Doug Cornelius .com

Forrester Research and NewsGator are putting on a webinar: Increasing SharePoint Value with RSS: “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is getting lots of buzz because it’s a one-stop portal, collaboration, content management, search and business process environment. To get the most of SharePoint team sites, you need to make the experience as rich as possible for employees and ensure that content is accessible when they are away from the portal. “

Using the RSS feeds and an enterprise based RSS reader can turn SharePoint from a repository of information into a much more powerful communications tool. SharePoint produces RSS feeds for its blogs and wikis (no surprise). It also has RSS feeds for searches, changes to lists and many other objects in the SharePoint platform.

Milissa Tarquini posted a story on web design: Blasting the Myth of the Fold.

We are currently re-designing out intranet and are wrestling with the issue of screen space. Everyone wants a link to their site or information on the home page and in a top-most location on the home page.

Milissa points out that it is hard to find out where the fold is located. The combination of users settings of different screen sizes, text sizes and resolution ends up putting the fold in a different places for different people.

Her point is to use visual clues like cut-off images and to provide compelling content. People will scroll if they think there is something to find.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled in the case of BELLEMARE vs. CLERMONT that the trustee of a nominee trust is not an “owner” of the property under the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention and Control Law (MGL c. 111 s. 189A et seq.).

Under a nominee trust in Massachusetts, the trustee may only act at the direction of the beneficiaries of the trust. The trustee has no independent authority. The trustee is better thought of as an agent of the beneficiary of the trust. As an agent, the trustee holds bare legal title.

In 1993, the legislature added the definition of “owner” to the Section 189A:

“Owner”, any person who alone or jointly or severally with others (i) has legal title to any premises; (ii) has charge or control of any premises as an agent who has authority to expend money for compliance with the state sanitary code, executor, administrator, trustee or guardian of the estate or the holder of legal title; (iii) is an estate or trust of which such premises is a part, or the grantor or beneficiary of such an estate or trust; or (iv) is the association of unit owners of a condominium or cooperative, which shall be considered an owner solely with respect to common areas and exterior surfaces and fixtures of such condominium or cooperative; provided, however, that the term “owner” shall not include a secured lender except to the extent provided in section one hundred and ninety-seven D.

Prior to 1993, there was no definition of owner in the statute. The plaintiffs were harmed prior to 1993.

Even though the current version of the statute would indicate that a trustee of a nominee trust could be held liable, the Court held that the definition of “owner” should “not be read out of context and employed to impose liability on one who is effectively an agent for a principal; who possesses “only the barest incidents of ownership,” Morrison v. Lennett, 415 Mass. at 861; and who neither controls the property nor benefits from its ownership.” The Court rejected a literal reading of the statute because it produces an absurd result.

The plaintiff should have filed suit against the trustee and the beneficiary of the trust. The trustee would be dismissed from the suit, but could be compelled to reveal the identity of the benficiary of the trust.

Yes, I picked up my copy of Hatter Patter today and have started turning pages. After reading the first six, I just have to see how it ends. I am sure the plot will start leaking out by Monday morning and I do not want my reading experience spoiled.

I posted earlier about the ethics opinion from the Massachusetts Bar that caused a stir about making an attorney’s email publicly available without some disclaimers.

To follow-up there is an article in this month’s ABA Journal on the topic: The Too Much Information Age: Authorities seek clarity on unsolicited information from prospective clients.

It highlights some of the worst-case scenarios of why law firms should be putting disclaimers on their websites. A “California lawyer received an e-mail from a woman seeking a divorce lawyer—who revealed information about her secret extramarital affair. . . . The [California State Bar's Ethics] committee noted that a disclaimer stating, “I un­der­stand and agree that law firm will have no duty to keep confidential the information I am now transmitting to law firm,” would have eliminated any reasonable expectation of confidentiality, allowing the lawyer to represent the husband in spite of the wife’s admissions of adultery.”

I just signed up for the International Legal Technology Association’s Educational Conference. As I have found with most conference websites, there is lots of information but it is hard to piece together. In particular, I found it hard to plan my itinerary for which sessions I wanted to attend.

As I devoted user of Google Calendars, I went ahead and set up a calendar for the conference tracks. I first set up one calendar with all the sessions, but I found that it was too full and hard to view. Instead I set up a separate calendar for each track. That way it is easy to add and subtract sessions. Also, each track gets a separate color designation. These should all be public so feel free to add them to your Google Calendar.

Interwoven Peer Group

Applications Track

Business Strategy Track

Communications and Collaboration Tools Track

Social Events

InterAction Peer Group Details

Knowledge Management Track

So far, I have only set up calendars for the tracks that interest me. I will add others over the course of the next few days.

Bruce Falby wrote an article in Real Estate Finance and Investment on the case of Blue Hills Office Park LLC v. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, as Trustee for the Registered Holders of Credit Suisse First Boston Mortgage Securities Corp., Commercial Mortgage Pass-Through Certificates, Series 1999-C1, and CSFB 1999­C1 Royall Street, LLC.

