Finally! To celebrate its first birthday, Clio announced that Clio now syncs contacts, calendars, and tasks with Microsoft Outlook, so you can get offline access to your key information. Most importantly, as far as I am concerned, you should be able to sync with most smartphones through Outlook.

For me, this makes Clio the first truly practical cloud-based practice management software. A web-only interface just is not very useful when I just want to make a call from my phone.

Hopefully Rocket Matter and LawRD will get with the program, because this moves Clio to the top of my rankings.

Clio Releases Full Outlook Synchronization, Enhanced Reporting, and QuickBooks Integration to Celebrate First Anniversary | Official Clio Blog

Clio Becomes the First Practice Management SaaS to Sync with Outlook is a post from: Lawyerist

Changing the subject line of messages in Outlook can make them easier to find. Here is how:

Modify the Subject Lines of Archived Outlook E-mail | PC World

Archiving Outlook Messages: How to Change the Subject is a post from: Lawyerist

Recently, a reader wrote in asking how to use Microsoft Outlook for case management software. Specifically, the reader wanted to know how to get e-mails from Outlook into your client file folders on your hard drive. Instead of just answering the e-mail, I did a screencast showing two different ways to manage folders in Outlook.

Saving Outlook e-mails to your file from Lawyerist Media on Vimeo.

Save Outlook e-mails to your client file is a post from: Lawyerist

You can already remove attachments in Outlook—but only one at a time, which gets to be a big waste of time.

Outlook Attachment Remover (clever name, huh?) does just what it says, but in addition to removing attachments from one message at a time, you can scour an entire folder clean. This works well if you are on an Exchange server with a mailbox size limit, or you just want to put a bit of spring back in Outlook’s step.

Outlook Attachment Remover Frees Up Inbox Disk Space [Lifehacker]

Remove attachments in Outlook is a post from: Lawyerist

For quite a while now, I have been using Plaxo to manage my contacts. The great advantage of Plaxo is that it syncs with a variety of software—I use it with Outlook (two different copies), Thunderbird (ditto), and Gmail. The mobile version of Plaxo is also fast enough that you can access it even from an older smartphone instead of your local contacts.

With Plaxo, you can also sync your Outlook calendar(s), tasks, and notes.

LinkedIn does much the same thing, along with the social networking aspect. Both LinkedIn and Plaxo will automatically update contact information for any of your contacts who are also members, which is a handy feature.

Enter a new player, Keepm, which focuses solely on contact management. It will import from Gmail, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, etc. For someone who just needs a central contacts repository and does not want to muck about with all the social networking that comes with Plaxo and LinkedIn, Keepm looks like a simple, lightweight, and central contact manager.

[via Lifehacker]

Managing contacts is a post from: Lawyerist

Here comes something I have been wanting for a long time: an easy way to sync my Outlook Calendar with Google Calendar so that I can share my schedule with my wife. Oh, and co-counsel, I suppose.

Since I am always changing from one program to another, it also makes it easier to track my calendar through other applications like Thunderbird, Evolution, Rainlender, etc. Now if only all those programs played nice with iCalendar .ics files. (They all import and/or read them; only some will write to them properly.)

Find out more and download the Google Calendar Sync tool from Google.

Google Calendar sync for Outlook just released is a post from: Lawyerist

Lifehacker posted yesterday about Xobni, a new Outlook productivity plug-in. Xobni runs as a sort of sidebar, and displays information about the people who e-mail you. Among other things, it shows related contacts, e-mails, and files. I downloaded the beta version and started using it this morning, and there are two features in particular that are just plain awesome.

First, Xobni grabs phone numbers from e-mails and displays them as a Skype link in the Xobni sidebar. I am switching my business phone to Skype, so this is incredibly useful. But even if you do not use Skype, it is pretty nice not to have to go digging for the phone number. Fair warning: it only seems to grab one phone number, which may not be the one you want.

Second, Xobni has an awesome “schedule time with” link. If you click it, it automatically generates an e-mail to the contact with your availability–pulled from your calandar–already filled in. I would hope to see some configuration options for this in the future. For example, it would be helpful to be able to select the days and define a workday vs. a non-workday scheduling activity. But still, this is pretty cool, and saves a step over TimeBridge, which I posted about yesterday.

There are other cool features, as well. I love that Xobni tells me what time of day the contact e-mails me. It feels like I am spying on my contacts’ work habits. (And sleep habits.)

The to-do list on the organizer is not very useful, since I organize by category. The stay-in-touch list is a nice idea, but not all that useful, since I don’t really want to stay in touch with most of my contacts. If I could select a few contacts with whom I actually do want to stay in touch, this would be pretty sweet.

I also do not have much use for the feature that shows what files I have exchanged, since I remove attachments as a matter of course to keep my IMAP folders slimmed down. This would probably be useful for others, however.

All in all, I am loving Xobni.

Xobni may be the most useful Outlook plug-in yet is a post from: Lawyerist

One of the biggest pains about managing a law practice is scheduling meeting, conferences, and other get-togethers with clients, opposing parties and attorneys, etc., all of whom have crowded calendars. TimeBridge goes a long way toward simplifying the process of setting meetings.

Here’s how it works: pick a few possible meeting times, and enter the e-mail addresses of the attendees (or their staff). They send it back with their availability, and TimeBridge either confirms the meeting time or asks for more possible times.

It also has a plug-in for Outlook and Google Calendar so you can use it without leaving the comfort of your PIM.

[via Lifehacker]

TimeBridge simplifies scheduling meetings is a post from: Lawyerist

One of the problems with using Outlook to manage e-mail is that there is no easy way to manage attachments. Outlook is not a good place to store attachments. Outlook basically rolls all your information–e-mails, attachments, tasks, appointments, and contacts, into one .pst file. So the more attachments, the more data Outlook has to manage, and the slower it runs. I’ve heard that if your .pst file gets above 1 GB, Outlook borders on unusable. I’m not there yet.

You can remove attachments (after saving them to your client file, of course) one at a time, but this is tedious and inefficient.

There are a slew of add-on programs to help with this. Can anyone recommend a few to try to start? If not, I am going to start plowing through them, one by one.

Managing attachments in Outlook is a post from: Lawyerist

I have mentioned the Activities tab in Outlook several times, but I don’t think I have explained exactly how to get to it. The Activities exists as a tab in Outlook 2000-2003, and as a button in Outlook 2007. Open up any contact and look just under the task bar and menu, and you should see several tabs (2000-03) or the Ribbon (2007). The second tab is the Activities tab. The Activities button should be visible on the default Ribbon in 2007. Click it, and all your e-mails to and from that contact should show up in a few seconds. If you have linked any contacts, appointments, or tasks to that contact, those will show up as well. This is how I track cases (using contacts in a separate folder as cases) similar to the way

Outlook’s Activities tab is a post from: Lawyerist