No option for Law Firm

This week a couple of things cropped up to remind me of my predictions for the top 5 technologies for Legal in 2010. In particular that I had search at #4 and my thoughts on why I think next year this will be moving up the charts.

First off is my first recent experience on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5 working with IDOL and using search to retrieve email out of a 30m+ document library. As I tweeted at the time it made me want to take my email out of Outlook and put it in WorkSite! The search experience was so much better than Outlook 2003 Advanced Search (although recently I’ve used Outlook 2010 and the search in that is itself so much better than 2003!).

Then on Friday night, the second thing that got me thinking about search was when my son (aged eight) found a Flipnote on his Nintendo DSi and wanted to know what the music was. I had no idea, but what happened next was an eye opener on the new generation.

I consider myself pretty tech-savvy but in this instance I was well beaten by the eight year old. First off he’d asked if he could use Shazaam, but he couldn’t wait for me to get my mobile and so he had gone to his PC, fired up Google, found the track by searching for keywords and lyrics and then found last.fm and a copy of the track. No guidance, no help from his parents, in fact I was so impressed I went and bought him the track off Amazon (which in hindsight wasn’t that clever, as it is now on a continuous playlist of one!).

The thought hit me though, that if my son was to go into law (not on his list of potential employment at all at the moment, currently being a Chef is #1) then he just won’t accept the reams of paper file or the clunky e-filing systems that require either browsing or complex search forms. No search is something he takes for granted. It’s not technology to him it’s just something, like reading and writing, that he just does.

We in Legal IT have about 10 years before these kids start arriving in law firms, think we’ll have enterprise search working by then? And for the lawyers get yourselves comfortable with search technology, as these kids won’t accept the “I don’t understand computers” argument. They’ll just look at you like you’ve just announced “I can’t read”!

If you’re an Autonomy iManage customer and you have access to the WorkSite Support portal, then there is some new content on there that will be of interest. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a direct link to it from the portal home and I’m not sure I should link from here direct to the resource due to it’s customer only nature, but have a word with your Autonomy contact for a link (also if Autonomy are reading this and don’t mind pointing out the location please feel free to add it into the comments).

The new content is a number of video webinars on the IDOL worksite indexer deployment that are worth a look if you’re on or about to go to version 8.5. There is about 60+ minutes worth of flash video taking you through such topics as:

• Indexer Deployment
• WorkSite Indexer Components & Key Settings
• Initial Crawl vs. Maintenance Crawl
• How Indexing and Searching Works with Active Content
• Plus a number of other related topics

I think it’s a great way to spread the knowledge of this new indexer and as IDOL becomes a key part of WorkSite it is a much better than the traditional training methods Interwoven (and other vendors) have previously implemented for new products.

I’ve not had time yet to watch all the videos but colleagues have and have said they’re excellent. Once I’ve had chance to watch them I’ll post what I think in the comments.

On Friday I got a simple explanation of how IDOL fits together with other applications (like WorkSite and Zantaz). I was so simple and obvious that after a few days mulling it over I can’t believe I’d got confused. But for those new to world of IDOL I hope this little video of the explanation I got may be a light bulb moment for you too!

Also it may be worth mentioning that this video was put together in about 10 minutes! Take a look at the site http://www.xtranormal.com/ it’s a great tool for quickly putting together an animated video to explain things.

Workspaces. They’ve been around for quite a while and I’ve thought about doing a post on what they are since starting the blog. The aim being to try and easily explain the concept of workspaces and libraries within the Autonomy iManage WorkSite document management system (DMS). So basically removing the tech speak and explaining what they are in “real life” terms. I was going to title this post “The Dummies guide to Workspaces”, but apart from possibly getting sued for copyright infringement I figured the concept of Workspaces and libraries are terms that to be fair aren’t that easy to grasp. So, here it is. Let me know in the comments if it hits the mark.

Let’s start at the top. That green blob in Outlook under FileSite or the application called DeskSite on your desktop. The document management system (DMS) itself, think of this as your firm. In a paper world this is where everything is stored. DMS = Your firm

The Office = The DMS

Now inside your office or firm you can have many of Filing cabinets. This is the place where your documents are stored. In the DMS these are pretty much what are known as the libraries. Library = Filing cabinets

You can group these in logical ways just like filing cabinets, a row for Litigation, a row for Real Estate or maybe you just have a bank of cabinets for all the firms clients. It’s exactly the same for your libraries in the DMS. You might have one way of grouping them, you may have many. e.g. Litigation Library = Litigation filing cabinets

Filing Cabinets = Libraries in the DMS

Right what’s in the cabinets? Yes, files and typically lots of them! In the DMS this is known as a Workspace. Workspace = File

Workspace = Matter File

Your firm will probably have hundreds or thousands of these files. Some of which you’re working on, some of which are just stuck in the filing cabinets (let’s not touch on those in archive today!). How do you organise those you’re working on? This is where your desk comes in! Your desk, the place where you put your files. In the DMS this is like the list of files under “My Files” (you may have it labelled My Matters or My Woirkspaces). My Files/My Matters/My Workspaces = Your desk

My Desk = My Files/My Matters/My Workspaces

This list can be changed by removing files or adding new ones. Remember though you’re just using these files, they aren’t just yours. Update them and all the office can see the updates. To add these in the DMS you would use a search to find the workspace (file) and add it to your My Files, in the real world you would go and get it from the filing cabinet and put it on your desk. Same concept.

Back to the file. Within the paper file you can arrange the documents with tabs and/or folders. Within the workspace (file) in the DMS  you can do the same. Tabs = Tabs, Folders = Folders

Tabs and Folders

Within tabs you can store folders, within folder documents and emails.

Finally that thing called “Subscribe” what on earth is that? This is basically the ability to look at your colleagues desk and see their files!

For those that struggle with the concept of workspaces, hopefully that will make some sense. From here you can read on and learn about how you can apply security to these workspaces (files) (worksite security pt1 and worksite security pt2).

Such a dull title, but that was the title of one of my final year modules at University. The textbook is probably in the loft somewhere. It was all about designing applications to be intuitive and easy to use (a much harder job when everything was DOS based!).

A couple of things over the last week got me thinking again about the design of applications from a user perspective and how important this is.

First off was the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series.

Clearly Microsoft finally “got it” with this release. They went back to the drawing board and designed something from a users perspective. Grouping things together in a logical human way (rather than technical grouping). Take a look at the video over at MSDN.

Second though was the interface with the most potential, Microsoft Live Labs Pivot.

Basically it is an interface into huge amounts of information. It allows you to slice up information in different ways, allowing you to go from huge amounts of data down to small amounts and back out in logical and connected ways.

It’s quite difficult to explain how this works using text, so take a look at the video over at the Microsoft Pivot site – http://getpivot.com/

In a law firm the possibilities for this are huge.

Law firms have huge amounts of data in documents and emails that this kind of interface would be perfect for. Imagine this being the main interface for Outlook or your document management system. You could slice up your emails quickly to find the information you were after. Or slice up your documents to collect together specific types of agreements, in specific jurisdictions etc.

On the developer page there are a number of challenges. One of which is a front end to SharePoint. I’m going to put my own challenge out there for any legal software developer to front end Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite, imagine this being the user interface of DeskSite!