Granted it’s only a 6 month license, but if you ever wanted to see what ReadyConvert can and can’t do when it comes to converting load files, this is a great chance to do just that!

http://www.prlog.org/11860274-free-downloads-of-readyconvert-discovery-software-available-this-friday-april-27.html

I really enjoyed this post by Kevin Eikenberry yesterday. Read This Before You Attend Your Next Training Session

It reminded me of many of my pet peeves when doing training internally, let alone now that I’m an outside trainer. See if this sounds familiar:

You send your folks out to a day of training on some software tool. They are very excited to be out of the office for the day! They spend an inordinate amount of time planning their lunch trip, or maybe their post training class group outing. On the day of the training, they are mostly concerned with getting done early. They don’t ask questions that might drag the class out longer, despite the fact that the instructor is now 5 steps ahead of them and there’s no hope they’ll ever figure out what they are talking about. Or, they spend half the day looking at their blackberry, keeping up with what’s going on at the office instead of the training you’re paying for, because you keep sending them messages.

Then they come back to use the new tool, only they really don’t know much more about it than they did before. At this point, two things happen. They decide the training was bad, and they hate the new tool. Your group never, ever, recovers from this and you wind up with a very expensive tool that your staff simply works around as much as possible.

I’ve seen this in my IT experience as well as in law firms. One of my first IT jobs as working for a small office that had spent a significant sum to implement a customer management database system about a year before I started. I soon discovered that everyone in the office hated it. They had organized training classes, and for whatever reason, everyone disliked the trainer, decided they didn’t want to pay attention any more, never learned how to use the system, and therefore they decided it sucked. I spent almost 7 years in that job, and never, ever overcame that with the folks who were there before me. I was successful, as we had new staff come in, in training them and getting them to actually use it more, but there was no overcoming the first impression of the others.

Now, as a trainer, I keep that experience in mind when I start with a new group. I don’t want to be the reason they hate our product.

The thing is, I have no idea whether the trainer they had was any good or not. I wasn’t there. It’s possible that this is all that trainer’s fault, but I can’t help but feel like the people who got the training, and the management of the organization also hold some responsibility. When you’re sent to training, you are there to learn. Be professional and put aside your personal feelings about the training and learn what you can, regardless of how much you may not like them.

Likewise, when you send people out for training, look for well-qualified trainers and demand they train your people. If there are problems, talk to someone and get them corrected. Secondly, if there aren’t problems, and your people come back without any evidence of having actually learned anything, hold them accountable as well. Find out why they didn’t ask the instructor, if the class was not structured to fit your needs, etc. It hugely inefficient to have expensive tools that your staff is doing everything they can to NOT use. There was a reason you made this investment, shouldn’t you be getting the most out of it?

For Valentine’s Day this year, the wife and I had one rule. No spending any money.

For her, that meant using some of the crafty things we already had around the house to make something for me, above. For me, heretofore known as the crafting disabled, this provided something of a challenge. Since I love writing, that became my method, but coming up with something new and interesting was the next challenge. So, I decided to do something a little special. Rather than having one note to read, I wanted to send the wife emails throughout the day, some with small love notes, some with Youtube links, some with “virtual coupons” for things like a romantic walk under the stars, a massage, and a bunch of other things.

Of course, since I would be at the office for a good chunk of the day, working, I needed a way to make sure these messages would get delivered. This became a good chance to test out Boomerang, a Gmail add-on that allows you to schedule messages. The free version is limited to 10 per month, but there is an unlimited trial for the first 30 days.

It adds a “Send Later” option to the Gmail interface in Firefox or Chrome. So I was able to spend a couple of days putting together 17 different messages to be delivered to my wife, and she was able to spend Valentine’s Day expectantly waiting for each new message. That’s a win-win to me!

If you have an occasional need to schedule emails to be sent later, check it out!

This weekend, someone sent me an email in response to this post about the lack of good job descriptions, pointing me to an HR tool that actually tries to solve this problem.

Halogen Software’s Job Description Builder.

Now, I have never used this software, and don’t know much about it, but in all honestly, our current systems for keeping up with job descriptions suck, so if a tool can help, great!

On the other hand, while the tool can be setup to require updates to job descriptions at set intervals, or require that those updates come from managers instead of the HR department, you have to make that part of your culture if you really want it to be effective. (Garbage in/garbage out and all of that..) Having a system that tells you when it’s time to update job descriptions doesn’t help much when the descriptions are just industry jargon with no real tie to the work being done.

Hmm, maybe what we need is a tool that would create a tag cloud of work done by someone in that job. For billable employees in law firms, it could look through billing entries, grab keywords, and show you where your description falls short.

Someone should build that, but in the mean time, HR folks, please use whatever you have to to help alleviate this problem!

Last year it was AccessData acquiring Summation, and now that they are releasing their new version of Summation Pro, fully integrated with the FTK backend that takes you from forensic acquisition straight through to attorney review,  I guess this should come as no shock.

Guidance Software to Acquire CaseCentral

Actually, this is good news as far as I’m concerned. We need more tools that can handle ediscovery all the way through the process, and the entry into the ediscovery review game by two of the big forensic companies, with all their expertise on  side of the equation is much needed. Should be interesting to watch these two continue to compete in a new arena!

