3. Tags and Bases

Learn about our tagging, plus updates on login and jurisdictions.

Pinboard

We’ve cleared off a number of items from our pin-board, with the few really interesting bits to come.

This Week

We re-vamped our login process for servers in different jurisdictions, and users with multiple accounts. Authentication is an intricate process, so we test every conceivable permutation of what might happen here. This is a time consuming but worthwhile effort.

We spent a substantial amount of time testing our new release, as well as documenting a run-through for testing. We also built some new reusable components for our payment mechanism, using the latest version of Stripe.

Next Week

Multi-user — Turning on the multi-user permission models.

Importing — Work has begun for the processes we intend to use to bring external data into Conductor. There are a lot of formats we’d like to import, and being able to get them into Conductor in a useful way is critical to a smooth transition. Here are some of the formats we’re working on for importing:

1. Our own native format
2. Microsoft Word
3. Wordperfect
4. DoProcess FastCompany

Precedents — We intend to add organizational documents, such as Ontario and Federal articles of incorporation.

Featured Feature

Tags

Tags are terms that a legal practice can use and refer to repeatedly. They simplify document creation, expedite multiple-user communication and messaging, and offer reminders for work in progress.

In Conductor tags are the lowercase letters and the dash (-) character, such as draft or needs-help. They are kept in a searchable tag database that organizes tags for easy instant access.

What can be tagged

Most things in the system considered “model” data, such as users, the account, corporations and other entities, documents, and uploaded files can be tagged. And Conductor can tag things automatically… like precedents and imports.

Add a Tag

It’s this easy: Open the file and click the Tags button:

Type the new tag name into the New tag field and hit the [+] button. We discuss tagging strategies below to ensure straight-forward search access.

The colour of tags is chosen automatically, and cannot be changed.

Searching Tags

The next time the document is saved the tag will become searchable. From the main page (the “portal page”), you can either type the tag name itself, in this case john-review:

If you’re looking for a specific tag and a general search returns unwanted or too many results just add ‘tag’ (see below) and your search will be refined to just the tag.

Multiple Tags

You can add numerous tags to a given item. For example, instead of a tag john-review you can add two tags, john and draft, which would look like this in the tag editor:

This way you can search for all items tagged draft, all items tagged for john. As well, the following will return items that only have both the draft and john tag:

Strategies for Tagging

The convention for tagging information in Conductor is almost entirely up to you. However there are some recommended practices that help keep the information organized.

In general it is better to have more and shorter tags than long tags. Using john-review is certainly fine for a small team, but for larger groups, one common system for tags would be practical.

Tag by Status It is often helpful to add tags that can indicate what the status of information is. For example, a corporation that needs review might have a needs-review tag. Here are some tags that you might consider to indicates statuses you encounter:

• draft
• needs-review
• waiting-for-client
• unassigned
• needs-help
• unsigned
• complete

Tag by Person or Team You can also add tags to indicate that a person ought to look at an item, and regularly review tags as part of the practice workflow.

Other Strategies Tags can also be added simply as visual indicators.

Undoubtedly you will come across other statuses and strategies that are more suitable….we’d love to share them!

Something Interesting: The origins of time, twelve, and sixty

Modern timekeeping goes back to antiquity with hourglasses, but when and why did we start dividing time into divisions of twelve hours and sixty minutes & seconds.

Most of our measurements of the physical world from antiquity derive from some sort of anthropological basis. Examples include the yard (the distance from King Henry I’s nose to the thumb of his outstretched arm), the inch (the length of the last knuckle to tip of the thumb), the fathom (length from fingertip to fingertip with arms outstretched). Yet twelve and sixty are not readily observable parts of anthropology, because their origin is functional.

The conventions we use today are understood to have come from Babylonia, in the ancient trade city we now call Damascus. The number 60 was chosen because it divides evenly into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This was of deep practical importance in a period of history that predates numerical fractions.

This base-60 counting is known as Sexagesimal, and the Babylonians cleverly counted to sixty on two hands, as you can see in this video.

Sexagesimal died out with the advent of decimal counting and fractions, however new non-decimal numerical bases have come to use in the digital era, with base 2 (binary), 8 (octal), and 16 (hexadecimal).