Budget belts have been officially loosened, Lots of Microsoft Office upgrades are planned, Cloud computing and the Apple iPad are the most exciting technology trends, and email management is the biggest challenge facing IT departments. Noel Williams, Managing Director of  MacroView reports on his recent visit to ILTA 2010 in Las Vegas.

These observations are based on results of a Technology Purchasing survey, conducted in June and July across member law firms by the International Legal Technology Association. I came across them at the ILTA annual conference held recently in Las Vegas. As a Silver sponsor of ILTA 2010, MacroView had a booth in the associated Exhibition at which we were demonstrating our range of SharePoint add-ons for email management and document management.

The temperature outside was touching 43 degrees Celsius and the Las Vegas strip is sooo plastic, so staying indoors in the massive ARIA Resort Hotel and Conference Centre was cool, in more ways than one.

Apparently, the Purchasing Survey got responses from 109 firms – all of which employed at least 50 attorneys – in 21% of cases over 400 attorneys. The bulk (84%) of responding firms were located in the US, but firms from Australia, Brazil, Canada and the UK were also represented.

Compared to the gloom and doom of 2009, overall IT budgets are generally up - by more than 5% in nearly a quarter of respondents. Firms with growing technology budgets reported an average 11% increase from 2009 levels. Some 45% of firms indicated that financially their business was back to normal following the Global Financial Crisis. This is all good news for IT vendors like ourselves.

MacroView specialises in solutions based on Microsoft SharePoint and Office, so it was pleasing to hear that Microsoft Office continues to be vitally important – 43% of firms that responded to the survey indicated that Microsoft Office upgrades were a priority for 2010 / 2011 – and that Microsoft SharePoint is currently in use by 51% of firms, with more use of SharePoint on the horizon.

According to survey respondents, the two most exciting technology trends for law firms in 2010 are cloud computing and the Apple iPad. A major driver for the interest in cloud computing is the way it enables off-site storage of documents and emails – thereby helping with disaster recovery.

For the third year running email management was nominated by survey respondents as the biggest challenge facing IT departments. That would explain why we receive so many enquiries about our SharePoint add-ons that handle email management – from all sorts of organisations and increasingly from law firms and legal departments.

That level of interest was also reflected in the visits to our booth at the ILTA Conference. A number of conference attendees mentioned that their existing document management systems leave quite a lot to be desired when it comes to managing email messages.

The common view among these conference attendees was that they already had SharePoint in place, so it would make sense if they could use the document management capabilities of SharePoint to address the management of their Outlook emails. In many cases they had attempted to save emails to SharePoint from Outlook, only to be frustrated by the rather clumsy out-of-the-box integration between Outlook and SharePoint – even between Outlook 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

These attendees saw a demonstration of our MacroView DMF add-on, with its integration of Outlook and SharePoint. We clicked in the DMF Pane in Outlook to preview and retrieve email messages and other files stored in SharePoint; we dragged and dropped to save new emails and their attachments to any area in SharePoint; we used the intuitive DMF interface to search across the SharePoint document store directly from Outlook.

By the time many attendees left the MacroView booth, SharePoint was back on their agenda – definitely as a platform for email management, and maybe even as a replacement for their existing DM system.

I can’t help wondering if the answer is to tie all these hot-button technologies together – to use the iPad as a way of viewing a virtual desktop that runs Microsoft Outlook with the MacroView DMF add-on installed, so that you can browse, search, view and retrieve emails and other files stored in SharePoint without needing to leave Outlook (see screenshot above). Managing emails from your iPad by using MacroView DMF running in Microsoft Outlook.

The emails and attachments are stored in a cloud-based SharePoint server. The iPad screen has sufficient resolution to display your Outlook desktop, and touch sensitivity so that you can click and drag and drop with a finger. Remote desktop clients for both Windows and Citrix are available for the iPad that let you connect to your SharePoint server, which can be located in the cloud. This approach combines the portability of the iPad, the familiarity of Outlook and the document management capabilities of SharePoint, accessible through the cloud. Noel Williams can be contacted at noel.williams@macroview.com.au

(2010 ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey - www.insidelegal.com)