Now, documents uploaded to Discovery Cloud and Trial Cloud can be DeNISTed at import. This can be done in one of two ways: tagging or filtering. When configured to tag DeNISTed files, the special “NIST” tag will be applied to all matching files automatically. When configured to filter, those files will be removed completely from imported batches, making it easy to skip past useless files.

On the import page, your current DeNIST setting is now visible.

This setting can be changed in the new DeNIST section of your General Settings page, where there is a full explanation of the feature.

With this feature you can save time and effort skipping right past junk files and straight into more useful, relevant data. We hope you find it helpful.

Following upload to Amazon S3, files may be selected for import via the batch creation screen’s file-picker:

Load file formats traditionally supported in browser uploads continue to be supported via both browser upload and Case Folder selection.  Additionally, Case Folders supports the selection of loose files or directories containing loose files, making the upload process that much simpler.  Uploaded directory structures containing load files enjoy the extra benefit of easy correction and drop-in replacement of load files when issues are realized and remedied.

It’s an exciting development that we hope you’ll get a lot of mileage out of.

Two Factor Authentication increases security by using two identification classes to determine that you are who you say you are. The first identification test we use is something you know: your password. We haven’t changed anything about our initial login process, you’ll still need to enter your email or user name and password.

If you pass the first authentication test and we recognize the device you’re connecting with, your login is complete. However, if you pass the first test and you haven’t authorized your computer you’ll be directed to a device verification page.

Here you’ll have to complete our second step in the authentication process. You’ll need to use something you have: access to your email account. When we don’t recognize your device, you are automatically sent an email containing a time sensitive PIN which you’ll use to complete authentication and authorize your device.

The PIN in the email expires shortly after it’s been sent, so make sure you use it in a timely fashion. If you don’t enter the PIN within the time constraints, you can always request a new one from the device verification page.  An added benefit of the automated new device email is that you’ll know right away if your account has been compromised.

If you’re an existing user, we’re providing a quick and easy way to postpone activating this new feature, just click on the ‘postpone until later’ link on the device activation screen and ignore the Device Activation email in your inbox.  You’ll push back activating two factor authentication, and will continue logging in just like you’re used to.  You’ll be presented with the New Device Verification page again in two weeks.  Once you activate one device, two factor authentication will automatically be enabled for your account.  Users created after May 26, 2011 will not be able to defer this feature.

We’re also providing you with a history of your most recent logins, where you’ll be able to see data about your login and which devices you’ve logged in with.

Why are we doing this? We want to make sure that your data is secure even if someone steals your password. Two factor authorization is an extra step for you to log in, but it’s a much bigger obstacle for someone to maliciously access your data.

To that end, we’ve introduced Feed Permissions.

Select the users that should/shouldn’t have access.

Selected users will be able to see the feed in question while others will not*, providing users with the ability to execute a single search across all feeds that they have access to, while limiting the visibility where appropriate.

* Advanced-level users have access to all feeds and cannot be limited.  They are also the only users allowed to manage permission settings.

We’ve recently added support for archiving embedded video from three major video sites: Youtube and Vimeo to CloudPreservation.com’s fully automated web archival service. If you’re using any of these sites to embed video, cloudpreservation.com will automatically save a copy of the highest quality video available and store it for you. It’s just another way CloudPreservation.com makes archiving your web presence easier.

And if you’re looking for a good viral video here’s a Lab favorite – the “Double Rainbow”

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Nextpoint is currently looking for talented software engineers to assist us in building the next generation of web-based litigation technologies.  We are the pioneers of cloud computing in the legal industry with products that help corporations and law firms manage their evidence, e-discovery, and electronically stored information. This is an exciting opportunity to play a key role in developing industry shaping products with an established market leader.

The ideal candidate will have an undergraduate degree in Computer Science or Engineering. They will be well versed in multiple web development technologies and passionate about web-based software development. Specifically we use the following technologies:

Ruby on Rails
Merb
Javascript
MySQL
Cloud-computing & virtualization
And many more

Compensation:
This is a full-time, salaried position. Compensation is competitive and commensurate with experience. With full time employment, the company offers a full range of benefits including paid vacation, 401k plan, and health insurance.

The Nextpoint Lab is an informal, creative, and energetic team environment located near downtown Madison on Lake Monona. We’re a hard working group that encourages engineers to develop a rounded skill-set including functional and architectural design, development, testing, and project management. Check us out at nextpointlab.com.

If interested in the position, please send your resume and cover letter to engineers@nextpoint.com.

We’ll be posting a lot more information on CloudPreservation.com in the near future.  It’s a completely web-based solution for preserving your website, blog, and social marketing content.  It’s a blast to use, seriously affordable, and for legal and compliance reasons a must-have for every organization.

One final note, while the service is in beta we’d like to encourage any and all feedback.  Feel free to comment right here on the blog or email us at cloudpreservationbeta@nextpoint.com.  We value your insight and look forward to hearing from you!

