Technoarchive

Conveyancing Month!

CONTENTS

Text Box: This month has seen the launch of the first property podcast whereby buyers in London can take a virtual tour of the properties they're interested in online. Four of London’s leading estate agents have been trialing the use of videos tours in the marketing of property for sale and rent - Chard, Faron Sutaria, Marsh & Parsons, and Featherstone-Leigh. The video tours are also being used to reduce wasted viewings and refining the search criteria with the prospective purchaser before embarking on physical viewings.

Text Box: PISCES (Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard) is an attempt by property professionals to standardise the way they exchange information with one another. PISCES is not software; it is a language that will, once it has been adopted by more firms, lead to better communications among property professionals.

Text Box: Scanning made easy… For some years to come, conveyancers will be obliged to work in two environments at once – analogue and digital. Electronic data transmission requires digitising paper-based data, and that, of course, means scanning. There are two sorts of scanners to think about, desk top (for smaller, “one off” A4 sized tasks) and theatre (for bulkier tasks, up to A3 in size).

The UK’s first monthly on-line journal dedicated to conveyancers!

TechnoFile...

Text Box: If your serious about the Internet… If you're serious about the Internet, (and you ought to be!) then NetPilot 3 from Equinet is exactly the sort of product you need to acces the ’Net with maximum speed and efficiency combined with maximum security. Over the next few years, the time firms spend on-line, and the amount email generated, will increase dramatically. Having a dedicated Internet server not only increases speed of access and security, by reducing traffic on your main server it also increases the speed of your whole network.

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The PropCast has landed!

London estate agents pioneer new technology to make property

viewing easier

Practitioners wishing to remain at the cutting edge of service delivery should listen to Richard Susskind’s fascinating address to the Society for Computers and Law, and given at the Royal Society earlier in March. Available as either a webcast or podcast, practitioners can link to it from the SCL website: www.scl.org

Text Box: This month saw the announcement by Sony of it’s new Reader product. Roughly the size of a paperback novel, but thinner than most (about .5 inches thin), the device can store hundreds of books in internal memory with the addition of an optional Memory Stick or Secure Digital (SD) flash memory card. The Reader can also store and display personal documents in Adobe PDF format, favorite web content like blogs or news feeds, and JPEG photos. With a seemingly limitless battery life equivalent to roughly 7,500 page turns, avid readers can devour a dozen bestsellers plus War and Peace without ever having to recharge.

Time to buy Adobe...

Text Box: Over the next 12 months, and as they gear up for HIPS and Land Registry’s e-conveyancing roll out, many practitioners will be investing considerable sums of money in their IT infrastructures. Maximising your return on investment (ROI) will entail getting a real handle on electronic service delivery, and the creation and management of .pdf files will be critical to a successful outcome. Because electronic documents are created by a variety of applications, they come in all shapes and sizes. The trick for the e-conveyancer is to get all the files - documents, emails, pictures, web pages etc - into one file, that can be viewed by launching one application. The HIP, for instance, will need to be turned into just such a file.