Digital Practice of Law

Low Cost Intranet Conferencing

Collaboration service adds Web conferencing
2-23-04
"Collaboration services provider Intranets.com jumped into the increasingly competitive Web-conferencing market on Monday.

Woburn, Mass.-based Intranets.com sells collaboration services that enable workers in different locations to work together on documents and other common business tasks. The company has about 6,500 subscribers for the hosted service, mainly small businesses that don't want the expense and work of maintaining their own server to host collaborative documents.

"The fact there's no hardware or software to buy is very important to a lot of organizations," said Karen Leavitt, vice president of marketing at Intranets.com. "They don't want to punch a hole in their firewall to support users outside the company."

The company plans to target the same customer base with the new conferencing services. Customers can add Web-conferencing capabilities, which enable remote users to view online presentations and other common meeting functions, to the service at a flat monthly rate of $100 for up to 25 simultaneous users.

Most Web-conferencing services charge on a per-user, per-minute basis, but Intranets.com decided that flat-rate pricing would do more to entice new customers, Leavitt said."

On the Spot Training

Training Perspectives: Just in Time, Just Enough
Doug Caddell
Law Technology News
10-30-2003

Training article discussing on the spot training -

"They want it "just in time," and they want "just enough" instruction to accomplish what they need to do at that moment. Forget the PowerPoint classes of the past when we taught them how to create, edit and run a presentation using all sorts of glitzy backgrounds. Most attorneys today just want to know how to "run the damn thing," because the PowerPoint is often prepared for them.

Just In Time/Just Enough (JIT/JE) instruction is today's training mantra, and it's often delivered much differently than the classroom training of a few years ago.

More often than not, the training of attorneys in law firms is now a sidebar event, either in the lawyer's office, in the hall or at a computer in the training room on a one-on-one basis. The discussion between the attorney and the trainer is usually along the lines of, "I want to do this?" Or, "How do I get this to work?"

The training of lawyers has evolved into coaching, and our trainers have evolved into JIT/JE advocates. Sure, there are times when classroom training is appropriate, but even in those situations, trainers act more like coaches than a high school teacher."