Saturday
Jul122008
A Small Firm's Transition, Part I: Sharing Files
July 12, 2008 at 7:41 PM by EsquireMac
This is the first post in a short series of indeterminate number about our small firm's transition to a Mac-centric law office. Being a good 20 years younger than the next youngest person in our firm, I am, by default, the IT guy, or, "guy who does the computer thingies."
When I joined my present firm about 1.5 years ago, I came packing my 15 inch Powerbook G4. The law firm had two dinosaur Windows machines - one for our receptionist, and one for our paralegal. My boss himself didn't (and still doesn't) use a computer at all for his law practice, even though his office relies on them heavily. It amazes me how effective he is at getting things done without personally using a computer. Anyway...
I suppose I could have used an even more ancient Windows machine that was gathering dust in a corner at the office, but, as the firm had no law office management or other collaborative software (thank God!) I was free to use my own Mac since the only things we'd need to share with each other were Word or, ugh, Word Perfect docs.
At first, finding and sharing files was cumbersome, to put it mildly. If I needed to use an old document as a template for a new document, I'd have to locate the floppy disk (you read that right) the file was on, load it onto one of the PCs (since my Powerbook didn't even have a floppy drive), and then either put the file on a thumb drive or email it to myself.
At that point in time, the firm had no website or email addresses, so we'd be emailing between my gmail account and the receptionist's or paralegal's pookiebear3695@yahoo.com (not a real address, but you get the point). The whole process, from start to finish, often took 15 to 20 minutes - NOT an efficient process! In fact, I could, and frequently did, type the documents from scratch in that amount of time because as a result of taking notes in law school on a laptop, I can now type about 75 words per minute.
As a small aside here, I relied heavily on Abiword to open and edit Word Perfect files.
Almost immediately, I had our staff start importing literally hundreds of 3.5 inch floppy diskettes containing the law firm's files for the last 10 or 15 years onto the PCs. I believe the reason for keeping the files on disks, rather than on the PCs was to save space on the PCs - even though the computers were old, they still had 20-30 GB hard drives. This is plenty enough room for all the Word docs you could ever imagine. Although, I'm not sure what's scarier - keeping all your documents on an ancient PC or keeping them on ancient floppy disks.
Anyway, after a couple of months of being at the firm, I was able to convince the boss to replace our paralegal's PC with a Mac Mini and to purchase an Airport Extreme and an external hard drive (this was before the days of the Time Capsule). Her PC had crapped out so many times that the office nearly ground to a halt because she did all of the boss' typing. He knew her computer needed to be replaced, and I persuaded him that our office would run more efficiently if he bought her a Mac.
So, we did it. We bought a Mac Mini to replace the paralegal's aging PC, an Airport Extreme and the smallest and cheapest external hard drive I could find: a 120GB USB-powered Samsung Pleomax (yeah, I never heard of one of those either). My goal was to use Apple's Airport Disk feature to share the hard drive between my Powerbook, the Mac Mini, and the receptionist's dino-PC.
Admittedly, the paralegal was frustrated at times learning the new system. Over time, however, the stability of the system and ease of use have made her far more comfortable.
I was able to set up the Airport Disk so that all three computers could access it with relative ease. I transferred all of the law firm's files, which we had spent the previous months transferring from floppy disks, to the new Airport Disk. After transferring all of the files, the Airport Disk still had 119GB free! 15 years of law practice on less than 1GB! Can you imagine?!
This solution was somewhat problematic, however. On reboot, the computers (Macs and PC) would not always recognize the drive. So, if I wasn't there to fiddle with them, the staff would be left without access to the firm's files. This was due, in large part, to the shifting IP addresses doled out by the router. The computers could all be realigned pretty quickly, but you had to know what you were doing.
