It's a good thing I don't try and make a living as a blogger, my time between posts has been quite long - which is a good indicator of how busy we've been here. While every firm is grappling with the change in the economy, that certainly hasn't slowed us down with the projects we're undertaking at the firm. The two biggies this year for us are our rollout of FileSite and our intranet project.
You may have seen some press lately around our purchase of Recommind , ContactNetworks, and selecting XMLAW to help us with our intranet redesign effort. There's been a lot of discussion about our implementation of Microsoft CRM with the help of Client Profiles, which is being led by Victoria Gregory from our Marketing Department. She spoke at ILTA recently about the project. Having scars from my own CRM implementations, I'm confident that Victoria's approach to this rollout will lead us down a path of success.
Speaking of ILTA, our own Lisa Gianakos represented Reed Smith as we took home 1st place in the annual MCC design competition co-hosted by Baker Robbins and Interwoven. Our approach was quite different than some firms and we got excellent ideas from this year's GearUp conference, especially looking at what Faegre & Benson had done.
Powerful search changes the game dramatically. For those firms about to embark on an MCC project, your design should account for how people will organize/retrieve work product now that Interwoven has included the Vivisimo product with their core line-up. One partner at my last firm made the statement, "If I have good search, wouldn't I just need a folder for e-mail and one for documents?" While that may sound far fetched, it certainly got me thinking about the actual need for the granular level of folders we've seen in the past. In fact Justin North, of Janders Dean International, worked with Gilbert+Tobin to design their MCC implementation with something this simple in mind. While not a new trend, per se, I do think we're seeing more firms look at a clean, simple design.
