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Day 10 after Gustav. 43,000 households in Baton Rouge, including mine are without power. No one has mastered the four way stop. There has been a mandatory curfew since the storm hit. During this whole ordeal I have still managed to keep working and maintain contact with my clients. Here are the three steps that have kept me in business:

1. Purchased a Wireless Card from AT&T that allows me to connect to the Internet through the cell network. Day 1 and 2 the connection was spotty. It has been solid ever since.

2. Used an inverter to charge my cell phone and laptop through my car's cigarette lighter.

Inverter

The inverter needs to be 150 watts or you will blow its fuse charging your laptop. $39.99 from RadioShack

3. Moved Law Office Technology's Documents and Emails to a hosted solution that is not located in the state of Louisiana.

The rest of this newsletter will be an attempt to convince you to move to a hosted solution.

What is a Hosted Solution?

There are several geek terms that we will first need to define

SaaS - (Software as a Service) - Instead of purchasing an application, the customer pays the vendor a monthly fee to use the software. Most hosted solutions are offered through SaaS.

Hosted or Cloud Computing - Software is provided to the customer over the Internet. The actual software does not reside on the user's computer but at the host site.

One of the first common hosted solutions was Google Docs. This application allowed users to create documents in their web browser and easily access and share them with colleagues. The most common hosted solutions that are seen in the legal industry are Microsoft Exchange which is Outlook and Microsoft Sharepoint which is basically your document store.

Where is My Data?

Our hosting provider has three datacenters across the country. That means our data is mirrored to three locations. If one location goes down, everything switches over to the next data center. So if a hurricane wipes out the eastern seaboard and an earthquake takes out the west coast, we should still have access to documents and email.

The day Law Office Technology started hosting our email and documents was the day we stopped worrying about backing up our data.

Total Cost of Ownership for Hosted Exchange

Total Cost

As you can see from the chart above, a hosted solution is cheapier, especially when purchasing all new equipment. Even if you were to take the equipment charge out, you would still save money with just the tech support costs.

Benefits of Hosting

· Same features as on-premise solution

· Available anywhere, anytime (Great for Multiple Offices)

· No installation, configuration or ongoing maintenance

· No upfront investment

· Fixed per user monthly fee

Law Office Technology believes that 5-10 years from now, most offices will be using completely hosted solutions. Today we are starting to see firms move some of their applications into a hosted solution. You could start off by just moving your email to a hosted solution and later move your documents and applications. If you are at all interested in hosting with Law Office Technology, please feel free to call us at (225) 926-2733.