Skype Contact Integration For Your Law Office
GoMatters is excited to announce full Skype integration for all of your GoMatters contacts. Now save even more time using GoMatters for your law firm’s contact management by one clicking contact numbers to dial out on Skype. That’s right, don’t pick up the phone. Just click contact numbers and let Skype do the rest.
All you need to call landlines and mobile numbers from GoMatters is a Skype account. When you click your GoMatters’ contact phone numbers, GoMatters will automatically launch a Skype call from your Skype account. Skype calls are also a great way for your law firm to track time on calls. Skype keeps a running log of time spent on calls and with one or two more clicks, you can convert your Skype calls to billable tasks in GoMatters.
Don’t have a Skype account? Skype is very easy to use and free to download. Skype can help the large firm or the solo practitioner in so many ways. Need voice mail? Skype has it. Need to make and take calls from anywhere? Skype can do it. And it can probably do it for a lot less than your current business phone system. Learn more about how Skype can help your law office.
To use GoMatters Skype integrated contact phone numbers, single click any contact phone number in GoMatters. As always, double clicking the contact phone number cell will open the GoMatters cell editor so you can quickly edit and update your contact information. If you don’t have Skype, don’t worry, the Skype integration feature doesn’t affect you.
With GoMatters Skype integration for your law office, you can also add Skype names for contacts. The difference between calling a Skype name and calling any phone number via Skype is that you pay no Skype connection charge when calling a Skype name.
Enjoy!
Docket View
Gomatters Docket View shows all of your events and tasks in one quick look. Click an event or task title to open event or task editor. Choose from the selection ofoptions in the event edit or task edit panel to manage the item.
Docket View
View the docket for any member of your law firm by selecting their user name from the “User” button above the docket calendar selector.
Docket View is only available to those users who have a minimum “View Events” and “View Tasks” privileges enabled so you may need to update privileges for your office staff to enable Docket View. Learn more about how to update user privileges.
Docket View allows you to add events or tasks on a user privilege basis. To add events or tasks to your docket, click the respective “Add” buttons for each.
Google Chrome For Mac And Linux Certified
GoMatters is happy to officially add certification and support for Google Chrome for Mac or Linux to our list of compliant browsers.
Many of our users are Mac happy lawyers and it will be interesting to see how many of those users begin to use Google Chrome. It seems most Mac users are content with Safari and our logs show the biggest browser variance among GoMatters PC users. Anecdotally, Mac user loyalty to Safari appears to be much greater than PC loyalty to Internet Explorer.
Platform and browser independence is one of the most enjoyable aspects of using GoMatters SaaS case management and billing system. Because GoMatters runs on any computer in any browser, law offices are no longer forced to have the same operating system or browser installations throughout the law office. GoMatters users can bounce from computer to computer in as many different locations as needed and secure access to office data is always available without software or hardware conflicts.
How To Change The Default Email Client For Your Browser
GoMatters provides clickable contact email addresses that will open your default mail application with a blank email form. Users using Gmail or some other web based email should set their browsers to open the email address links in Gmail instead of their desktop email client.
Firefox
To set Firefox to open email address links in Gmail or other webmail app like Yahoo! Mail, open Firefox and go to the Tools->Options->Applications (Mac: Preferences->Applications) and type “mailto” in the search box to find the Firefox dropdown mail app selector. Choose your webmail from the options and save your settings.
Change default email client for Firefox
Safari
To set Safari to open email address links in Gmail, you need to download Google Notifier for the Mac. Once Google Notifier is installed on your Mac, open your Mac Mail application and go to Preferences->General and select the Google Notifier from the Default Email Reader drop-down list.
Change default email client for Safari
Once your browser is set to open your new default mail application, any GoMatters contact email links will open in your preferred mail application.
Text Message New Tasks To Users
GoMatters has added SMS capability for sending tasks via text message to users. To use the new service, login and update your user information by clicking on the “Users” link in the main app sidebar. Add text messaging numbers for users in their “SMS” cell (double click cells to open). Make sure text messaging numbers are in the email format for the particular cell carrier. Some of the most popular US cell carrier text messaging by email address formats are:
- ATT: [mobile-number]@txt.att.net
- Verzion: [mobile-number]@vtxt.com
- Sprint: [mobile-number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
- T-Mobile: [mobile-number]@tmomail.net
- AIM: 1+[mobile-number]
When adding a new task, check the “Send SMS” box to send a text message to the user’s mobile phone.
Sending tasks by text message works great when secretaries or paralegals need to get quick messages to you when you are out of the office or stuck in court. With GoMatters new task SMS service, “return call to client” messages can be entered once, sent via text, and acted upon that much quicker.
Cloud Computing for Lawyers
“Cloud Computing” is the buzzword du jour for technophiles, but what does it mean to you as a lawyer and how will it help your law office in the future?
First things first… what is cloud computing? To understand cloud computing, you first need to know about “the Cloud”. Breaking it down as simply as possibly means “the Cloud” is the internet and the internet, as every two year old knows nowadays, is an endless array of computers linked together. Cloud computing takes advantage of that endless array of computer power and storage capacity and moves data storage and the applications to manipulate the data off of your local computer and onto remote computers that are part of “the Cloud”. By removing the data from your computer and storing it in a secure environment, you reduce the likelihood of drive failure or data loss while increasing data accessibility and convenience.