Don’t Mess With the Collateral: A Cautionary Tale

The significance of the case is that the court enforced a “bad boy” non-recourse carve-out guaranty against principals of a borrower.

Full guaranty of real estate loans is rare these days. However, lenders do generally require a bad-boy guaranty from principals of the borrower. The guaranty will trigger full recourse against the borrower and its principals in cases of fraud, misapplication of funds, transfers of the mortgaged property or other egregious behavior. Sometimes the guaranty will be limited to the amount of damages, rather than a full guaranty of the debt.

In the Blue Hills case, the borrower settled a zoning dispute with a neighboring property. The principals pocketed the $2 million cash settlement, rather than depositing the settlement into the borrower’s account. With the zoning dispute settled, the neighboring property owner was able to complete its property. The single tenant of the borrower’s property did not renew its lease and moved into the neighboring property. With no tenant and no rent payments, the borrower stopped making payments on its mortgage loan and the lender foreclosed.

The lender was not happy to find out that the principals pocketed the $2 million rather than making it available to the borrower to pay the mortgage loan.

The court found that under the language of the loan documents the $2 million settlement for the zoning dispute was part of the collateral for the mortgage loan. Therefore, the borrower and principals transferred a portion of the collateral in violation of the loan documents. As drafted, the bad boy guaranty made the principals liable for the full amount of the debt in the case of an unauthorized transfer of any portion of the collateral. Therefore the principals were liable for the $17.5 million loss of the lender.

This case is the first I have seen that enforced a bad bay guaranty. It should be no surprise that it was found to be enforceable. The case also makes it clear that the collateral for a mortgage loan can be more than just the real estate, in this case, a lawsuit affecting the property.

By messing with the collateral, the principals turned their $2 million windfall into a $17.5 million loss.

Leo Babuta, of Web Worker Daily, put together his list of 15 Productive Uses for a Wiki .

We recently established a wiki for our KM team to see if would be a better way to collaborate and share information.

Each member of the team was keeping their own meeting notes and project notes. We would email links to test projects and news. As a result, each team member has their own silos of information. At meetings we would spend a fair amount of time going back over the same information. With the wiki, that information is getting centralized and shared.

The hard part is de-siloing the information. My collections of emails and stacks of paper need to be synthesized and the information put into the wiki. Rather than going about it in any sort of methodical way, I am just adding information as I turn to work on projects.

It is transformative process and is taking time to build. But, I can quickly find the information I am looking for (quicker than trying to sort through email chains.)

School Library Learning 2.0 put together their list of the 23 Things program to learn about Web 2.0.

We are in the beginning stages of upgrading our intranet platform from an older version of SharePoint to the new version with blogs, wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. I thought the 23 things program would be interesting to try out with our Knowledge Management team here at the firm. That way we could try out these technologies and in the process look for ways to utilize them on our intranet.

After looking at the list of 23 things, I thought it need to be revised to better focus on Enterprise 2.0 rather than Web 2.0.

My first step was to set up a wiki using an external vendor. I chose PBWiki. It was free and had a lot of features. Plus, I was familiar with PBWiki because I had already been using a PBWiki that a colleague set up to plan an event.

I also created a del.icio.us account for the KM Team.

On the frontpage of the wiki. I laid out a list of some our KM projects and a list naming each member of the KM Team.

I created a new wiki page with the steps below.

Wikis

1. Read the wiki’s introductory materials on the Help page and learn the basics on how to use a wiki.

2. Create your wiki page from the text on the FrontPage and add information to your wiki page.

3. Update one of the project pages on the wiki or add a new wiki page for a project not on the site.

4. Add a link to a document from our document management system on your wiki page and describe what the document is about.

RSS Feeds

5. Sign up for Google Reader (or another feedreader if you have a preference. I use bloglines on the web and Attensa in Outlook)

6. Add the RSS feed from this wiki as one of your feeds. (The feed is on the bottom right corner of the page.)

7. Subscribe to each of the blogs on the KM Learning page in your feed reader.

8. Check your feedreader for new items at least once a day.

9. Add an RSS feed from your online newsource of choice. (Boston.com and WSJ.com each have an extensive list of RSS feeds.)

Blogs

10. Setup a blog on blogger.com. You can keep it private (there is setting for that.) If it is private, add each member of the KM team as a reader.

11. Add a link to your blog on your wiki page.

12. Subscribe to the RSS feed from your blog.

13. Subscribe to the RSS feed from each of the KM team member’s blogs

14. Write a post on your blog.

15. Clip a news article using the “Send to Blogger” button on the Google toolbar.

16. Write at least one post or clip one article each day for five days.

17. Write at least one comment each of the KM team blogs.

Tagging

18. Set up an account on del.icio.us.

19. Install the del.icio.us toolbar buttons.

20. Tag some websites in del.icio.us.

21. Add the KM Team Account to your network

22. Share some tags with KM Team Account.

Social Software

23. Set up an account on LinkedIn.

24. Fill in as much profile information as you are comfortable with adding.

25. Add each of the KM Team Members as a connection.

26. Search for other contacts in LinkedIn and add connections.

27. If you use a web email system, check to see if any of those contacts are in LinkedIn.