No option for Law Firm

I’ve had an idea! You might want to take notes…..

I’ve been using your Zantaz product a little bit this week, specifically I’ve been trying to address an issue in the firm with large Outlook calendar folders. During this time a thought hit me….imagine a future release of WorkSite and Zantaz that are perfectly integrated with Autonomy’s IDOL engine and each other. Here’s what I came up with…

• Emails are no longer physically stored in the WorkSite environment, but are solely stored within Zantaz – BIG savings on WorkSite storage costs (our DMS is 70% full of email!), additional benefits from Zantaz de-duplication, compression etc
• However you can still file an email to a matter, either by continuing to do a simple drag and drop or by using the Interwoven “Send and File” functionality. BUT rather than move the email into WorkSite, it would just “tag” that email as belonging to the WorkSite matter in question. You could still browse the matter workspace in WorkSite and see the emails in a folder, but they would be just returned from Zantaz using an IDOL search on the “tags” – benefits here would be in performance as the email doesn’t have to get moved from Exchange to WorkSite etc
• “File and Send” itself would become more efficient as it wouldn’t have to scan WorkSite for emails that are already filed, to flag in your Inbox. Instead a simple IDOL query could be used against the Zantaz store. In fact if journaling was being done, it would know the email was already logged and “tagged”!
• By changing to “tagging” you could easily add many “matter tags” to one email, it could then belong in many WorkSite matter workspaces – perfect for all those emails from a client that refer to many matters.
• ALL emails could be journaled into Zantaz and then IDOL could be used to intelligently “tag” emails based on content, recipients, senders etc automatically. This could be used to suggest filing locations to the fee earners or even just file the email as soon as it reaches the Inbox – big benefits in time saving for the fee earner. Also if the fee earner has been particularly lazy and not filed their emails by the time a Zantaz policy archives it from their Inbox, it would still have some matter information tagged against it.
• Best of all Search! The Express Search would become incredibly powerful allowing full access to all documents and emails with a simple “Google like” search. You could also leverage Outlook search to consolidate results from Exchange, Zantaz and WorkSite, ALL matter documents and emails in one search.

I hope Interwoven’s WorkSite engineers are allowed the scope to look at the full Autonomy product suite. This merger could really be great news for law firms if they are! I’m also so glad we made the hard decision two years ago to drop KVS and buy the Zantaz solution

WorkSite tech help part 2

How do I search for a folder in a WorkSite workspace?

I received a query recently from a colleague, wanting to know how they could find a folder within a workspace (using FileSite). The workspace in question had grown to have 100’s of sub folders.

Using a document search was not an option as a common template had been used to create the majority of documents and thus they all happened to have names that were too similar.

What was needed was a way to find the holding folder, which was specifically named and thus could be easily identified.

We were close to concluding that the only option was to create all the holding folders as workspaces, until we came up with the following:

Start by right clicking on “My Shortcuts” (just below your My Files/Matters/Workspaces) and from the menu selecting “Add Shortcuts…” (you could do this on other levels, but as you’ll see this is more logical).

You then get the enhanced search dialogue, from here you can select to Search for a folder.

Selecting this brings up a dialogue where you can pick your “database” (i.e. worksite library) where your workspace is located and add some further search terms, example below:

This will return you a result list of matching folders, you can then highlight the required folder and click Select. A shortcut to that folder will be placed in your My Shortcuts for you to access your documents from etc.

Once you’ve finished working with the folder you can leave the shortcut there or just delete it.

It’s not perfect I know, but it does the trick. Let me know if you know of a simpler method?

Final point: it is much easier to search for folders in WorkSite Web, but for us most fee earners and support staff work in either FileSite in Outlook or through the MS office integrations.

WorkSite help part 1

Saving an attachment on an email as a new version of your document in WorkSite

This is the first in what may become an occasional series. A series of tips and tricks for software found in the Legal industry. The aim is to try and explain some of the more useful features of these pieces of software using common social media sites (like YouTube).

Today’s post is to show how you can use a very well hidden feature of Interwoven’s WorkSite 8.x to save an email attachment into the DMS (Document Management System) as a new version of your original document.