In an independent TechnoLawyer review of Nextpoint, Brett Burney said “… data is unquestionably more secure on the highly-encrypted, highly-secured server farms under Amazon’s watchful IT army than an old, out-dated server sitting in the broom closet of a law firm.”  I concur.  Even worse, are you letting people tote around sensitive client data on laptops and smart phones?

2. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
We often hear law firm technologists claiming that storage is inexpensive.  And it’s true that you can go to Best Buy and buy a Terabyte hard-drive for $99.  It’s also true that a USB hard-drive with a terabyte of data on it is a disaster waiting to happen.  If you take your data seriously, you know you need to have it geographically redundant, not simply backed up.  You need it in a secure physical location at all times.  You need RAID configurations.  And the list goes on.

We’re all aware that disasters happen, but there is no reason to put your business or livelihood at risk.  Not when there are companies readily offering a service that will allow your business to be up and running from a hotel with a laptop.

3. Scalability
Internally at Nextpoint, I’m pretty certain people are tired of hearing me talk about scalability.  I’m fascinated by Moore’s law which “describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.”  In other words, computers double their power every two years.  It’s incredible, and it also applies to storage.

Some people interpret this to mean that storage and computational power are cheap, so they buy hardware.  Unfortunately, what happens in practice is that we are creating exponentially more data every year to take advantage of that new power.  Remember when Hotmail shocked the world with 50MB of free storage?  I have 25GB of storage on my gmail account.  If you buy X storage today, by the time you plug it in it’ll be too little and you will have paid twice as much as you would tomorrow.  Spend all you like and you will get no closer to keeping pace.  You are competing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.  These companies are building physical data-centers with walls made of hardware.  You can’t beat them… join them.

4. Cost
Cloud computing is also sometimes referred to as utility computing.  The key things to take away from that are that you can use as much as you’d like (scalability) and that you only pay for what you use.  200 years ago a factory might set up shop next to a river as a means to generate power.  I’m not going to say that’s outdated or bad.  With power I actually think it’s brilliant.  Because it’s not likely that a company’s power needs will double every two years, so you likely won’t hit your limit.  But with your computational needs, it’s unquestionably a bad idea as we explored in the scalability discussion.

So here is the deal with cloud solutions.  You pay for what you need and nothing more.  Regardless of how the cloud service charges (by user, by data, or both) you will pay for only what you need.  That means no large up front expenditures.  And for you law firms, it probably means it’ll be easy for you to track your expenses directly to matters.  It certainly does if you use Nextpoint.  So not only is it less expensive, it’s easier to track and pass-through to customers.

5. Focus
Put simply, you aren’t in the technology/software/IT business.  We always say LLBL.  Let Lawyers Be Lawyers.  We’re happy to report that we got out of the email business a long while ago and went to the cloud.  And you know, we got by okay before but Google is much better.

Old Review Page

So we reviewed it and reorganized it. We talked about the eye candy we could create with pie charts, or the benefits of bar graphs. We talked about what kind of counts would be beneficial to clients. We dropped the Production section and included it in an all new Review Status section, trimmed what we could from the pre-existing page, and focused on highlighting the most important information.

Redesigned Review Page

The Subreviews Assigned to You section provides a quick status of subreviews that a user/reviewer is working on. The Additional Subreviews section has been collapsed but provides the same level of detail for each subreview to users with advanced security privileges. Within these sections users are provided with links for basic filters so that they can resume reviewing non reviewed docs or inspect any of the other documents which already have a review status.

The new Review Status section provides a quick and powerful overview of the review as a whole.

Review Status Section

We’ve also provided a drill-down for Responsive Documents that shows how many of the documents marked as responsive are privileged and how many of them are Production Ready.

Review Status Section Expanded

Clicking on the apply bates link will help assign bates numbers on documents without bates.  Similarly clicking on the stamp them link begins the process of bates stamping documents.  Finally, clicking on the Production Ready link begins the exporting/production process.  You can also kick-off that process for individual responsive issues.

The Privileged and Redacted Documents section provides easy access to documents that have been marked as privileged or have been redacted.  You can also kick off the generation of a privilege log from this section.

We hope you like the changes and welcome your feedback as always.

Usage and Statistics:

The Nextpoint dashboard shows a usage summary for each case and totals across the entire account.  There is a ton of detail including database/storage sizes for every category of data that can be broken down by day or processing statistics that get as granular as every import batch.  If you need a quick view of storage and access or are looking for something much more detailed, the dashboard is the place to go.

Customization:

We like our brand at Nextpoint, but recognize that you like yours too.  We now have powerful tools that allow account administrators to customize the look and feel of the Nextpoint applications.  You can choose colors, logo, and favicon to blend the application feel with your own brand and you can also customize the URL.

We hope you enjoy the new power of Nextpoint Account Dashboards.  As always, please get in touch if you have any questions.