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Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. provides technology and strategic consulting services to law firms, corporate legal departments and financial services firms. We can help you analyze, plan, implement and manage business and technology solutions to optimize your organization's functionality and processes.

Kraft Kennedy | Technology Blog

Archive for January, 2010

I recently performed an upgrade from iManage 8.2 to iManage 8.5 Update 4.    Update 4 was released on January 14th and resolves several issues regarding service stability and wildcard searching.  It adds support for the new WorkSite FileShare, iManage Workflow Manager, and iManage Digital Safe.  I plan on blogging about these modules soon, so keep an eye out for that.

But the real reason for this post is that Update 4 sets the database schema version as 8.51 (all previous releases of 8.5 had set the schema version as 8.50).  This value is listed as the MHVERNUM column in the MHGROUP.VERINFO table of the WorkSite database.   For those of you looking to migrate from an environment with WorkSite Indexer 8.2 SP1 P2 (Verity), there is a compatibility problem with this change.   Although Indexer 8.2 SP1 P2 was released in order to support iManage 8.5 servers for a transitional period, the 8.2 Indexer services fail to start when the database has been upgraded to the 8.5 Update 4 schema.   Autonomy’s workaround for now is to modify the MHVERNUM value and set it to 8.50.  This can be done by executing the following SQL query:

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In a previous post, I discussed some useful free web parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  In this article I’ll discuss two more very helpful solutions for building extranets in SharePoint and for building more advanced workflows in SharePoint Designer.
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A couple weeks ago I blogged about the XML patent infringement that Microsoft had to deal with.  As mentioned in that post, they’ve released new code that removes some of the custom XML functionality that was built into the Office 2007 system, and brings them into patent compliance.

We’ve just heard that there is at least one vendor whose product is now basically non-functional due to the code change.   This sort of problem can result in products needing to be completely re-engineered to work with the new XML limitations.

Organizations who have already implemented or are looking to implement Office 2007 should reach out to any third-party vendor who would be integrating with the Office 2007 XML format to determine compatibility with the new rules.  In addition, any custom code that has already been written would need to be tested and possibly re-written if any issues come up.

Kraft Kennedy has worked with numerous third-party vendors that integrate with Office 2007.  If you find yourself in a tough spot due to this issue, let us know and we can help walk you through the process of finding the right solution.

As consultants to legal professionals, we here at Kraft Kennedy often have to deal with sensitive or private information or data. This often means something as simple as password protecting case privileged files or documents as they are emailed back and forth between opposing counsel or other parties.

I recently came across this issue for a client in the Support Practice who wanted to password protect some documents they had compressed and needed to email to co-counsel in the Far East. My first inclination was to recommend one of the tried and true file compression utilities, like WinZip or WinRAR. After all, Windows is good for compressing files, but doesn’t offer any of the more robust features that these utilities have, right?


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For years organizations have relied on tape drives and changers for backup and recovery of their critical data. Despite many predictions to the contrary, tape is still alive as we begin 2010.

When virtualization became popular it presented a challenge to those looking to continue to use their tape drives in fully virtualized environments. If you were using VMware you could use SCSI pass-through to present a tape drive or changer directly to a virtual machine but that prevented you from using any advanced features like VMotion. It also tied your tape drive and VM to a single host containing a SCSI card, making things complicated if that host were to experience a hardware failure.


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