No option for Law Firm

Quite a few Autonomy customers have implemented 8.5SP1x WorkSite Communication Server (WCS) to take advantage of the enhanced server-side filing features brought in by the new Email Management (EMM) client. Although the legacy “send & file” functionality existed before 8.5, it was a bit clunky & basic. Using the filing toolbar and other neat features bought the fee-earner even closer to matter collaboration and email volumes in WorkSite have increased.

Separately, there has been a push in the enterprise towards Exchange 2010, as the Exchange Administrators are keen to make use of the CAS high availability and new Outlook Webapp amongst other features, the most obvious one being Outlook 2010

This blog post will take you through some of the things to note when migrating your mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 and what the impact might be on your WorkSite user.

First the easy bit, the legacy WCS (SMTP) service that runs the filing via email address. There are no major changes to carry out here. The email filing functionality at the back end is still the same, with the SMTP service on the WCS picking up the incoming mail directed to it from your Exchange server using the mail connector The mail connectors from your Ex2003 environment will have automatically been migrated to your Ex2010 so things should pretty much remain the same, so any mail destined for yourworksitedomain.yourdomain.com will still go through. If you want to reconfigure the bounced email to be redirected to your new service account, (see below for why you need a new service account) you can make this change quite simply in the Communication Server Properties. A restart of the WCS service will be necessary, however the messages will queue during this time.

Things get a bit more interesting when it comes to the Email Filing Service (EFS). The EFS handles two of the main services, the FilingWorker (for Email Filing) & MarkingWorker (for Filing Folders). There are two key changes to be made within the EFS when the mailbox migration process begins.

First of all you need to review the Email Server Connection tab. Here you will have added the details of a Ex2003 service account which has relevant Send As/Receive As permissions. This service account field needs to be updated to a Ex2010 service account (a mailbox hosted within Ex2010). I guess you could also migrate the existing service account but I wouldn’t advise this, just so it doesn’t impact your current environment. Naturally, the Send As/Recieve As permissions need to be added for this account and should also have this access to the Ex2003 environment. In the Service Account/Server Name field you need to put in the name of your Ex2010 CAS name, whether this be a single server or an alias for the array and ensure you add this using the FQDN. All this can either be done manually or via the Email Filing Server Configuration Wizard, which will also change the local Outlook profile on the server to the new service account. If you use Trusted Login with the WorkSite administration account on EFS then you should ensure this has relevant NRTADMIN permissions in the database.

Secondly, depending on how many WCS’s you have and how they are individually configured, you may be filtering the Email Server Connection according to how you want each WCS to service Exchange. If this field was left blank, so the EFS could connect to any mailbox, then you can leave it like this. If however, you are using more than one WCS OR explicitly defining the Ex2003 mailbox stores, then you will need to add the same Ex2010 CAS name that you added into the Server Connection/Mailbox servers field. The benefit of explicitly defining what Exchange servers I want to filter on is it helps with troubleshooting and also keeps the WCS for the two Exchange environments separate. On the other hand you may wish to remain Ex2003/10 agnostic and want to leave it blank.

After you have saved the above settings you should run Test User Connections against both Ex2003 & Ex2010 users to ensure everything has gone through smoothly. Clicking on Marked Folder Management you should still see the listed of Filing Folders you had as before.

A subtle change to review is that any MarkingWorker or FilingWorker jobs carried over prior to migration will appear exactly the same in Folder Sync Monitor/Email Job Monitor lists. However, any new Filing Folders created or any new Filing jobs queued will have their mailbox entry prefixed by the Exch2010 CAS name.

So to summarise

• Have a new Ex2010 service account with relevant permissions
• Update the Email Server connection to use this account with the CAS name
• Consider how best you can use the Exchange filter, to help you with troubleshooting and splitting across multiple WCSs
• Set up a few test accounts with Filing folders, migrate, set up a few more and see how these differ in Folder Synch Monitor area. The same principle will apply in the Email Job monitor pane.

I read an article in The Spectator a couple of months back that I’ve been meaning to tie into a Legal or Legal IT post for a while.

There were two areas of Law that I was thinking about when I first read it. First off this paragraph.

These changes happen because there are two kind of business competition. The first is where you try to be better at doing what the business next door is doing already. The second is where you create a ‘paradigm shift’, pursuing some entirely new ideal no one has focused on before.

This one got me thinking of the crossroads that a lot of law firms are reaching in these tough economic times. Do they try and do things better than their close competitors? Or do they create the “paradigm shift”? The majority of the press and many legal commentators would suggest that “Tesco Law” will usher in a new kind of law firm and the old firms that stick to the current model will wither and die. Is there room for the old style law firm anymore or will law pump out agreements “needlessly uniform and fast”? I suspect there’ll be room for both, after all the two businesses sited in the article (McDonalds and Starbucks) haven’t totally wiped out the “old diners” or the “old style cafés”.

