We didn't say she wouldn't be busy: Fiona has penned an article about the Linex Smart Alerts for the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. The piece comes mainly from her perspective as a client, highlighting key features of the product. 

For example:

Smart Alerts are highly customisable and flexible. You can pick and choose what content goes into your alert. If you have a subscription news service such as Nexis or Thomson Reuters Newsroom, then the inbuilt search within Linex to these services makes it easy to “mash” the content. ... Content can come from your own subscription sources, any internet page that you ask Linex to track, an RSS feed, an email alert or the Linex search area. 

and

Linex also helps with good knowledge management as rather than all alerts being lost when someone leaves, the archive is still available and it is very easy to manage names in the subscription area. The statistics area shows what content is being clicked through to, providing an indication of the value of the various sources

Read the full piece on the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers website. 

Our good friend and client, Jim Shelar, was after a better way to monitor updates from the Federal Register. There are alerts you can receive from the Federal Register website, and a listserv update service, but these weren't quite working the way Jim needed. Besides: he is managing distribution for numerous people within his firm and wants to keep user lists unified. So he turned to us. We built him a solution that does everything he needs, and managed to save him some money in the process.

In his own words:

The Federal Register is a fundamental source for tracking proposed and final regulations from U.S. Government agencies. Daily email updates with links to the full text of new and proposed regulations are standard in U.S. law firms.  However,  our clients want to know as soon as possible about new regulations.  The Office of the Federal Register offers an online Electronic Public Inspection Desk.  “Regular Filing” documents are place on file at 8:45 each day, for publication in the next day’s Federal Register.  We are receiving Linex updates on the material placed on the Public Inspection Desk each morning but even better whenever there are “Special Filing” documents placed on file at any time during the day, Linex generates an email update.  Linex has in place a failsafe system so that if something on the Federal Register site creates a problem, they know about it and  get the alerts back up.

Also in progress from Linex is a new version of the daily Federal Register table of contents, a service that is included in the basic Linex subscription. This will obviate our need to purchase this service from an existing vendor and will add value to our Linex subscription.

If you want to know more about how you can monitor the Federal Register updates using Linex, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

I am beyond delighted to be welcoming Fiona Fogden to Linex. She has been a long-time customer and friend to us all; I now get daily access to her enthusiasm and knowledge. The possibilities here are endless! But enough from me, here's her first day in her own words:  

The sunshine is streaming through my window as I sit in the Linex offices on my first day as Customer Relationship Manager for Linex.  I have had a very warm welcome from Markus the Content Manager and Matthew Dickinson the Director. I have had a call with Rebecca in the States and have been getting to grips with all sorts of new systems, some more familiar than others. I am replete with a pasta from the deli in nearby Spitalfields market and ready to face the afternoon.

What strikes me the most is that I am finally here, it seems like an age ago that I first met Matthew in the London offices of Baker Tilly in 2008. That meeting didn’t result in anything much more than an exchange of contact details and the knowledge that Linex were a flexible company that at the time didn’t quite have the product that Baker Tilly were looking for. A few budget cuts later and a review of current awareness provision and I couldn’t see how I could solve both the budget and the current awareness problems together but by switching our main news provider and subscribing to Linex we made budgetary savings and were able to deliver a broader and more uniform alerting service to 28 offices around the country. Linex by that time had got about 80% of the functionality that we needed and their responsiveness and agility meant that by the time we needed to go live it was giving us 100%.  I became a fan of Linex. I wrote about Linex in Legal Information Management. I spoke about Linex at the BIALL conference. People who know me would have thought I had shares in the company, but I didn’t then and I don’t now, I was just a very happy customer.

I have been a customer of software and content solutions for as long as I have been a Librarian which is more than 15 years. I have always been the buyer and the negotiator and never dreamed that one day I would be on the other side of the fence. But here I am, feeling like the guy in the Remington shaver advert who said ‘I liked the product so much I bought the company’. Well I can’t afford to buy Linex so the next best thing is to be working with them. I like to think that I will be bringing my experience of what Librarians need and what end users expect into the company. I am looking forward to working with many ex-colleagues again but in a different type of support capacity. What are your expectations of what I might bring to Linex? Can I meet those expectations? I hope to see as many of you as possible in the coming weeks and months.

You may be familair with the KM News page on our main website. We monitor your top knowledge and information management blogs and publications, as well as relevant news from larger publishers. We then select articles of interest and post them on our website (and we do this with a few short clicks, using the Linex platform, of course). We are looking at blogs like Slaw.ca, Harold Jarche's Life in Perpetual Beta, Robert Ambrogi's LawSites and Mary Abraham's Above and Beyond KM; as well as publications such as HBS' Working Knowledge, CIO.com and KM World. 

