Many lawyers are now finding they need to be able to work at locations other than their own office. In asb law lawyers often need to travel to other offices, or work in conjunction with lawyers based in another office. Where documents and other client information is being shared it is critical that anyone can access any document from any location.

 The brief inside asb law was therefore that anyone could work in any office, at any desk or even at home. This raised two significant issues – how to provide staff with their “own” desktop at any location and where to store all the electronic documents.

 The solution to this was to use “Citrix” technology – also known by some as “Thin Client”. This allows anyone from any desktop (even an old one or a home machine) to have full access to their own desktop. In asb law this has been implemented in such a way that all the IT complexities are centralised making local desktops very simple to organise and removing the need to move PCs when moving desks.

 In addition, a Virtual Private Network has been established – this means that anyone with Internet connectivity can connect and use Citrix. This is now being extended for the smaller offices – allowing them to have full connectivity at the highly cost effective rates available for Internet Broadband services.

Many Partners / Lawyers and Support Staff have now become used to being able to go to any office and instantly get into their “own” desktop – the only thing they have to remember is to change the printer they print to. Although it is early days, some people are also now working from home a few days a week – with one person now having moved to France and home working from there!

 In addition to the obvious benefits from this there are several important side benefits:

• The impact upon IT support has been very helpful. With the traditional desktop arrangements, IT support spent most of their time solving “system error” problems where software was coming up with errors or needed to be updated to the latest version. Now they hardly have any calls like this – instead they are focused on helping the users make effective use of the software. In the new role they see things more from a user’s perspective, understand the business processes and are able to pro-actively identify users that need extra assistance and provide a more “tailored” service in terms of training and support.
  
  
• In addition, instead of having to physically travel to the users, IT support are now able to “shadow” a user – they can see everything on the user’s screen - watching what they are doing and talking them through any issues. This has meant that where someone is an expert in one area they can help anyone in any of the offices.
  
  
• Lawyers visiting the USA have found some hotels there have broadband access and thus they can work from their hotel rooms – having all the facilities they have in the office.
  
  
• Moving staff between offices or desks now requires little or no IT effort. With over 350 staff, there are office moves nearly every week, these now require little effort as all desks have a desktop and unless a new desk is required, the person can simply use the desktop there as all there personalisation is held on the central Citrix servers
  
  
•  On the whole the implementation of Citrix has been straight forward. The technology is expensive to licence, but the benefits are substantial and for firms working across various offices it is of great benefit. The biggest area to watch is in establishing the amount of network bandwidth to connect the offices. What has become clear is that printing (not the number of users) is the area which most affects bandwidth needs.