Product Review of Westlaw Practitioner Insights: Sources & Coverage
8th January 2014

The second part of John DiGilio's review of Westlaw Practitioner Insights looks at the sources and coverage in this legal information database which offers practice-specific information from a range of sources including the WestlawNext database and sources such as Reuters Legal, CQ Roll Call and Wolters Kluwer. John highlights Westlaw Daily Briefings as a particularly interesting feature, offering full context and analysis on developments in practice areas.

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Email and Yammer: a Match Made in Microsoft?
8th January 2014

Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer in 2012 has been oft-discussed. Since then there have been a number of developments which have improved both the integration of Yammer within SharePoint and the functionality available within Yammer. The latest of these developments was announced just before Christmas and makes Yammer available to individuals who aren't registered users and introduces mobile messaging. But what are the benefits of this new functionality for organisations and individuals?

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Product Review of Westlaw Practitioner Insights: Introduction, Audience, Value & FreePint's View
8th January 2014

The debut of WestlawNext was a radical and, for most users, welcome departure from the old days of database-driven legal research. The ability to run one search across all content sets and for a set price was an idea whose time was hastened by clients eager to tighten purse strings and control costs. Too much of a good thing can have its disadvantages, however. Practitioners using the new platform waxed nostalgic over their former ability to create content-focused sets of resources specific to their areas of practice. Westlaw's new Practitioner Insights pages are designed to recapture that powerful feature of the old platform while enhancing it with modern advances in curation and customised alerting that attorneys need to gain competitive advantage in today's legal market.

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Source Update January 2014: What's Happening with Factiva?
7th January 2014

This month's additions and takedowns in Factiva, researched and compiled by Anne Jordan.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) in the Enterprise
6th January 2014

There has been a lot of speculation and hype surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) over the past few years but to date the ability to use the internet for monitoring and connecting everyday objects has mostly been used for operational efficiencies within the enterprise. However, a recent Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report highlights the long term potential benefits of this technology. Sophie Alexander explores some of the obstacles that will need to be overcome before IoT can operate successfully across businesses.

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Mini Review: Manzama
6th January 2014

Competitive and business intelligence requires information from multiple sources, both traditional and new, along with ways to filter and make it into decision-ready information. James Mullan's Mini Review of Manzama examines how the tool performs for its legal and professional services clients and how it can help them to gain a better understanding of their competitors, clients and industry and to better identify business development opportunities. 

Update: A new review of this product is available here »

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Large Software Vendors Bet on BYOD
3rd January 2014

The subject of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) continues to make headlines and despite the security issues this presents, less than a third of businesses in Europe have a formal BYOD policy. Given recent acquisitions by IBM and Oracle in the enterprise mobile management market, maybe it's now time for companies to review their BYOD policies as the use of mobile devices in the workplace continues to gather momentum.

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like CVs?
2nd January 2014

CVs, resumés and skill sets are an essential part of new business proposals, particularly for professional services organisations such as legal firms, consultancies and accountants. How best to manage the CVs is a challenge for knowledge and information professionals who have to facilitate fast access to the information, ensure the documents are accurate, can be easily shared and that the formatting allows easy output, copying and sharing.

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2014 - Reasons to be Cheerful?
2nd January 2014

Businesses still have a long way to go before they can be sure they're exploiting all their available data effectively, suggest recent comments from the Business Information Industry Association and the European School of Management & Technology. But do the exciting developments in big data, business intelligence, analytics and regulatory compliance predicted by analysts such as Gartner and Ovum necessarily have to be information technology led? Perhaps not; some of the skills involved include procurement of increasingly commoditised services and exercising judgement over trends highlighted by the data. And The Economist predicts a growing role for a chief digital officer, charged with embedding technology into products and business models.

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Lost in Translation - Online Tools for Foreign Language Research
31st December 2013

With the globalisation of information via the internet and English rapidly losing its place as the predominant online language as Chinese, Japanese and Spanish content grows, Sophie Alexander explores the increased popularity of online translation tools. She highlights some useful features of a few of these. Social media site Facebook recently acquired a translation tool and search engines such as Bing and Google have quite well developed software. However, Sophie suggests researchers also consider more specialist tools such as Linguee, Systransoft and 2lingual. 

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