You can visit this page every day to see the latest on technology trends, KM products and commentary, event reviews and more. 

Or, now, you can receive it straight to your inbox. These articles are now also available as a daily email alert, free for all Linex registered users. Visit your alerts page and look for the KM News alert, click on the large red Subscribe button. Starting tomorrow some of you will be receiving this alert already. 

Send any suggestions for further sources or articles my way. 

Because when we say "all your external information streams", we do mean all. 

We are monitoring a number of government and specialist organisation Twitter accounts in Linex. You can find these on our Sources page by searching for "Twitter". Even more important: you can add in any further Twitter handles you need monitored. In addition clients can stream a Twitter Search in to Linex. Build your search on Twitter, drop the URL into Linex and we will do the rest. 

We have made a few platform improvements, mainly relevant to Smart Alerts clients. These are tweaks and additions done with a view to giving the client more control to customise their platform and manage the changes themselves. 

Bespoke Email2Linex address

Most of you are now familiar with our Email2Linex solution, allowing 3rd party email alerts to come in to your Linex inbox. We can now customise these email addresses with your firm or company name, making them easier to remember. 

Mass emails with attachments

Another feature which proved popular was the mass email from Linex function. This allows clients to idenfity a mailing list with one click - all users in the Houston office, perhaps, or everybody subscribed to the Hedge Funds email alert - and send them a mass email straight out of the Linex page. A small addition to this is now the option to upload a PDF or other file from your own desktop. Do you have an internal file you need to share with all those Hedge Funds alert recipients? Do it in a couple of clicks via Linex. 

Further customisation

Clients can now rename or delete their feeds. A small enhancement allowing clients more control over their private RSS feeds, once added to the Linex database. If it is no longer of use you can delete it straight out, or simple amend the URL. 

You can also upload separate logos for your individual alerts, so branding can be at the group rather than firm level. 

As you see, a few small changes - if you have questions on any of the above do get in touch. If you are not a client, but would like to know more, call (numbers at the bottom og this page) or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and I will be glad to talk.

How can you manage all of your information streams and distribution lists through SharePoint, without any extra work on your part? With the Linex web parts for Sharepoint, that's how. Our most recent new solution is a full web parts suite for integrating your Linex feeds in to your SharePoint site.

It is all the good of Linex: 3rd party alert management, source allocation, alert distribution, a single user management page; but fully integrated in to your SharePoint pages, so your end users maintain the one access point. Tailored to practice groups or individuals' pages, display lists of online sources, Smart Alerts or 3rd party alerts of relevance to each user.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for a demo of this new product, and we will show how you can use this to manage all the news about your clients, industry topics, market intelligence and more.

Another improvement to our Smart Alerts platform going live today is the updated folder structure. 

Smart Alerts clients logging in today: note the simplified in-page folder management, as well as a whole new permissions table for these. Decide exactly who has access to amend your alerts and searches as well as who can view them based on office, practice area or individual. 

For now your folders maintain organisation-wide visibility by default. We are glad to help you get your permission structure decided, and to discuss best options for your specific needs. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we can arrange a time to review your folder structure together. 

As our clients give feedback, so we respond. We have a made a few funcitonality improvements to the way Alerts are managed. Everything is done in the same way as previously, simply with added options and better visibility. 

Alert Edit

In terms of editing individual Smart Alerts, you can now also exclude individual articles from any automated alert, with a simple 1-click. In addition we can create custom disclaimers to be added to your alerts, saving you the need to have to type the same text multiple times. 

Mass Email Users

Need to get feedback on an alert? Want to know if your end users are really reading those costly subscriptions? Use the mass email option to send the email directly from Linex, with a pre selection of users by alert, office, or more. 

View an archive of all published alerts, complete with publish date, recipient list and content for each. 

A few months ago we first unveiled the Email2Linex solution, granting clients a Linex inbox for all their external email subscriptions. Combine these with other sources in a Smart Alert, or, new and improved, use the new alert type in Linex. 

Is this subscription only going to a select number of users within your organisation? You would rather avoid combining it with other sources, but in fact want the end users to have complete continuity of service? No problem. Do this all through Linex. You manage just one user and distribution group list, your analytics are all in one place, and the end user receives the original email as per its own schedule. 

If you are a client and want to know about setting this up just let me know. If you are new to Linex, and would like to know more about this solution, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we can arrange a quick online demo.