a couple of other solutions. Up until then, I hadn’t heard of Avenda, and all of [Avenda’s] products seemed like the best ones. It was very good timing,” Loveland says.

Complete Article: Enforcing Policies & Access: Avenda Provides City Of Gastonia With An Ideal Solution

In the few months that Haynes and Boone has been using eVantage, Wisinski can cite several scenarios where eVantage has cut the cost of data search for clients by as much as 75 percent. In one situation, a client gave Haynes and Boone 15 .pst files belonging to 15 custodians that totaled 48 gigabytes. Using eVantage, Automated Legal Services loaded the 48 gigabytes within a few hours, while attorneys evaluated keywords and timeframes, simultaneously.

As the data was being loaded, the attorneys were trained to add tags, create search queries, and tag their results to export the data to a review platform — all in approximately 15 minutes. After a few searches and some tweaking of the search terms, the resulting data set was reduced to eight gigabytes, 1/6 of the original data. The total cost? On a straight per gigabyte processing model, the firm gave the clients an 80 percent savings. In addition, eVantage was able to process the firm’s data at 1/4 the cost of its previous outlay. “The [old procedure] would have been to process the [entire] 48 gigabytes of data for searching … before the attorneys had the ability to kick the tires, “Wisinski says. So eVantage provided a savings in processing and review time.

In an unrelated case, a Haynes and Boone client gave Automated Legal Services five .pst files from five custodians that totaled 24 gigabytes of data. One of these custodians did, as Wisinski put it, a “bad deed,” but the client did not know the custodian’s identity or the person to whom that custodian discussed it with. Wisinski’s department loaded the .pst files into eVantage, which reviewed every outgoing e-mail distributed by the company for the period in question. According to Wisinski, eVantage was able to identify the person in less than a day after the client delivered the data. “In the past, the timing would have normally taken more than a day just to process [the data] for searching, and it would have been difficult to filter e-mails going outside the company,”says Wisinski. “So it would have cost the client [four times as much] without being able to do the [latter task],”if eVantage hadn’t been deployed.

Complete Article: On-Premise EDD Appliance Saves Firm Time and Money

Nixon Peabody looked at several internal solutions along with a few hosted options, but both sets of solutions had their various drawbacks. “The internal FTP solutions were very expensive to implement [and] would require a redesign of our security architecture, which we didn’t want to do because our network security is very stringent, and we really take pride in it,” says Roman. “And the hosted solutions were either expensive because they charged based on data volume, or their user interface[s] were not easy for our clients to utilize.”

Unlike the other products Nixon Peabody examined, YouSendIt charges by number of users no matter how many files are sent over its networks. It does not require any overhaul in the firm’s security architecture within its corporate network. And YouSendIt’s simple web-based interface is easy for Nixon Peabody’s clients and vendors to follow. “All they have to do is click on the link we send them,” Roman says.

And most importantly, YouSendIt ended Nixon Peabody’s reliance on FedEx and other courier services. “Without YouSendIt, we would have to pouch it, and we would lose a day in productivity because we didn’t have a good means of electronically transmitting that [secure] data,” says Roman. “We’re also able to save our clients’ money by not having to use [courier services] in these situations.”

Complete Article: Law Firm Secures File Transfer With YouSendIt

In many ways, International Justice Mission (www.ijm.org) is a typical SME. It employs about 400 people, several of whom are located in branch offices, and it has an IT staff consisting of just four people. This small IT department is tasked with making sure IJM’s far-flung network works effectively and securely, responsibilities that, in an ideal world, would be handled by a staff two or three times its size.

Unlike most SMEs, however, IJM’s branch offices are located in places such as Rwanda and Cambodia, where it can cost several thousand dollars per month to run a 128KB connection. Moreover, fast and effective network communications can mean the difference between life and death both for its employees and for the people it is committed to freeing from such evils as slavery, sex trafficking, and police brutality.