The second area I thought of was after I read this.

I sometimes wonder whether it’s time for government to try a paradigm shift. If, instead of devoting all its energies towards huge, intractable problems such as wholesale NHS reform, our government were to establish a Ministry for Eradicating Trivial Irritations, some degree of success would be assured.

And this got me thinking of a few Legal IT vendors. How the clamber for larger firms through mergers and takeovers have led to a chase the next big thing. Whether it be the cloud, the latest in eDiscovery or Legal Hold or another big technology to sell to the law firms. My thoughts usually are that I wish they’d just look at what they do/did well and make it better. Ironing out those trivial but annoying “features” that drive the lawyers nuts.

Anyway, take a look at the article it’s worth a read in its entirety and perhaps read through some of the other articles by “The Wiki Man”.

This is just a short post to point out a great blog post I read the other day about in-house lawyers. What struck me was the similarity between in-house lawyers and their customers and IT departments and their customers.

It was this section that made me smile:

People who don’t speak to customers that often (and this gets worse the more senior that person is) are prone to taking every complaint that they do hear at face value. After all, if it wasn’t serious they wouldn’t have called the boss, would they?

So where more a experienced complaint wrangler has a range of techniques for getting angry people off the line so that they can do a proper investigation of the issues, the senior manager can think of nothing else but an immediate promise that Something Will Be Done. Thus expectations are raised and the lives of minions made harder.

It’s a generalisation of course and the seniority isn’t necessarily the issue in IT departments. But this does happen (I can even see where I’ve done it myself!) and you end up chasing problems that affect only a few people or delay other projects that could benefit many.

Well it’s been a bad few days for RIM this week (and I dare say a difficult time for a fair few IT depts in law firms as a result). And it looks like it isn’t just contained to EMEA either, reports suggest a spread to the US now.

A few things spring to mind off this:

1) It’s going to be one heck of a case study for IT service failure. From the technology that failed, the (lack of) disaster recovery and what resilience was built into a critical system through to studies into how not to manage an incident (the failure in communicating to customers etc). No matter how much redundancy you put in place we know things like this do happen in IT. But for your core product, in RIM’s case, there seems to have been no contingency (although in the aftermath this may end up being something truly unavoidable) and worse still no method of communicating good up to date information to the customer in place. It’s even worse when you consider the mainstream 24hr news services have been carrying the story and would have surely loved to broadcast comment and updates direct from RIM.

2) It’s a real kick in the teeth for cloud computing. Another provider (Office 365 outage, Amazon outage, Google Apps/Mail outage, Apple MobileMe outage) suffering a major outage and thus clients seeing service outages for their own customers.

3) In the corporate email and smartphone arena it’s a big bonus for Apple, Google and Microsoft. The other three key competitors in the smartphone arena. Also for services like Good Technologies who provide app based email solutions for enterprise.

RIM were on the back foot as it was, their main benefit over their rivals was enterprise strength email solutions (although personally I don’t buy into the whole BlackBerry is less of a risk that ActiveSync type technologies argument, but there you go). This reputation though has been dealt a big blow with this incident and they’re going to need some excellent PR work and customer deals to stop a desertion of the enterprise to rivals.

There are plenty of lawyers that use Apple or Android devices already (more so outside the UK), and now Windows Phone has a release that puts it on a par with the others. So at the moment it seems like RIM’s days are numbered.

An article I wrote that was originally published by Legal IT Professionals in July

OK so let’s take a look at Word. Clicking on File Open brings up a WSP dialogue box replacing the native Word open dialogue.

This type of dialogue replacement will be familiar to a user of any DMS and you get obvious views (My Matters, Favourites, Recent). There’s a checkbox allowing me to keep the document checked out (allowing me to stop others amending the document whilst I’m working on it) which is set by default.

I can then make some amends to the document. If I then click save on either the quick access toolbar or the backstage I get a dialogue asking whether I want to save as a new version or save over the existing document.

Using Save As I get a similar WSP dialogue to Open, where I can select a new location and a new file name. If I cancel this you get similar behaviour to that of Workshare Professional when integrated into a DMS, in that the WSP (DMS) dialogue is replaced by a standard Windows dialogue allowing a local save. Quite nice consistency between the two Workshare products!

All the standard DMS functions are handled, but some areas still need some polish. For example the versions in Office 2010 on the backstage are integrated (presumably because it’s designed with SharePoint in mind) but the compare seems to jump to Microsoft’s version.

In other areas the native SharePoint use is a bonus for WSP i.e. the recent documents in the backstage (and the Recent Places) all link correctly to the documents and folders in SharePoint (i.e. the WSP versions). So if I open a document from a link and then click the Save button, the WSP kicks in and asks me what I want to do with the document as you’d expect.

