Force.com’s support for delivering “everywhere” access to critical practice information is unmatched. Any conversation about the functionality of a cloud based Legal Practice Management system has to start with the obvious function…

ubiquity: the state or capacity of being everywhere, especially at the same time.

Access Everywhere
The concept of geographically dispersed users having simultaneous access to the same business information is the essence of ubiquity. Business travelers, remote employees, geographically distant branch offices, collaborative business partners, or working from home at 1:00AM in the morning are concepts innately supported by the cloud-computing model. Ubiquity, by nature, is an irreproducible function that legacy desktop applications will simply never achieve. Some may argue that Remote Desktop, or other desktop capturing technology, facilitate the same functionality but we humbly disagree and will devote an entire blog to the topic in the near future.

Beyond simply making the application and data available “everywhere”, Force.com maintains geographic relevance between the user and their business information. All date sensitive data in Force.com is stored in Universal Time Coordinate (UTC) format. This allows the data to be presented to each user dependent on the user’s time zone. Otherwise the user ends up guessing which time zone the data was entered for, and then doing calculations on the fly. In addition to individual user time zone preferences, Force.com provides full internationalization, on-the-fly translations in 15 languages, and multicurrency support.

Supporting Mobility
Off the shelf, Force.com works great on notebooks, netbooks and tablet style computers. Equally important Force.com offers custom Smartphone device dependent applications for the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile operating systems. Functionality on these devices is awesome!

The Mobile Application is a true device dependent application that makes performing tasks or finding what you need in your Force.com data tightly integrated with your mobile device. For instance, pop-up reminders from the calendar and logging phone calls create a truly integrated experience. Additional functionality includes the ability to update records on the fly, design custom mobile screens and view business analytics in real-time, from anywhere.

When your Smartphone isn’t connected (such as on an airplane or in a remote location) you still have access to your Force.com data, saved locally to your Smartphone. When you can reconnect, data updates will be synchronized automatically.

Force.com tops off the end-user functionality with over-the-air administrative capabilities. Administrators control who can and cannot use the remote applications and can instantly erase and shut down lost or stolen devices. Administrators can also secure company data via a combination of security controls, including logins, automatic device lock after a set period, and assigning users to specific devices.

Using an Android or WebOS based device? No problem, you can still use your devices’ browser to access a Force.com application just like you would from your desktop.

Unplug With Offline Access
Sometimes, for better or worse, ubiquity also means being disconnected from the Internet. With Force.com “access everywhere” remains the mantra, even when network access is not available. The Force.com Offline Edition was introduced circa 2002 and has undergone many subsequent improvements. We frequently need to work where there’s no Internet connection; whether you’re in court, on a plane or visiting a client’s office Offline Edition provides the same browser-based application interface. When you’re back in the office or connected to the Internet, Offline Edition automatically updates your Salesforce database with any changes made while you were offline.

Offline access for LPM applications is available today and can be found in AdvologixPM, an LPM application based on the Force.com platform. In fact recent enhancements to the Force.com offline edition have allowed AdvologixPM to build the capability, within their platform, to allow offline access to a significant portion of their application. That means that disconnected users can continue billing, taking case notes and scheduling appointments with the reliability that everything will seamlessly be synchronizes upon reconnection to the Internet. Yep, that’s sweet!

Displacing the Inherent Concerns
OK, this functionality is great but it’s important however to alleviate the concerns that ubiquity brings with it. With over 10 years of experience delivering highly available, secure cloud-computing services Force.com has developed a unique ability to meet the requirements of the technical community and the nation’s largest financial and network security companies.

The Force.com platform adheres to the seven standards outlined below. These standards are the building blocks for best practices that every successful cloud-computing platform should follow:

1. World-class security – Provision world-class security at every level.
2. Trust and transparency – Provide transparent, real-time, accurate service performance and availability information.
3. True multitenancy – Deliver maximum scalability and performance to customers with a true multitenant architecture.
4. Proven scale – Support millions of users with proven scalability.
5. High performance – Deliver consistent, high-speed performance globally.
6. Complete disaster recovery – Protect customer data by running the service on multiple, geographically dispersed data centers with extensive backup, data archive, and failover capabilities.
7. High availability – Equip world-class facilities with proven high-availability infrastructure and application software.
(source Force.com)

In Conclusion of Ubiquity
The case for Force.com’s ubiquity as a function can be easily made. When it comes to LPM cloud-based solutions any product built on the Force.com platform will have a huge head start over their peers; simply by nature of the eleven years that Salesforce.com has invested in the platform. Internationalization, offline access, device dependent mobility, deployed on the industries’ strongest architectural platform represents a preponderance of functionality that is unmatched by others in the cloud-bases LPM market.