YouSendit, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPPA

Speaking of being Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPA compliant. I've always wanted to advocate lawyers using YouSendit or a similar services for files too large to email, but I have privacy concerns. Again, I'm no expert. I'm simply raising the question. Does any reader has an answer?

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Law Firm IT, HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, YouSendit

Federal student loan program exposes data on 21,000 users

Today's Doh! via Digg: "The U.S. Department of Education has disabled its Direct Loan Servicing System, the online payment feature of its Federal Student Aid site, because of a software glitch that exposed the personal data of 21,000 students who borrowed money from the department, said Education Department spokeswoman Jane Glickman in an e-mail to Computerworld."

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Five Reasons You'll Use Google Office (And Five Reasons You Won't)

"Sarbanes-Oxley or other industry regs prevent you from even considering using hosted apps."

I'm not an expert, but I doubt it is HIPPA compliant.


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Google Office Biz Suite Site Debuts

Via Digg: "Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization's website, too. It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain."

read more | digg story

What's hot in the law firm IT market

Dennis Kennedy links to a post by Tom Collins on the recent ILTA 2006 Technology Purchasing Survey. On the software side, SharePoint comes in at number one on the list. Followed by VoIP, VM ware, KM, portals, wireless, and matter centricity.

On the hardware side, disaster recovery-related programs comes in at number one, followed by document and record management, e-mail management, scanning, litigation support, internet/intranet/extranet, Microsoft upgrades, workflow automation, and phone system/VoIP.

While SharePoint is hot, I think AMS-Legal's Collaborator is a much better product. While it's basically built as extranet software, it has many features that does many of the things that SharePoint tries to do but fails. Some example are document management and better security management. The product is worth a look those who find SharePoint lacking.

SharePoint wins when looking at costs. I haven't gotten a quote on Collaborator, but SharePoint is free with Server 2003.

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Law Firm IT

Building the Perfect IT Person

eWeek examines the state of IT and looks at what it takes to be the perfect IT person.

Technology certifications matter. Or maybe they don't. Pay is up for IT workers, but many haven't recovered the wages that typified the late '90s. There aren't enough computer science majors in the United States, but the jobs held by the ones we do have here could be outsourced. Corporations want M.B.A. technology managers, but there are shortages of specialized technology skills. Meanwhile, the image of the profession is in the dumps.


Those rip-and-read headlines culled from eweek.com over the last month paint a confusing picture. Pick a survey—for example, an Aug. 2 compensation study released by Foote Partners, an IT research company in New Canaan, Conn. Wait a few days, and there's bound to be another take on the technology work force that will pop up to counter it.

Via Digg


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Law Firm IT

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Measuring the value of IT

Bruce MacEwen over at Adam Smith, Esq. asks "Can We Measure the ROI of IT? Should We?"

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Law Firm IT

It's Microsoft update time again

SANS has a nice graph of what's being patched.

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Windows, Security, Software

Speed up Windows XP

Windows XP 15 Minute Tune-Up - Fix Sluggish Performance for Free is a very good primer for speeding up Windows XP.

Via Digg

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Windows

Open Sesame

I got tired of resetting my password every time I go to pay a bill online, so this morning I went and downloaded passerby. It works great so far, and the best part is it's free.

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Software

New Hacker Target: the Blackberry server

From Wired:

LAS VEGAS -- A computer security researcher says he's found an unexpected new path into company networks: the Blackberry.

Jesse D'Aguanno, a consultant with Praetorian Global, has developed a hacking program that exploits the trust relationship between a Blackberry and a company’s internal server to hijack a connection to the network. Because the data tunnel between the Blackberry and the server is encrypted, intrusion detection systems at the perimeter of the network won't detect the attack.

This stuff is pretty scary.

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Security, RIM, Blackberry

Download Zappit System Cleaner 1.1 for Free

Zappit System Cleaner is now Freeware.

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Software