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WordPress as a platform

September 15, 2011 By

What does WordPress mean for LawNovo?

1. Low cost of entry to create a stable platform.
2. Easy to use content creation tools.
3. Well established content management system.
4. Plenty of add-ons and tools (such as the Android app I am using to edit this post).
5. PHP is a great language to build apps with.
6. A great community of fellow users of all experience levels.
7. An ever increasing market share means that there are plenty of developers who know the platform.
8. Multi-site is a convincing suite of features to use to create a network of sites.
9. Did I mention the whole editing this post with my phone thing…thats just plain cool.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With:

Cloud Computing and the LawNovo platform

August 23, 2011 By

Bluntly, if someone had asked me 5 years ago to try something like LawNovo I would likely respond that it would be costly and time consuming to implement. This is because the popular forms of hosting available back then (virtual private server, dedicated server, shared hosting) would not meet the needs we have for the platform.

Things have very much changed recently and this change is mostly due to the cloud computing model. Cloud Computing is a very much misunderstood idea, but, for our purposes at LawNovo cloud computing refers to:

  • A computing fabric within which our application code can be deployed
  • That fabric must be expandable: we can either add more storage, processing power, bandwidth etc.
  • The details of the fabric have to be very well hidden so that our use of the fabric is not complicated by those details

The best analogy I can think of is that instead of us buying a bus to transport our clients we actually bought some space on a train. If we need more space on the train we can get it by reorganizing the cars. If we need more speed we can pay to burn more fuel to run at a higher speed. The point is that we are not bogged down by the fact that we are just using two seats today. We can add more of everything without having to leave the train we currently have.

Cloud computing provides us the following real world advantages:

  • The safety of an actual enterprise data center underlying our infrastructure
  • Less infrastructure tasks as there is no “server” in the traditional sense to administer to.
  • The freedom to focus on our application and our client’s service requirements rather than the details of maintaining a physical infrastructure.

There are some serious considerations that you must make before moving your infrastructure into the cloud:

  • The details of the fabric may not be known to you, but, it is still necessary to have knowledge of OS level details: caching, network routing, etc.
  • Picking a cloud vendor can be very complicated and the well known vendors do not necessarily offer the best value.
  • The basics of application modeling and performance tuning become a regular obsession because that is the work of hosting an application in a fabric.
Filed Under: Architecture, Technology

First Post

August 22, 2011 By

Hi folks,

I am as excited about the LawNovo platform as the first day Vien and I sat down to discuss the ins and outs of his idea. I did not have his experience working in the trenches as a practicing attorney, but, as a first generation immigrant I have had to work very closely with several attorneys and I knew firsthand how difficult it is to find and maintain a good lawyer to client relationship.

Now that we have launched there is even more work for us to do to develop this platform based on the needs of lawyers and their clients. Our goal is to provide attorneys and their clients with a way of using internet technologies effectively.

My role in LawNovo is to provide technical leadership and oversight. I do not take this role lightly as I think it is very important that we deliver what fits our users needs. Personally I like to get what I ask a provider to give me when I sign up with them and I don’t expect any less for the users of the LawNovo platform.

From time to time I will discuss some of the technology and challenges that goes into making the LawNovo network tick. I look forward to working with our users and I can be contacted at either my LawNovo email or using my contact page.

Filed Under: Uncategorized