No option for Law Firm

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I’d very high hopes for WorkSite 9. Admittedly a lot of these hopes I’d developed circa version 8.2 (i.e. before the Autonomy merger) so a lot has happened since. But because of this I feel just a little underwhelmed by what’s in v9.0.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is some good stuff in 9.0 that is going to be really useful for a lot of firms, but there were a couple of things that I’d hoped for that haven’t materialised. First off though let’s take a look at the things that are there:

Unicode: Now if you are a one country, one language firm that has no international offices nor international clients then this probably isn’t a big deal. But for everyone else it’s a big cheer of “Yes! finally”, no more agonising over the code pages of libraries and limiting the poor folks in the small office in Russia to using the Latin character set for everything! There’s the ability to handle the meta data of course, but also to handle dialogues in multiple languages based on the locale that Windows is set to.

Security: Two areas of security jump out:

• Security in the ACL (Access Control List) currently uses an optimistic model (or can be set at the server for an all pessimistic model). i.e. the higher or the lower security always wins if the person is in the ACL more than once (e.g. marked as an individual as well as in a group). In 9 you can have a hybrid model, where no access trumps everything. Basically no mimicking the way Windows file security works.
• Encryption. file encryption built in. So you can set specific documents to be encrypted at the file store level. In law firms I can see this being an increasing requirement in the near future!

Remote use:

• https support: an alternative access to having to set up VPN connections to gain remote access to your firms WorkSite setup. Similar to Outlook where you can set the client up to talk to Exchange via https enabling easier remote access.
• The other is not necessarily designed for remote access but will be beneficial for those on slow connections. It’s the utilisation of OffSite cache whilst you are online. So if there is a local version of the document that is the most recent, then that is used rather than fetching one from the server. Reducing network traffic (at least for large document transfer).

Client:

• 9 has features for saving native word comparisons into WorkSite and to allow you to compare WorkSite documents
• Integrated into the save as PDF functions in Office, allowing you to save to worksite (interesting these two seem to be an “attack” on Workshare, Docscorp & Litera territory!)
• In Office 2010 you can now view NRL link attachments within email (similar to standard Office attachments)
• Add-on available that plugs into the Outlook 2010 social connector that can show WorkSite activities.
• iPad client v2 – take a look at this post on Legal IT Professionals for full details.

Some additional features that help IT department more than the fee earner are:

• Easier desktop upgrades through automatic upgrade of custom configurations, handling re-install in the install package.
• FilesSite and EMM will become one package.
• v9 server compatibility with 8.5 schema to ease upgrades.
• Autonomy Control Centre – Allows managing of all IDOL components. Includes graceful start-up and shutdown, ability to edit config files etc. In future sounds like there are plans to include all WorkSite components in this!
• IPv6 support.

Finally there is a push to the cloud, where you can have Autonomy host the WorkSite infrastructure. There is also a hybrid cloud solution. Where your data centre would replicate to their cloud for disaster recovery purposes or just for backup purposes. Uses replication products from Autonomy’s recent iron mountain acquisition.

So what were those two things that I would have liked to be in v9.0 that weren’t?

I was hoping for a significant rework of the database schema. Something that would really remove any limitations on docmaster in terms of number of documents and give significant performance gains to workspace/folder navigation. Also an addition of a much more flexible custom field set up, allowing full user configuration of meta data.

The second area I was hoping for work on was to allow easier global working. We know latency is a killer for any global set up, so I wasn’t expecting the Chicago guys to perform miracles. But just add more flexibility to allow “on the fly” connections to other libraries. For example, I could create matter shortcuts to an Australia matter in the library in Sydney from within my UK system and the DMS servers would then manage the connection only on my entering that particular matter (releasing it once I navigated away). This would save me having to maintain a connection to the Australia DMS as well as my UK one. DocAuto have a product that does something along these lines, but can’t help feeling it should be in the core product?

I did say my hopes were high didn’t I!

But what we do have with v9 is a good step forward. Plus as they will be targeting Office 2007 and 2010 only, it will hopefully mean we see some further exploitation of Office 2010’s features and better integration as we move forward through 9.1, 9,2 etc. as well.

It’s been a few years since iManage WorkSite effectively won the war of the document management systems (DMS) against Hummingbird’s DM5. Since then both companies have been through a number of mergers and are currently the Legal DMS products are owned by Autonomy and Opentext respectively.

The peace though looks soon to be shattered by a counter strike on two fronts. On the one side we have the SharePoint juggernaut from Microsoft and on the other a coalition of vendors we’ll call “the cloud” (currently led from the front by netdocuments).

So who’s going to win this latest battle? First off it’s worth pointing out that the game has changed considerably since the WorkSite 8.0 v DM5 days, it’s no longer just traditional DMS functionality that is required in the armoury, but email management capabilities and great search functionality.

Let’s start with SharePoint. In its 2010 guise it looks like SharePoint is starting to be taken seriously. From Lewis Silkin’s SharePoint implementation to the announcement that Clifford Chance are going SharePoint there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the product is ready to be used by law firms. The big benefit of course is the cost, if you’re licenced for Microsoft, then you’re likely licensed for SharePoint. Plus there is the native integration with Office 2010. The addition of the FAST search engine gives it some capability against WorkSite’s IDOL engine. And there’s also a growing IT skillset out there to maintain the product (wider than just the Legal IT market).

But wait, there are limitations for Legal. Matter centricity and email management to name two. These can be addressed by “add ons” like Workshare Point or DMS4Legal (the former I have seen and have to say looks really neat) but then the cost and resource benefits are reduced or eliminated.

So if it’s not a one horse SharePoint race, what about the other side, the cloud coalition?