Think email.
Chances are your law firm is using a web based email service like Gmail. Gmail is cloud computing. The Gmail application to read your email is not stored on your local law office computer, but is accessed through the web browser on your computer. The data that comprises your email is not stored on your local hard drive, but is saved on Google’s Gmail servers. Storing the data in that secure setting allows you to access your data from wherever and whenever you want.
Cloud computing is not “remote computing” that some people are already familiar with. “Remote computing” is the process of logging into a computer at another location and accessing that computer alone. VPN’s and services like GoToMyPC are “remote computing” solutions. “Remote computing” does not share many of the advantages of cloud applications like GoMatters. “Remote computing” does not prevent against data loss through hardware failure. VPN’s can also be difficult to setup correctly.
GoMatters is cloud computing for lawyers. GoMatters stores your data on secure servers across the globe. Because your law firm data is stored in “the Cloud”, you can access your law firm data securely and conveniently anywhere, anytime.
Email Event Notices to Matter Contacts
Have you ever wanted to shoot a quick email to a client or opposing counsel telling them about an upcoming court date? Would your clients like an automatic email notice of an upcoming event in their case?
We’ve added automatic event notice emails to GoMatters so you can email an event notice to any matter contact with the press of a button. Login into your GoMatters case mangement account and you will notice the “Email Notice” option on the “Add Event” dialog. Selecting the “Yes” option for emailing notices allows you to customize the email addresses to which GoMatters will send a short event notice. You can also pull up a quick list of all matter contact email addresses by selecting the “All Matter Contacts” option. Add any additional email addresses for the event notice separated by a comma.
Recipients of the event notice will receive a short email notice of the event details of date, time and place that they can easily add to their own calendars. The GoMatters event email also contains a Google Maps link to the event place.
Storing Passwords In Your Office Computer Web Browsers – The Security Accident Waiting To Happen
All modern web browsers offer the option to remember passwords for you for websites regularly visited that require logins. Choosing to let a browser remember a password for a website sounds like a good idea at first, but you should take a close look at whether or not you want to allow members of your law firm to save passwords when prompted.
Storing passwords in a browser allows for longer, more secure passwords to be used with relative ease. Its just a simple fact, stronger passwords are more difficult to remember and they are also more difficult to type. But storing website passwords in a browser is a very bad security decision in an environment where people frequently have access to other computers and workstations like your law office setting.
Each password stored in a browser is a security accident waiting to happen. The more people that have physical access to the computer, the more the security threat is increased. If any computers in your law office with stored passwords are left unattended, an unauthorized user can check recent sites visited by viewing the browser history and login to the site with the stored password. Temporary employees, cleaning staff and even clients left in a conference room or roaming about the halls can easily login to any account on an unattended computer with stored web passwords.
Having computers that are protected with system logins is simply not enough because inevitably, some of your law office computers will be left on and unattended at some point even if only for a few minutes.
GoMatters recommends that you do not permit the storage of any web passwords in your office web browsers. GoMatters does not provide a “Remember” option for passwords at login.
User Notes – Fast Access to Client Info
We recently received this email from one of users:
I just wanted to drop you a quick note because I was so happy with myself! Well, okay, myself and GoMatters. I needed to contact a client quickly to tell them that a court date was still on for tomorrow and that they needed to attend the court date.
I got off the phone with opposing counsel and was already looking at my “Events” tab in GoMatters with tomorrow’s date docketed. I selected the event and pressed the “View Matter” button which flipped me over to my “Matters” tab and pulled up all of my contacts for the matter in a split second with their phone numbers staring me in the face. I got my client on the line quickly and advised him of the court date.
My client asked me to email him the address for the court. I did one better by getting a Google Maps link for him and pulling his email from my GoMatters “Contacts” tab and firing out the email before we got off the phone.
Thanks for a great product. I love to look good in front of my clients.
So how do you use GoMatters? Send us a note and let us know your best tips and tricks.
Green Your Law Office With GoMatters
How many computers are you running in your office? Do you have an office server? How many sheets are paper are you wasting writing to-do notes? Storing your law office data on GoMatters will green your law office and reduce your carbon footprint.
The GoMatters servers are made to maximize the speed and efficiency at which your law office data can be stored, accessed and distributed. Storing your data on your local networks and maintaining those networks is an inefficient use of both your time and energy… and energy consumption! An inefficient data center or server like the one in your law office increases your office energy needs and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
GoMatters allows your law practice to cut down on physical data storage space in your office that can be used for other things besides housing clunky, loud servers. By centralizing computer processing power in our data centers, economies of scale are achieved and overall power consumption is reduced.
The “paperless law office” is as far from reality as a flying car, but GoMatters can help green your office by reducing paper consumption. Your case files may never be totally paperless, but you can certainly reduce the size of the files by storing your contacts, tasks and events in GoMatters. Creating an easily accessible digital case file with GoMatters is one easy step you can make towards making your law office green.