Posted by alukan in Uncategorized Monday, 8 February 2010 10:24 No Comments
Users of the LexisNexis products PCLaw™ and Time Matters® and Billing Matters® may have recently heard that LexisNexis is requiring customers to purchase or reinstate their Annual Maintenance Plan (AMP) by May 1, 2010. While news of additional software costs can sometimes be alarming, it’s important to remember that purchasing an AMP is something that Affinity recommends to all its clients.
Having an up-to-date AMP ensures that your firm stays on the most current version of the LexisNexis software you own and that you have immediate access to any patches that LexisNexis may release. Going forward, this new policy will also allow you to better plan for your annual software costs and budgets.
If your AMP has lapsed or you need to purchase one, now is the time to do so, not only to meet this requirement, but also, because LexisNexis is offering significant discounts to customers who need to bring their AMP up to date on or before April 30th. If you do not renew your AMP by May 1, 2010, be advised that LexisNexis will charge you a “reinstatement fee”. Thus, please contact your Affinity Practice Management consultant if you have any questions or concerns as soon as possible. We remain committed to helping you select, implement and use the best software products that are available.
Posted by jfederico in Uncategorized Friday, 5 February 2010 09:23 No Comments
Sometimes it is helpful to view two different parts of your document at the same time. In Word 2007, there are two ways to do this.
(1) Split Screen.
The first way is to use the split screen view. The split screen view “splits” the screen in two, and presents two different views of the same document. To enter the split screen view either click the split button on the View tab:
and click on the screen to place the split; or hover the cursor on the black line above the scroll bar and click and drag to create the split:
The split screen will contain two different scroll bars that work independently to present two different views at the same time. This makes it possible to look at pages 1 and 3 at the same time:
(2) Separate Screen.
The second way is to open a separate window containing the same document. To do this, click the “New Window” button on the View Ribbon.
This will open a second window with the title “<Your Document Name>:2”, where <Your Document Name> is the name of your document.
Both of these windows show the exact same document. Typing in one window will change the other (they really are the same document). The only difference is that now the scroll bars work independently and it is possible to show different pages of the same document in different windows. In the picture above, Page 1 and Page 3 are being shown in two separate windows.
Posted by Scott Bassett in Good Deals, Hardware, Mobility, Uncategorized Friday, 5 February 2010 07:16 No Comments
If you messed up and bought a netbook with the low-capacity 3-cell battery and are now stuck with just three hours of battery life instead of 6, 7, or even 9 hours you could have gotten from the optional 6-cell battery, all is not lost. Starting Sunday, Feb. 7, Staples has the Energizer Xpal XP8000 external netbook battery on sale for $79.99, a $20 savings. It is about the size of a smart phone and can give you up to three extra hours of netbook power. It is also versatile enough to charge your iPod or cell phone. It comes with 6 cell phone tips, 9 Net Book Tips, iPod / iPhone tip, AC adapter, and carrying case.
Posted by Ed Emmerson in Uncategorized Wednesday, 3 February 2010 14:38 No Comments
Free Webinar February 26, 2010, 1 p.m. EST
What is a mindmap?
A mindmap is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mindmapping has been used for decades for task management, project management and knowledge management. Mindmapping technology has been changing the way knowledge workers capture, connect and communicate information and ideas. This technology has recently been applied to the legal profession with extremely beneficial results.
Posted by bcluxton in Uncategorized Tuesday, 2 February 2010 13:41 1 Comment
Online data backups such as Mozy, Carbonite, IDrive, Amazon S3 and others provide excellent protection for your data. We use Amazon S3 ourselves. But, as this time, we still strongly recommend an on-site backup as the primary backup method and online backup only as a secondary solution.
Case in point, one of our clients (a small office) only uses Mozy for their data backup. Long story short, their server died and we are restoring data temporarily to one of the desktops until the server is replaced. It’s now going on hour 28 of restoring the data from Mozy and it’s not all that close to finishing. This is not unique to Mozy, other online backup providers have the same kinds of issues when restoring large amounts of data – it works, but can take a looong time. Here’s a good article that goes into more detail about why online restores often take so long. Had there been an on-site backup, we could have restored the data in less than an hour. Online backups are great for large disaster recovery and small amounts of data may be restored quickly but it’s best to have an on-site backup such as external hard drive, tape drive or network attached storage device as the primary backup method.
About the author: Brian Cluxton is the Vice President of Affinity Consulting – Columbus and manages the hardware installation and Managed Services departments. bcluxton@affinityconsulting.com