I’ll be honest I like the concept of netdocuments. The desktop application has all the features of a good DMS like WorkSite, but the heavy lifting of a DMS (the application servers, the indexers, the database etc) is managed in the cloud. Allowing the focus for the Legal IT department to be on the fee earners desktop, which is where it should be.

The downside of the cloud at the moment is the perceived security and risk concerns, I’m sure this will be resolved in time. But right now it’s still a stumbling block for many firms, but the shift may be coming (Foley & Lardner in the US, a 1000 lawyer firm, have possibly shown the way).

So is the original winner of the DMS battle doomed?

Short answer, certainly not.

I think there is plenty of life left in iManage WorkSite. As well as the fact that unlike the others it is a proven product in Legal, it also has a couple of aces up it’s sleeve.

First off it’s proven itself to be scalable to meet the demands of even the largest law firms. Something that SharePoint I don’t think has yet proven. The number of documents a law firm has may have levelled, but the email volumes on matters is still growing. That’s a counter strike on one flank.

On the other side it’s announced a big offensive by moving WorkSite to a hosted solution, too early to tell whether this is a route to victory (or what exactly the hosted solution will look like), but on the face of it moving WorkSite into the cloud itself is a good move.

So who’ll be the winner?

I honestly don’t know. Thinking about it, I hope there won’t be one outright winner. A little competition in the Legal DMS arena is a good thing. Product competition usual brings with it innovation and advancement, it forces vendors to up their game. All of which can only be a good thing for the lawyers!!  *

*that’s lawyers as users of the technology, not in some big litigation of course!!

A couple of weeks back I attended the Autonomy iManage (or should that be Autonomy Protect now?) user group in London. There was a good session early on in the afternoon where Autonomy ran through their roadmap for WorkSite. I was struck with a feeling that they were clearly listening to their customer’s needs, in fact some of the indexer additions are almost direct answers to an adhoc customer feedback discussion I attended at ILTA earlier in the year.

So it’s worth blogging some of the highlights of upcoming releases:

WorkSite client SP2

This release is out and you can find details on the support site. But it is worth noting that this is basically a branch of SP1 u3 (all the fixes in that release are in SP2) that just brings Office 2010 compatibility.

WorkSite Indexer 8.5 SP2

In this release there are some improvements in the connector (the fetch state is preserved via checkpoint to save having to start all over again), improvements in the indexing resilience and in disk space protection.

There are also a couple of nice tools that have been added. A diff tool, which will do a health check between your index and the DB. Sort of like the imfcheck between docstore and DB I guess. And the Autonomy Control Centre, a web based tool for monitoring all your indexing components. Allowing you to start/stop services, monitor all log files, messages, metrics etc of all your WorkSite indexer components from one control centre. I think in time the aim is for this to be able to monitor your IUS and EAS indexers too.

Worksite Communication Server 8.5 SP2

This release looks to bring Exchange online support (https support) and also a Mailbox Agent, this allows emails to be marked that have been filed elsewhere in the firm by colleagues (not just those filed by using the luggage tag).

WorkSite 8.5 SP3

This release will be a real plus for Excel users as there is a focus on linking support in Excel sheets. Also this release will see the start of the shift to .NET integration.

There are also some NRL improvements. The ability to have NRL previews in Outlook and NRL links to matter centric containers as well as documents.

WorkSite 9

A lot of what is in 9 I already blogged about from ILTA and this is still:

• Full Unicode – yes! finally you can file those Chinese and Cyrillic language document descriptions (email subject lines)!
• Encryption support.
• Access anywhere – similar protocol to how Outlook client can communicate over https.

There is also now a hybrid security model. You can mix pessimistic and optimistic models. For example, you can have optimistic for grant privileges and pessimistic for revoke. Sort of how windows file store security works.

And maybe not in 9.0 (for which the main focus I believe is Unicode), but certainly earmarked in point releases is further outlook 2010 integration. Starting to exploit some of the new 2010 features of Outlook (conversation threads etc).

Autonomy ACA

Finally there was a quick mention of the Archiving ACA product. Autonomy Consolidated Archiving, this allows the archiving of many different types of content in an on or offsite archive. They are looking at a migration path from EAS too. Given the volumes of data law firms now deal with this product could be very interesting.

This blog post is a question to other legal IT teams, especially those that support Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite product. The question came to me after I re-read the post by @jbtrexler on the excellent blog electronic file 2.0.

It’s about storage underneath WorkSite and a realisation that after six years of supporting the product I’ve never really needed to get to grips with the underlying file management of the product.

The question though is simple. For a single WorkSite library or database, can I have the physical documents stored across numerous shares? So for my Matters library could I have the documents stored on a matters1 share on say one array of disks and a matters2 on another?

At some point I’ve been led to believe not, but am I wrong?

I’ve been struggling over the last couple of weeks to come up with a subject to post about. Is this what people call writers block? It’s mainly down to being focussed on a particular project at work which has lead me to think about little else in the Legal IT field.

We’ve been gearing up to rolling out Autonomy’s iManage WorkSite 8.5 product together with the EMM (email management module). It’s been building up throughout the year, building VM environments, rolling out IDOL and Email Filing Servers etc. But it’s these last few weeks when the end users have started to get the software.

We started with a small field test and followed with a couple of pilots in London and Madrid, then this weekend was the big one. Six offices in one go, across four countries!

We’ve had some challenges with it, but on the whole I think the fee earners will like the product. If all goes well I’ll post up some coal face views of the software in the coming weeks!

On another note, this week I got short-listed for the Computer Weekly blog awards 2010! So if you’d like to vote for me (Jason Plant) you can do so over at the Computer Weekly site (or just take a look at the other shortlisted blogs).

Vote for Jason Plant - IT Blog Awards 2010