Strategic Attorney

Recently, I wrote a blog on How to Create Your Law Firm Procedures Manual in One Week. In that article, I mentioned that an internal wiki – in paticular, one provided as part of the Google Apps suite would be pretty great for hosting your procedures manual. I invited responses if you’d like a blog on the topic of Google Apps and its wiki functionality, and you said “we would!” (well, some of you did).

Before I begin, let me recommend that if you are a reader and you’d like more info on Google Apps than this blog post provides, you buy Google Apps: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner. Its 711 pages should have what you’re looking for.

Google Apps is a robust suite of office applications that can actually compete with Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation software, email and the ability to work off-line. But if you upgrade for $50 per year per user, it also includes 25 GB of storage space for email and Google Sites.

Within Google Sites is the ability to create your own internal wiki. This internal wiki is a collaborative site that everyone in your firm – and no one outside your firm – can access and make changes to. (You can allow access to outside users – like your mentor – if you have administrator rights so I recommend keeping those to yourself and giving your team members “collaborator” rights.) You can also make Google Sites work with third-party applications (see related articles below).

You can make sure you and others are aware of the change by ensuring that everyone “subscribes” to get an email when a page they use changes.

Google Apps is hosted in Google’s “cloud” of servers all over the world, and protected by full-time security teams. All of your Google Apps run using SSL (secure socket layer) protection, just like your bank. That makes the Apps run a little slower but you probably won’t notice the difference. Just always be sure you use a Google address that starts with https:// not http://.

One last note. Google Apps integrates with another cloud application: Advologix. Advologix is a practice management system for attorneys built on the Salesforce.com platform. I use it in my practice and reviewed it earlier.

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• Google Sites now works with third-party applications (venturebeat.com)

Tags: Google Apps, procedures, wiki

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Diedre Wachbrit Braverman, Practice Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.