Another serious problem with this method was that editing or saving files directly to the Airport Disk was incredibly unstable, and more often than not rendered your file unusable or non-existent. This meant that all three of us had to create and save our files locally on our desktops, and then, only after we were finished with the documents, we could copy them to their appropriate folder on the Airport Disk, and then erase them from the local desktop. More confusing still: if you wanted to edit a document you had to copy the file to your desktop, edit it, then copy it back to the Airport Disk, either replacing the original or creating a second version. This was because opening and editing the file directly from the Airport Disk would almost always cause your document to disappear or become corrupted. Talk about a process! Still, this was better than the old system.
I had a "To Be Filed" folder on my desktop. Ideally, at the end of each day or week, I would file all of the documents I had been working on in their appropriate spot on the Airport Disk. In practice, I ended up doing this only every couple of weeks, or even once per month sometimes. Plus, I had to make sure the staff was doing the same.
Apple was taking a lot of heat at the time because the Airport Disk was notoriously unstable, even though it was a highly touted feature of the Airport Extreme. There were a couple of firmware updates, but they only introduced problems equally distressing as the ones they fixed. See here, and here, and here.
Since the Airport Disk was so unstable, I was paranoid enough to make frequent backups - though probably not frequent enough. Often, transferring large amounts of data (less than 1GB) took hours, and the connection frequently froze or disconnected inexplicably. On one occasion, the drive became so badly distraught, I had no choice but to reformat it and upload a backup I had made.
I had hopes of setting up this drive to be accessible from the Internet. Of course, I had security and accessibility concerns that I needed to research and iron out. Also, the drive was barely reliable on its own network, so I wasn't thrilled about making a significant time and a small money investment into testing a more complicated remote connection setup.
Then, Apple announced it was coming out with the Time Capsule. This seemed like it would be a perfect solution because if Apple is building the hard drive right into the router, they must have figured out how to make the Airport Disk work, right? Well, maybe, but Apple didn't release any effective updates to the Airport Extreme firmware until the launch time of the Time Capsule.
In the meantime, I pretty much had "remote" access to our files since I kept the latest backups right on my Powerbook because they were all so small, sub-1GB. Obviously, this didn't provide realtime access to newly created or edited files, but it was better than nothing.
THEN, everything changed.
Enter SugarSync.
This beta application from Sharpcast promised to solve all of our file sharing woes. And, boy has it delivered! This application was designed to sync any folder or folders on your computer (Mac or PC) with any other computer(s) that you choose. It's demonstrations blew me away in terms of how fast updates are made. You can also access all of your files from a web interface and from a special iPhone web app.
I immediately signed up for the beta and a free 45 day trial. I uploaded our roughly 1GB of data (over 30,000 files and folders) in about an hour or so, and set up the Mac Mini the next day to test it out. The Mac Mini downloaded the files over the course of a couple of hours. The major sync used a lot of resources, but once it was done, it sat quietly in the background, instantaneously uploading and downloading every change that was made on either computer.
About that time, I convinced my boss that I was going to need a new computer soon, since my Powerbook had been getting abused by me for over 3 years. He agreed to buy me a new MacBook Pro if I would give my old Powerbook to the firm for the receptionist to use instead of having to buy her a new computer as well. DEAL! I was big time stoked about that promise.
So, in March of this year, I received my 15.4 inch 2.4GHz Penryn MacBook Pro direct from Apple in Shanghai, China and happily set up my old Powerbook for use by our receptionist.
Our poor receptionist was almost in tears and threatening (jokingly) to quit at the prospect of having to learn a whole new operating system. I promised her that within one month she would be singing a different tune. She didn't believe me. I swear to you, less than a month later, I walked into the office one morning and she said to me, "Adam, I'm buying a Mac for everyone in our house. This thing is just awesome!"
Using SugarSync for all of our files has been truly great. The best part about it is that the process is transparent for our staff. They don't have to think about whether this file is stored locally or on a shared drive, or whatever. It's just there.
SugarSync announced pricing, which I felt was pretty reasonable, given the alternatives on the market at the time. The blogosphere had a more harsh reaction, however, and SugarSync caved and cut their asking price in half.
