Web 2.0: Business Tools That Save Time, Money - ' Cleaning House '

CLEANING HOUSE

User experience also was vital to Jonathan Jaffe, software development manager with Weitz & Luxenberg, a medical malpractice and personal injury law firm.

For Jaffe, client-server applications were easy to deploy and use; still, they lacked drag-and-drop features and needed to refresh pages from the server. "They didn't offer that immediacy that a rich Internet application offers," Jaffe says.

The firm, a longtime Microsoft shop, began using its .NET application framework four years ago and in 2005 upgraded to ASP.NET, a development platform for Web sites, applications and services. Using the platform, Jaffe and his team rewrote the firm's proprietary enterprise resource planning system, which held more than 100,000 components including client records and accounting applications.

For some major litigation, the firm receives 60 terabytes of medical records and correspondence. To sort through that load by hand would be impossible, according to Jaffe. With the Web-based system, built in 2005, he says lawyers and support staff can search the firm's ERP system—via an interface built into ASP.NET—and instantly obtain case-related details.

Some recent projects with ASP.NET, including an ordering system for medical documents, took about a week to create, Jaffe says. Using older technologies, he says they could have taken six months. And that, he adds, helped save the firm $150,000 in outsourced software development costs.