For example, you send a v1 draft out to the client for comment, he/she returns a marked up Word version that you would like to store in the DMS as v2. You can then work on v3 maintaining a full history of the document in the DMS.

This week I had a short telephone conference with Interwoven, the main purpose of my attending was the topic of the Autonomy takeover and what that means to our firm.

Given that we didn’t discuss anything confidential and a lot of it is out in the open already or will be communicated to other customers/potential customers, I thought I’d blog a few interesting things that came up.

We talked about where the deal had come from and they mentioned that they had been in the market for some kind of deal for a while, realising they didn’t have solutions for workflow really or email archiving and they were at risk in the indexing arena (they don’t own the Vavisimo engine and therefore there is a risk a competitor could buy the product and pull it from under Interwoven). When Autonomy came in the a good deal both companies realised the technologies were quite complimentary without much overlap.

We touched on the financials for the deal, the fact that Autonomy expect cost savings of $40m over the first year. In particular what this  meant to technology development teams in Interwoven? The response was pretty much the same as in the announcement you can hear on Autonomy’s website. They aren’t going to save on development etc, but the savings are expected by reducing the need for doubling up on some marketing, financial, legal teams etc.

In fact Autonomy do seem to want rapid introduction of their technology into Interwoven, this effectively means bye bye Vavisimo. The Autonomy IDOL engine will become the engine behind WorkSite and IUS (Interwoven Universal Search). Personally I’m still struggling to understand why IUS will stay, isn’t it just and Enterprise Search that Autonomy provide already? But the indication was it will live on.

What does this mean for WorkSite 8.3 and 8.5? Well my guess (certainly not confirmed) is to expect a delay on 8.5. The limited release will be released on schedule with Vavisimo as the index engine, but the full release will not be on Vavissimo and WILL be on IDOL. Technically the feeling was that this wouldn’t be a huge job and that Autonomy were willing to ship developers to Chicago to ensure a quick transitions. Interestingly it was also mentioned that IDOL was their first choice post verity, but that commercial reasons meant it didn’t happen. Vavisimo was seen as very good alternative though.

I queried the hardware requirements of IDOL (given as if you’ve gone to 8.3 you’ll have invested in new servers/storage no doubt). The indication was it would not need any more power, but these weren’t Interwoven technical people so take from that what you will.

The feeling I got from the telcon and also from the press releases and market briefing was that there really does seem to be a big focus on the legal vertical. On the one hand this could be great news for new functionality, development and integrations, but on the other it could be that Autonomy just see the market as a sales opportunity! Time will tell.

We asked about suppliers and what this means for the Tikits, Phoenix or the Baker Robins, the Interwoven resellers. Especially if, for example, you have Autonomy’s Zantaz and a different reseller. Will the new Autonomy use resellers as much? Will they ensure resellers know all their products? Will it allow firms to rationalise their suppliers? I don’t know, unfortunately we had a reseller on the call too so the answer was very vague.

Overall there wasn’t a whole lot of comfirmation or news, it’s early days and the Interwoven people are only just engaging with the Autonomy people in anger, I expect there will be plenty more news in the coming weeks.

Finally don’t be surprised to see the iManage brand back. It was mentioned as a bit of a throwaway joke in the meeting, but the brand was also on the slides from the market briefing. Maybe there was more to the joke? The Interwoven name will probably be dropped, so will we in fact see the DMS (Document Management System) revert to the old brand name?

Will the brand be back?

Interwoven Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Autonomy

Well it wasn’t a shock that Interwoven would get taken over in 2009, there were plenty of rumours indicating this was likely to happen. What was a shock is the company who has bought them. I’d heard from sources at other well known document management system vendors talk about it being HP or Oracle, as neither had a foothold in this market. But Autonomy, that was out of the blue.

No doubt in a lot of law firms right now there are a raft of questions doing the rounds.

What does this mean for IUS (Interwoven Universal Search)? Doesn’t this compete with Autonomy’s products?

Where does Velocity fit into the long term WorkSite plans as the indexing/searching engine?

Will WorkSite v8.5 get delayed as Autonomy’s search engine gets integrated?

Ultimately will the niche document management product (WorkSite) get sidelined for Interwoven’s other offerings?

No answers yet.