At the expiration of my 45 day trial, I spent $25 for a year of service and 10GB of space. To date, I've still only used 1.2GB of space. Mind you, however, that I don't put large pictures or video files in there, since I'm pretty much the only one who uses those types of files in our practice, anyway. I keep those files on my MBP in a non-synched folder.
Shortly after SugarSync was announced, Dropbox was announced. Dropbox sure looked slick and fast, and
had a very innovative and interesting UI. On the day it was announced, the story was dugg, big time, and people went nutz trying to get into the beta. I tried and tried, and it took me a couple of months to get invited.
By the time I got invited to Dropbox, however, I had become so deeply entrenched in SugarSync and had already paid for the service for a year. SugarSync has been so smooth and mostly trouble-free, that I have not had much motivation to put Dropbox through its paces with our 30k+ files.
I am interested in Dropbox, though, because it supports versioning of files and you can tell at a glance whether files have been synched due to the signature green check that overlays each document's icon when it's been synched.
Dropbox appears to be aiming to provide its service for free, probably up to 2GB of storage. They have not announced what their pricing will be for extra storage or additional features, or when they will be leaving beta.
I do have a few complaints about SugarSync, but I will cover those in another post giving it a more detailed review.
It has been a very interesting journey so far and we have come a long way. I am grateful that I have a boss and a staff that have been so willing to make the changes we have made. Everybody is happier as a result.
The switch has set me up to make my next big move. I'm moving back to Hagerstown, Maryland next month - the town where I was born and raised. This is about an hour and a half away from my current office, so I will be working from home one or two days per week. This would have been much more difficult with my firm's prior tech set up. Having made all the changes we have made, it's almost going to be a non-issue for me to be working from home a couple days per week. I'll let you all know how it goes when I make the move.
When I joined my present firm about 1.5 years ago, I came packing my 15 inch Powerbook G4. The law firm had two dinosaur Windows machines - one for our receptionist, and one for our paralegal. My boss himself didn't (and still doesn't) use a computer at all for his law practice, even though his office relies on them heavily. It amazes me how effective he is at getting things done without personally using a computer. Anyway...
I suppose I could have used an even more ancient Windows machine that was gathering dust in a corner at the office, but, as the firm had no law office management or other collaborative software (thank God!) I was free to use my own Mac since the only things we'd need to share with each other were Word or, ugh, Word Perfect docs.
At first, finding and sharing files was cumbersome, to put it mildly. If I needed to use an old document as a template for a new document, I'd have to locate the floppy disk (you read that right) the file was on, load it onto one of the PCs (since my Powerbook didn't even have a floppy drive), and then either put the file on a thumb drive or email it to myself.
At that point in time, the firm had no website or email addresses, so we'd be emailing between my gmail account and the receptionist's or paralegal's pookiebear3695@yahoo.com (not a real address, but you get the point). The whole process, from start to finish, often took 15 to 20 minutes - NOT an efficient process! In fact, I could, and frequently did, type the documents from scratch in that amount of time because as a result of taking notes in law school on a laptop, I can now type about 75 words per minute.
As a small aside here, I relied heavily on Abiword to open and edit Word Perfect files.
Almost immediately, I had our staff start importing literally hundreds of 3.5 inch floppy diskettes containing the law firm's files for the last 10 or 15 years onto the PCs. I believe the reason for keeping the files on disks, rather than on the PCs was to save space on the PCs - even though the computers were old, they still had 20-30 GB hard drives. This is plenty enough room for all the Word docs you could ever imagine. Although, I'm not sure what's scarier - keeping all your documents on an ancient PC or keeping them on ancient floppy disks.