Other things to note in WSP
In Outlook there is a ribbon for WSP and it’s in here you’ll find a few quick links to things like File Email and the WSP home page in Outlook mentioned earlier.

Also you’ll find the configuration option, as with other parts of WSP, this is kept simple. Basically you can say which Office products to integrate with, the name of the SharePoint server(s) and some simple configuration for things like number of items in the recent list.

A couple of things that jumped out as missing for me are matter creation and the afore mentioned meta data inheritance from the matter file. The former I suspect a lot of firms would like some basic “generator” out of the box, but then as the backend is vanilla SharePoint writing something to generate “matter files” from the practice management system should be straight forward. The inheritance though goes with the missing client/matter meta data and is something that is on the plans for Workshare to address. I just hope they create a flexible meta data model that allows customers to build in their own requirements (e.g. allow fairly simple meta data for basic matter documents or more detailed data for say know how documents)

A final niggle is the synchronisation with SharePoint for which there is an option to do so in various places, but in others there’s a refresh. Again it’s nothing serious just some polish that is required to keep consistency. Also I’d suggest that fee earners just won’t get the need to synchronise with the DMS, they’ll just want their document where they expect them.

Summing up
So let’s try to start and sum things up. Starting with a question “What is it that an Legal IT department want from a DMS?”

Well fundamentally it’s to provide the functionality required by the fee earners. Both that I’ve outlined at the start, but also some they may not want, but should be using – i.e. filing emails and documents correctly in the e-file! It should do this in a simple to use, quick and un-intrusive way. And then do it all as cheaply as possible with the least amount of support work required to keep it running.

Well in so far as what the fee earners want, WSP does most of the functions and where it doesn’t there looks to be plans to add that functionality. I did have to remind myself that this is early version, it does the basics well (and some bits very well – hook into compare for review, neatness of email send/file and attachment) but there is work still to do to make it polished. And I have to say it’s fairly simple, I was provided no documentation and yet I still understood it enough to find my way around the core DMS features you’d expect.

From a desktop management WSP of view it has a small footprint and at the moment has a nice simplicity about it, yes there are some things that look a bit techie but there are others that look simple and are well integrated.

There are some future features that look interesting too:

• Offline – the ability to mark folders (hopefully whole matters can be selected!) for cached offline use. And from what I gather the plan is that this will be part of the core app rather than an extra which is nice!
• There are plans to support SharePoint foundation which is good news for firms on a budget!
• Then what I think is the real interesting addition the move to look at Office 365 and SharePoint in “the cloud”. Workshare say they are looking to exploit by allowing people to simply connect to a SharePoint server online and still access that content via their office applications-just like WSP does now- except they will be connecting to a SP server hosted elsewhere.
  • Given the cost of 365 (£4 per person per month for SharePoint, email, IM and Office online!) this could be a real low maintenance legal app for small law firms

Finally the other aspect I mentioned was the fact Legal IT departments want to provide all this with the least amount of support work required to keep it running. Now this is the crux I think with the current buzz around SharePoint.

Is managing a SharePoint backend (after all WSP leaves pretty much a vanilla SharePoint backend) going to be any easier than managing one of the other major DMS’s? I’m not a SharePoint expert but I can’t imagine it will be, however finding the skills to do so may prove easier being a technology that goes wider than the Legal IT market. As for the as cheaply as possible, well a lot of firms already have a SharePoint licence as part of a wider Microsoft agreement or as an intranet (plus if the integration of SharePoint foundation is a success then all you’ll need is a Windows Server licence for the backend!).

But for large firms (and maybe the larger middle firms) that already have a DMS I’m not sure there is enough there to warrant a shift. This is not a fault of WSP, just that there is nothing really new in the DMS world and there is already a skillset supporting the systems in place. There is also the unproved nature of SharePoint.

Times are changing though; big firms are dabbling with SharePoint DMS’s (Clifford Chance springs to mind). In any case I like competition in markets as it forces all vendors to up their game. Microsoft was stagnant in the consumer PC world until Apple resurrected itself, they’re now playing catch-up Without Apple, Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7 wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as they are.

Overall what do I think of WSP? Well it does what a DMS should do (or at least it has the delivery of those missing parts on a roadmap). It does need some polish, but I’m sure that will come as it’s there in parts. I guess it then comes down to whether you’re convinced that SharePoint can be a DMS and whether Workshare can nail the price for the client to make it a very cost effective proposition.

Workshare have provided the test VM for me to use and kevin.docherty@workshare.com has been very helpful in answering my many questions on what is planned down the line. Apart from this they’ve left me to comment on the product as I saw it without any final review or editing.