IJM was looking for a solution that could optimize and accelerate data transfer, application performance, and mobile communications over its entire WAN, as well as enhance data security. After some research, IJM found that Riverbed’s Steelhead solutions offered exactly what it required. The organization uses the 1U Steelhead 2020 appliance in its main Washington, D.C., office, the Steelhead 500 in its larger field offices, and the Steelhead 200 in its smaller field offices, according to John Lax, vice president of information systems at IJM.

Complete Article: Connectivity When It Matters Most: Riverbed’s Steelhead Appliances Provide Agency With Connectivity That Can Help Save Lives

Hemry, Hemry & McDoniel has provided real estate, estate planning, and probate law for Oklahoma City, Okla., residents for more than 60 years. It’s a small but venerable firm with only three attorneys and four support staff members, none of whom is an IT professional. If it weren’t for the firm’s legal administrator, accountant, and self-described “computer nerd” Leslee Jaramillo, HH&M might still be relying solely on old-fashioned paper backups for all of its current and archived information.

“[The attorneys] figure if they lose stuff, they will recreate it. They weren’t very concerned because I have all of the history of the firm stored in my computer,” says Jaramillo. But after more than 15 years of using various methods — from 3 1/2-inch floppies to external hard drives — Jaramillo finally put her foot down and told the partners that the firm needed some sort of unified backup system that would ensure that everyone’s data is properly stored. Fortunately for HH&M, CoreVault, which is also based in Oklahoma City, provided the firm with an easy-to-use online data backup solution that Jaramillo believes can be used by anyone, including the firm’s 73-year-old partner who uses his PC only to check e-mail and play an occasional game of solitaire.

Complete Article: Case Study: Firm Turns to CoreVault for Online Backup

Adobe needs little introduction. The multimedia giant has launched everything from Photoshop to the PDF, and as the years go by, it continues to design products for individuals and enterprises around the globe. One example is the company’s LiveCycle product (www.adobe.com/products/livecycle), a collaboration service that Fang Chang, group product manager for Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service, describes as a platform as a service for both developers and enterprises.

“It’s an SDK (software development kit) backed by hosted services run by Adobe that enable companies and developers to create these multiuser types of social, collaborative applications and rich Internet applications,” explains Chang. LiveCycle incorporates chat, video, Web cams, whiteboards, and other collaborative features that might be used in a virtual room or environment, making it easy for customers to create and add these collaborative applications into their products.

When Adobe engineers began building the LiveCycle SDK, they were seeking to design it so data would be available in real time without having to store it in a database. Raffaele Sena, senior computer scientist in the business productivity business unit at Adobe, says that his group started looking around for caching solutions and found that the Terracotta Distributed Cache solution (www.terracotta.org) was the best fit for LiveCycle.

Complete Article: Real-Time Data: Adobe Turns To Terracotta To Meet Its Needs

Since its founding in 1949, Houston-based Wholesale Electric Supply (www.wholesaleelectric.com) has sold electrical supplies to commercial and industrial companies, along with companies in the petrochemical and utility industries around the world. Although Wholesale Electric’s industry is competitive, the company differentiates itself by providing a comprehensive product line teamed with top-notch customer service.

When Wholesale Electric’s customers need a GE breaker, for example, they typically need it right away, so it’s imperative that the company’s systems are always up and available. “The large petrochemical companies don’t care if we have a local issue or a hurricane or any type of disaster in the area,” says Bill Fife, director of technology at Wholesale Electric. “They need material, and they need it now, and we need to be able to supply that need [because] what we sell is available at plenty of other places.”

Fife knew that to maintain high availability, his company had to upgrade its storage solution. And with the help of Wholesale Electric’s reseller partner Tradentrix, Wholesale Electric was able to put together a complete storage virtualization solution made up of a Compellent storage-area network, Xsigo’s I/O Director hardware and software solution, and VMware’s ESX 3.5 virtualization software.