Anyway, after a couple of months of being at the firm, I was able to convince the boss to replace our paralegal's PC with a Mac Mini and to purchase an Airport Extreme and an external hard drive (this was before the days of the Time Capsule). Her PC had crapped out so many times that the office nearly ground to a halt because she did all of the boss' typing. He knew her computer needed to be replaced, and I persuaded him that our office would run more efficiently if he bought her a Mac.
So, we did it. We bought a Mac Mini to replace the paralegal's aging PC, an Airport Extreme and the smallest and cheapest external hard drive I could find: a 120GB USB-powered Samsung Pleomax (yeah, I never heard of one of those either). My goal was to use Apple's Airport Disk feature to share the hard drive between my Powerbook, the Mac Mini, and the receptionist's dino-PC.
Admittedly, the paralegal was frustrated at times learning the new system. Over time, however, the stability of the system and ease of use have made her far more comfortable.
I was able to set up the Airport Disk so that all three computers could access it with relative ease. I transferred all of the law firm's files, which we had spent the previous months transferring from floppy disks, to the new Airport Disk. After transferring all of the files, the Airport Disk still had 119GB free! 15 years of law practice on less than 1GB! Can you imagine?!
This solution was somewhat problematic, however. On reboot, the computers (Macs and PC) would not always recognize the drive. So, if I wasn't there to fiddle with them, the staff would be left without access to the firm's files. This was due, in large part, to the shifting IP addresses doled out by the router. The computers could all be realigned pretty quickly, but you had to know what you were doing.
Another serious problem with this method was that editing or saving files directly to the Airport Disk was incredibly unstable, and more often than not rendered your file unusable or non-existent. This meant that all three of us had to create and save our files locally on our desktops, and then, only after we were finished with the documents, we could copy them to their appropriate folder on the Airport Disk, and then erase them from the local desktop. More confusing still: if you wanted to edit a document you had to copy the file to your desktop, edit it, then copy it back to the Airport Disk, either replacing the original or creating a second version. This was because opening and editing the file directly from the Airport Disk would almost always cause your document to disappear or become corrupted. Talk about a process! Still, this was better than the old system.
I had a "To Be Filed" folder on my desktop. Ideally, at the end of each day or week, I would file all of the documents I had been working on in their appropriate spot on the Airport Disk. In practice, I ended up doing this only every couple of weeks, or even once per month sometimes. Plus, I had to make sure the staff was doing the same.
Apple was taking a lot of heat at the time because the Airport Disk was notoriously unstable, even though it was a highly touted feature of the Airport Extreme. There were a couple of firmware updates, but they only introduced problems equally distressing as the ones they fixed. See here, and here, and here.
Since the Airport Disk was so unstable, I was paranoid enough to make frequent backups - though probably not frequent enough. Often, transferring large amounts of data (less than 1GB) took hours, and the connection frequently froze or disconnected inexplicably. On one occasion, the drive became so badly distraught, I had no choice but to reformat it and upload a backup I had made.
I had hopes of setting up this drive to be accessible from the Internet. Of course, I had security and accessibility concerns that I needed to research and iron out. Also, the drive was barely reliable on its own network, so I wasn't thrilled about making a significant time and a small money investment into testing a more complicated remote connection setup.
Then, Apple announced it was coming out with the Time Capsule. This seemed like it would be a perfect solution because if Apple is building the hard drive right into the router, they must have figured out how to make the Airport Disk work, right? Well, maybe, but Apple didn't release any effective updates to the Airport Extreme firmware until the launch time of the Time Capsule.
In the meantime, I pretty much had "remote" access to our files since I kept the latest backups right on my Powerbook because they were all so small, sub-1GB. Obviously, this didn't provide realtime access to newly created or edited files, but it was better than nothing.
THEN, everything changed.
Enter SugarSync.
This beta application from Sharpcast promised to solve all of our file sharing woes. And, boy has it delivered! This application was designed to sync any folder or folders on your computer (Mac or PC) with any other computer(s) that you choose. It's demonstrations blew me away in terms of how fast updates are made. You can also access all of your files from a web interface and from a special iPhone web app.
