No option for Law Firm

I noticed a flurry of twitter posts over the last few days about LexisWeb beta and didn’t really take much notice, but it was a post from Doug Cornelious’ blog “KM Space” in my RSS reader this morning that got me to look at this site.

Their blurb says:

The Lexis Web product includes important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff. You can trust that all content has met LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate. The current beta version combines content from thousands of Web sites and millions of Web pages, with more being added each day

I suggest you read Doug’s blog for more info on the site itself. But the thing that interests me is whether or not it is actually built on IUS (Interwoven Universal Search) or at least whether on the Velocity engine underneath? 

From an IT point of view if it is based on the velocity engine,  I would love to hear feedback from lawyers and support staff on the LexisWeb site indicating whether it’s results are “good” (by good I mean “Google”, i.e. you get back what you were after!). It would give a good indication on whether IUS could be the answer to the law firm enterprise search.

Thanks to the Mr Mobile Blog for alerting me to this Microsoft beta technology. The technology is called Microsoft Tag.

Basically you install an application onto your BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device or iPhone. You can then just photo the tag with your phone and it’ll redirect you to a web page or any other online application.

It got me thinking. Imagine if you had a tag on every paper file in a law firm you could photo it with your BlackBerry and get instant access to the electronic details for that file. The WorkSite matter workspace, the InterAction client contact details or the financial information for that matter. Now if you had some way of opening all that information on your desktop PC by simply snapping the tag with your BlackBerry that might be the killer app!

Will this year be the year we are able to be always online? Fire up your laptop and you’re connected wherever you are?

I remember have a conversation with our CIO about 18 months or so ago, discussing why for document management we shouldn’t invest too heavily in enabling people to “go offline” when they’re out of the office. The simple reason I put forward was that we’d soon be always online.

The reason behind my comment wasn’t due to that current fad in the UK – 3G dongles from Vodafone, Orange etc but a technology that was on the horizon. WiMAX. This technology is effectively like WiFi but over much greater distances.

I just got a twitter tweet from a friend in the US about such a service that has started in his city. It looks like these services are starting to rollout in earnest. Personally I think this will kill WiFi hotspots and (hopefully) mean we soon won’t have to think about online or offline, if your laptop is on it’ll be connected to the internet or via VPN to your work network and email.

There is one cavaet to this and that is if you do business globally. It may take a while to see even WiMAX hotspots when you’re in the middle of say Dubai for example (for those that work in the UAE they know the difficulties and cost of telecoms/networks in that region!)

Before Christmas I went along to the Interwoven UK conference and saw a sneak peak of WorkSite v8.5 which is due for release this year. As we weren’t asked to sign a non disclosure agreement I thought I’d jot down some high level notes on some of the proposed new features that I think are great reasons to look at this upgrade.

Enhanced offline ability : There are some great additions here to the OffSite product. Bringing in seamless on to offline switching, background sync, granular selection of content and a new architecture to improve performance.

In fact my only gripe is with the current licencing model for OffSite. Surely it should really now form part of the FileSite licence (as should Email Management), these are core to the product functioning as you’d expect.

Multibyte support: unfortunately not unicode yet, but it’s better than now. This is for the key description, comments etc fields.  (Limitation is the need to have the characters on the same codepages, so unfortunately if you’ve multiple offices whose native language falls on different codepages this may not be what you’re after).

Indexing: there is a start to leverage the new indexers introduced in 8.3. This includes full text indexing of workspaces (meta data and descriptions). I can see two benefits here; the first it removes some load off SQL which can only be a good thing and second they’re providing a Quick Workspace Search bar, and thus as the meta data is indexed it can find matters in a much more “Google like” way.

Email Management:  Server side filing! Anything that takes the load off the desktop is a good thing, should increase performance of large email drag and drops! There are plenty of enhancements to the email management (send and file) piece which should improve things no end. For example, suggestive filing based on filing history and delegated filing (great for secretaries or should that be for fee earners?)

From the latest email I received from Interwoven the release dates are as follows:

Limited Release
Phase I
Core Components with Limited Platform Certifications March 2009

Phase II
Web with Limited Platform Certifications May 2009 
 
General Availability
 
Phase III
Core Components with Additional Platform Certifications June 2009

Phase IV
Desktop & Web Language Releases August 2009

Phase V
Tools & Other Miscellaneous Components September 2009