Editor’s Note: This post will conclude our series on the Virtual Law Office. Over the last 8 posts, we have taken you through the initial concept, start-up needs, benefits, and areas of opportunity while working with a Virtual Law Office. Linda L. Long Q.C. and her team have shared their personal experiences and testimonials, providing you with various perspectives. Our next and final testimonial comes from Casey MacDonald – the tech guru – who made this all possible from the technical side. Enjoy!
“When Linda approached me with the concept of a virtual law office and what that might look like I was excited with the thought of how this might come together (from a technical perspective). At the time when there weren’t many solutions being offered the key was to find the right one that would be the most cost effective and scalable. Our voyage of discovery made us realize that the end solution was as simple as 1,2,3!
Challenge/Scope: We needed the ability and capacity to have a hosted virtual environment for clients to use that was easy to use and manage. One that would offer real-time access to file & print capabilities (inside the physical office) as well as maintain a secure 24 hour remote connection.
After doing research on how we could take advantage of enterprise technology but not pay for overpriced solutions we landed in the open source arena. For those not familiar with open source it basically means that the software is free to use. That is correct FREE. What the open source model basically embodies is that if you require support for a product you would then pay for services on that product. That’s it in a nutshell.
Solution: Linux is a open source solution operating system that is used all over the world. It has a very strong following in Europe and has over the years gained a solid footing here in North America (As an alternative to Windows). Linux has the ability to maximize the hardware that it runs on. It takes very little memory and can run on just about anything! There are many different “flavors” of Linux.
1) We landed on SUSE Linux as a flavor that we would use to provide the foundation of our virtual hosted environment.
Once that decision was made we could then focus on the next hurdle which was what software we were going to use to manage the hosts (virtual PC’s). At the time there were only a few choices.
2) The one we decided on is probably now the most popular choice of today’s market, VMWare. This technology is proven and has a large following so from a perspective of support there were many repositories of information available on the web from which to search and develop strategies upon.
The next piece on the list was how to get a secure connection into the office. Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices. This was a perfect solution to get remote hosts into the law office.
3) The application that we used to take advantage of SSH is called “Putty”. Again another open source solution that is free to use. I’ll say it again … Free.
Finally came getting Marc ready for the virtual world. We leveraged all the pieces listed above and he was able to remote in and have full access to email, file & print, legal software, instant messenger, etc. This solution provided the means for Marc to commute 400 plus km in a matter of seconds. From my perspective Marc was a fantastic client to work with. Our support conversations were mostly done via email but on the occasion we chatted on the phone. He was friendly and open minded. Essentially he was the quintessential candidate to work with in a remote manner.
That is essentially it. The above is a high-level look at what we did and there were a lot of lessons learned throughout the projects life cycle but for the most part it was a turnkey solution that was a huge success. I was very fortunate to be a part of this project but the true key to its success was Linda’s fortitude relative to wanting to make a change that could help bridge those physical gaps in the legal community using technology. Without her leadership in this project it certainly would not have been a success. Cheers to you Linda!
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