I immediately signed up for the beta and a free 45 day trial. I uploaded our roughly 1GB of data (over 30,000 files and folders) in about an hour or so, and set up the Mac Mini the next day to test it out. The Mac Mini downloaded the files over the course of a couple of hours. The major sync used a lot of resources, but once it was done, it sat quietly in the background, instantaneously uploading and downloading every change that was made on either computer.
About that time, I convinced my boss that I was going to need a new computer soon, since my Powerbook had been getting abused by me for over 3 years. He agreed to buy me a new MacBook Pro if I would give my old Powerbook to the firm for the receptionist to use instead of having to buy her a new computer as well. DEAL! I was big time stoked about that promise.
So, in March of this year, I received my 15.4 inch 2.4GHz Penryn MacBook Pro direct from Apple in Shanghai, China and happily set up my old Powerbook for use by our receptionist.
Our poor receptionist was almost in tears and threatening (jokingly) to quit at the prospect of having to learn a whole new operating system. I promised her that within one month she would be singing a different tune. She didn't believe me. I swear to you, less than a month later, I walked into the office one morning and she said to me, "Adam, I'm buying a Mac for everyone in our house. This thing is just awesome!"
Using SugarSync for all of our files has been truly great. The best part about it is that the process is transparent for our staff. They don't have to think about whether this file is stored locally or on a shared drive, or whatever. It's just there.
SugarSync announced pricing, which I felt was pretty reasonable, given the alternatives on the market at the time. The blogosphere had a more harsh reaction, however, and SugarSync caved and cut their asking price in half.
At the expiration of my 45 day trial, I spent $25 for a year of service and 10GB of space. To date, I've still only used 1.2GB of space. Mind you, however, that I don't put large pictures or video files in there, since I'm pretty much the only one who uses those types of files in our practice, anyway. I keep those files on my MBP in a non-synched folder.
Shortly after SugarSync was announced, Dropbox was announced. Dropbox sure looked slick and fast, and
had a very innovative and interesting UI. On the day it was announced, the story was dugg, big time, and people went nutz trying to get into the beta. I tried and tried, and it took me a couple of months to get invited.By the time I got invited to Dropbox, however, I had become so deeply entrenched in SugarSync and had already paid for the service for a year. SugarSync has been so smooth and mostly trouble-free, that I have not had much motivation to put Dropbox through its paces with our 30k+ files.
I am interested in Dropbox, though, because it supports versioning of files and you can tell at a glance whether files have been synched due to the signature green check that overlays each document's icon when it's been synched.
Dropbox appears to be aiming to provide its service for free, probably up to 2GB of storage. They have not announced what their pricing will be for extra storage or additional features, or when they will be leaving beta.
I do have a few complaints about SugarSync, but I will cover those in another post giving it a more detailed review.
It has been a very interesting journey so far and we have come a long way. I am grateful that I have a boss and a staff that have been so willing to make the changes we have made. Everybody is happier as a result.
The switch has set me up to make my next big move. I'm moving back to Hagerstown, Maryland next month - the town where I was born and raised. This is about an hour and a half away from my current office, so I will be working from home one or two days per week. This would have been much more difficult with my firm's prior tech set up. Having made all the changes we have made, it's almost going to be a non-issue for me to be working from home a couple days per week. I'll let you all know how it goes when I make the move.
Filed Under Switching
Switching
Reader Comments (4)
Great article Sonny Boy. Great job on building the blog site too! Keep up the good work, I'm not getting any younger.
Thanks for detailed post Adam. I recently paid for Sugarsync too to keep my work and home Macs in sync.
Just wondering about your setup though - do you have all the documents synchronized between all the computers in your office?
Syamsul, thanks for the comment. We have three different computers all syncing the same files seamlessly. If and when we add more computers, they will sync too. To my knowledge, there's no limit to how many computers you can sync (although, there is probably some limit).
I can not activate my account