I love watching accountants as they experience "ah ha" moments relative to technology -- and I vividly remember mine as I saw my first spreadsheet (Visacalc on an amber-screened Osborne). A few weeks ago at the Illinois CPA Society Technology Show in Chicago I led "walking tours" and watched dozens of our fellow practitioners experience that same sort of "revolutionary" understanding as they watched a short demonstration of CCH's Award winning "CCH@Hand". In talking to my "tourists" I discovered that, while they had heard of the product (actually a service add-in) they really had no idea what it is. Or what it could mean to their productivity. So I thought perhaps I'd reiterate a bit. If you're a CCH research subscriber then listen up as you'll most definitely want to start using CCH@Hand. If you're not --- well, this just MAY be a differentiator worthy of your consideration.
CCH@Hand provides users one-click access to CCH's Tax Research NetWork directly from 
Microsoft® Office 2003 programs. That means users can conduct all of their research within an Office application, i.e. Word, Excel or Outlook, and never leave the Office application. CCH@Hand also integrates with the Windows desktop and Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. CCH accomplished this deep level of integration via Microsoft's Smart Tag technology. In my opinion it's simply beautiful in it's simplicity. The Smart Tags recognize citations within the text of an MS Word document and allows a user to then view the full text of the cited document. Additionally the user can retrieve that text into a Word document. Users can also retrieve related explanations, regulations, or committee reports from citations to a Code or regulation section and then create hot links to the underlying source in their documents.
And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. Because it's SO simple CCH staffers sometimes don't "explain" it's power. And, again because of it's sheer simplicity, practitioners don't realize it's incredible power. Finally, because CCH doesn't charge for CCH@Hand (if you use their research you just "get it"), both the sales side (that's them) and the consumer side (that's us) tend to gloss over it. The end result is that I see many, many practitioners not understanding the horsepower they've been given.
So, here's my challenge to you. School's in and you don't have another tax deadline for over a month --- so do yourself a favor and invest a few minutes to make sure you understand what CCH has built here. I guarantee you'll be impressed. A demonstration is at athand.cch.com.
gll
PS -- CCH@Hand was a winner of The CPA Technology Advisor's 2005 Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Awards in June, 2005.