Complete Article: A Joint Storage Solution: Compellent & Xsigo Team Up To Meet Electrical Supply Company’s Storage Needs

Founded in 1866, the University of New Hampshire is the largest university in the state and one of only nine land, sea, and space grant institutions in the United States. Its main campus in Durham, N.H., has more than 14,000 undergraduate and graduate students, along with another 2,000 or so faculty, administrators, and other staff. And Bob Rader, storage and backup manager for UNH, estimates the IT department for the campus is made up of about 150 employees.

UNH’s IT department is divided into two parts: academic desktop support for students and faculty and the administrative side, which handles backend business applications and general enterprise computing. Until recently, each sub-department had its own backup environment, and about two years ago, the university decided to consolidate the two backup environments.

After looking at data deduplication solutions from several vendors, UNH chose SEPATON’s S2100-ES2 VTL (Virtual Tape Library) and DeltaStor Deduplication Software (www.sepaton.com).

“I never expect technology to work as expected. To me, it’s hope for the best, plan for the worst,” Rader notes. “But SEPATON [works] as advertised, which is not necessarily as common a thing in IT as you would expect.”

Complete Article: Easy, Affordable Backups: SEPATON’s VTL Solution Gets High Marks From The University Of New Hampshire

Law firms have a reputation for being document-intensive, and Miami-based Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson is no exception. Over the last several years, this full-service firm has worked diligently at becoming a paperless operation, and more than 95 percent of everything it does now is computer-based, says Eugene Cabreja, IT director at Stearns Weaver.

Until recently, however, Stearns Weaver’s e-mail system was hobbling in their digital transition. The firm was using an outdated Novell GroupWise installation that was buckling under the massive amount of e-mail going back and forth between attorneys, staff and clients. To make matters worse, it didn’t integrate well with the firm’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Given that most of the firm’s 120 lawyers use BlackBerry devices as a primary means of communication, an outage on that end could mean the difference between getting a 200-page M&A agreement to the client with time to spare and missing the deadline altogether.

The firm decided to migrate from GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange 2007, but Cabreja had several concerns about both the migration and the subsequent management of the new Exchange site. First off, neither Cabreja nor his staff was well-versed in Exchange, and even if any of them were, the task of administering Exchange and BES in a proactive fashion would have been an onerous one at best.

Then a fellow IT professional told Cabreja about Seattle-based Azaleos and their Managed Exchange Services. Not only could Azaleos map out the migration from GroupWise to Exchange, it also offered the 24/7 proactive monitoring and management Cabreja wanted and integrated managed services for BES. “Azaleos had exactly what I needed,” Cabreja says.

Complete Article: Case Study: E-Mail as a Managed Service

Putting aside the usual height of some of the individual members of the NBA team, the Phoenix Suns organization is a typical SME. Its IT network is made up of about 40 servers for its 350 users, yet the IT department itself consists of only four data center employees, including Vice President of IT Bill Bolt, and another employee who works as a combination administrative assistant and help desk manager.

Bolt’s department is responsible for more than just the basketball team itself. It supports IT for the Suns’ US Airways Center and all the events that take place there, including the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and live musical events, most recently concerts by Depeche Mode and Green Day.

Bolt says that as the Suns’ IT infrastructure continued to grow, monitoring the logs of each server to ferret out security, program, and mechanical issues became increasingly problematic. “It would take another full-time employee each day just to review the status of stuff, and I was not going to be able to increase our staff,” Bolt says.

Then Bolt learned about LogRhythm’s Log and Event Management System (www.logrhythm.com). LogRhythm’s solution provided the Suns with a proactive means of alerting Bolt and his staff when, say, a server was running out of space in time to prevent an outage or some other calamity from taking place. Bolt checked out a few other competitors, but none of them offered the functionalities Bolt and his team needed.

“I sold [LogRhythm] to our CFO and upper management as being a tool that would act as another person assigned to the department [without] the overhead cost of salary and benefits,” says Bolt. “In addition, LogRhythm allowed us to be more proactive when it came to our servers and management of IT.”

Complete Article: Event Logging & Management Pros: LogRhythm’s Logging Solution Is A Slam Dunk For Phoenix Suns