• Litigation 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) Arrives<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

  
  

  <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="ArticleAuthorRole" --> <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->By <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="ArticleAuthor" -->Gene Albert<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

  
  

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  Should your firm consider using a SaaS litigation support application? Gene Albert discusses the benefits to small and medium-sized firms, and what firms should expect.

  
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  New approach Offers Ease-of-Use, Low Cost and Less Onerous IT Demands

  
  

  Software as a service, or 'SaaS', refers to web-native software that the service provider both develops and supports. Customers do not buy the software but rather pay to use it, often on a monthly basis.  SaaS applications have become popular in a number of industries because of its ability to provide robust functionality while not requiring from the user an upfront investment for hardware or software, or ongoing support.
  
  
  
  While the SaaS acronym is new, the idea is not.  Lexis and Westlaw pioneered the online delivery of legal research in the 1980s.  What is new about SaaS is how it's done, with new applications designed from the ground up to work over the internet. Both established and new companies have begun offering litigation SaaS applications and promise law firms the ability to manage their litigation matters anywhere from a web browser.

  
  

  This article will discuss why firms might want to consider using a SaaS litigation support application, benefits of the SaaS approach for small and medium-sized firms, and what a firm should expect from a SaaS provider.

  

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• 
  mazyar hedayat on 24 Jul 08

   

  Written by Gene Albert of LexBe .. friend and former advertiser on the pm blog

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Written by Gene Albert of LexBe .. friend and former advertiser on the pm blog</div>

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• Monday, October 29, 2007 The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream Continued from page 1 By Kate Greene <script type="text/javascript"> <!--//--><![CDATA[//><!-- startList = function() { if (document.all&&document.getElementById) { navRoot = document.getElementById("tier2"); navRoot2 = document.getElementById("tier2a"); for (i=0; i<navRoot.childNodes.length; i++) { node = navRoot.childNodes[i]; if (node.nodeName=="LI") { node.onmouseover=function() { this.className+="over"; } node.onmouseout=function() { this.className=this.className.replace("over", ""); } } } if(navRoot2 != null) { for (j=0; j<navRoot2.childNodes.length; j++) { node2 = navRoot2.childNodes[j]; if (node2.nodeName=="LI") { node2.onmouseover=function() { this.className+="over"; } node2.onmouseout=function() { this.className=this.className.replace("over", ""); } } } } } } window.onload=startList; //--><!]> </script>

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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• Paul, Jake and I were chatting a few weeks ago wondering how we can establish an ongoing dialog with our peers in product strategy and capture the innovative ideas they have for our future products. We thought of several ways to do this:

  
  

  
  
• Having conference calls to exchange ideas on a regular basis
• Inviting our peers to collaborate on a Google doc
• Build a simple website to track their ideas
• acts_as_commentable — for comments integration
• acts_as_ldap_authenticated — this is a variation on acts_as_authenticated with LDAP authentication support. In the future, I think I’ll migrate the LDAP code in this plugin to the restful_authentication plugin. I needed this plugin to tie into Oracle’s LDAP system so that users can just use their Oracle userid/pwds to get into the site.
• acts_as_taggable_on_steroids — for tagging support
• asset_packager — not necessary, but does a nice job of combining and minifying my javascripts and stylesheets
• minus_r — not necessary, but I hate the way rails treats javascript (they make you code your javascript in ruby… lame). Also, I wanted this since I prefer to use jQuery instead of Prototype.
• permalink_fu — not necessary, but gives me nice readable URLs
• acts_as_rateable — enables a five star rating system
• tiny_mce — enables WYSIWYG text editing which allows people to enter their content with some basic formatting.

The beauty of using rails is that over the past few years, it’s become a popular choice for building “2.0″ style apps. And so, lots of the features of a “2.0″ style web application have been turned into rails plugins which makes building stuff with those features dirt simple. It’s also a framework that has a huge (and growing) community of developers who love to share their knowledge and code.

When I started building the IdeaFactory, I had no idea that I would have a working version within 24 hours with all the key feature (tagging, ratings, comments, and LDAP auth). I’ve built a few rails apps before this one, but none that were really that interesting. The IdeaFactory is something that was interesting because it was badly needed by our teams — too many ideas weren’t being shared and critiqued by the general Oracle ecosystem. So, we knew that if we built the IdeaFactory, it would get used a fair bit and would help Oracle product strategists be more collaborative.

I started coding on a Thursday night and by mid-day Friday morning, I had the general pieces in place so that data can be entered. On Friday afternoon, I requested a new hostname (http://ideas.us.oracle