I have to admit, I haven’t seen much coverage from blogs or Twitter about LegalTech. Part of that is my schedule being off from a typical East Coast work day, thus missing a lot of morning twitter traffic. Part of that may also be the lack of usable wifi at the hotel, at least from what I’ve been told by those attending.

However, it appears that Lexblog has me covered in terms of gathering up a bunch of coverage and letting me flip through it in one place. Looking forward to doing just that!

I’ve written before about the Photo Migration tool offered at http://export.goyaka.com/

It’s a nice tool to make a copy of your Flickr photo sets in Facebook, eliminating the need for folks who want to interact with your photos to create a Flickr account, not to mention a way to instantly backup your photos sets online.

I used it back in December to grab a couple of sets as a test, and it worked pretty well. Last night, I decided to go back and add some more, finally, but ran into a problem. The migration queue still showed those other albums, unfinished (they did finish uploading to FB), and the new ones wouldn’t start. My instant reaction was that something wrong with the service, and since it was free anyway, oh well. I did happen to find a support email address on the main page of their site, and sent off an email before heading to bed, not really expecting much. Based on previous experience with free online tools, sometimes they just break, and sometimes they never come back, so in this case, I wasn’t really even expecting a response.

Before I even fell asleep though, they had emailed me back and offered to clear out the queue and let me try again, which I did today. Of course, now all is working well again.

So, good work Goyaka Labs!

With recent announcements about Google migrating their privacy policy into one large policy, that lets them share your information across any and all of the Google tools, some folks are starting to get up in arms about Google moving away from their unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil”.

Some are even comparing Google’s moves to AOL.

There’s some truth to this. Unlike Facebook, which started out as a social network only, and has tried to bring more things into the walled garden, Google has a number of various things out there, that people have been using for years, and now they’re simply forcing all of it into the walled garden, and into Google+ specifically. Facebook, rightly, got their hands slapped when they tried to bring in “partners” and made folks opt-out of those additional postings to their profile. They’ve recently added partners, but have made the process more of an opt-in, where you can choose whether a partner has rights to interact with your profile information the first time you use it.

Google, on the other hand, has no opt-out. The various Google properties will, as a matter of business, share your information. Does that mean Google will start posting your activities to G+ publicly? Of course not. (Thought there’s nothing, technically, stopping them from, is there?) It does, however, mean that Google is using information from your email, maps,  your calendar, from G+, and from your search history to target ads to you. What kinds of ads you get from Google will wind up saying a lot about the information that you are looking at and not sharing.Hope your boss or spouse doesn’t see that, eh?

For me, the unintended consequence of Google’s recent maneuvers to the end of anonymity on Google. Since we now know that they are striving, with G+, to be a one-stop identity source, and since signup for any Google product requires a Google account, which in turn creates a G+ profile, which of course, requires your real name, how could you use Blogger, Analytics, Gmail, etc. anonymously?

Let’s use this scenario. I’m a current Google account holder, and I want to create a second Gmail account, for use with an anonymous blog dealing with a highly sensitive subject. My attempt to create a second Google account is met with the creation of my G+ profile, which I can’t actually create without using my name, as I understand the TOS. Since there’s already a G+ profile out there for me, it’s not clear that I could create a second account.  So, I’m left with walking away from Google, and using other web services to do what I want to do.

Ultimately, when your business model is encouraging users to use your competitor’s products, maybe you are FUBAR?

What do you think, will Google’s policy changes make you think twice about using Google products? Or are you so far into the Borg that there’s no turning back?

Well today is the day many of your favorite websites may be going dark to protest against legislation that is under consideration in the US that would give the government the ability to remove websites from the internet based on complaints of violating copyright, without much in the way of an ability of any site to defend itself before it simply goes away.

Obviously, I have decided not to “black out” this site. Mostly because, really, who would really notice? However, I will link to a site where you can learn a lot more about this legislation, and contact your Senator and Representative.

http://sopastrike.com/strike/

My wife has written an interesting perspective on the huge waste of time that is created when a job description is vague and doesn’t really identify the job you might be applying for.

It struck a chord with me not only from previous job searches, but also from things I’ve seen and heard in both the technology and legal industries. (Especially in the legal technology area!) It seems all too common for there to either be “formal” job descriptions, that describe the job as it was done the last time someone in HR got on the everyone needs a formal job description bus, no matter how many years ago that was, or something thrown together at the last minute by people who have never done the job they are now advertising for.

The latter situation comes about because of a pure lack of planning. Someone resigns and everyone is caught by surprise. There’s no succession plan, no cross-training has been done, and there’s no clear immediate steps identified for replacing that person. It usually takes longer than the two weeks notice to even make any sort of decision about hiring a replacement, therefore there’s no input on what to look for from the person who has actually been doing the job.

On the other hand, the former situation comes about because there was, at one time, an attempt to develop succession plans, and identify the steps necessary to assure work continues to get done in the interim, but those plans have not been updated in years. Things change, quickly, in any technology area. New tools are brought in, roles change, staff members assume new responsibilities, etc. Dusting off the years old descriptions is not going to give you a clear understanding of the skills you are currently looking for.

In both situations, you wind up reviewing resumes and maybe even interviewing a lot of people who aren’t good fits at all for the job you currently need to fill.Wasting your time, and theirs.