No option for Law Firm

If anyone wants an example of why you should blog or use twitter, read on!

Since starting this blog back in January I have built up better relationships with legal IT suppliers than I have ever managed with any “account manager”. Through blogging and through twitter I’ve managed to discuss their products directly with the people inside those companies who are involved with developing them.

An example today relates to comments I’ve made over the past month in regard to Workshares products, first about their recent 5.2 SR2 release and then about a possible protect workflow problem here.I’ve been contacted a couple of times by Workshare through this blog and through twitter (@jesbreslaw), but today I got some good news relating to two specific points I raised in the posts indicated above.

1. My comment on 5.2 SR2 – “The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!!”
2. My comment on how Protect and Autonomy iManage Send & File together could annoy lawyers.

Here’s what Kevin Docherty, Product Manager had to say:

I just wanted to clarify a quick point that you mention… re “The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!!”- I suspect that you are using the first Beta as the second Beta fully supports DMS interaction.

This is great news as I see this peice of functionality being really useful for things like Bible creation etc. Then on the second point Kevin continues:

yes, we know that this may provide a challenge to the basic Protect workflow. We are obtaining a pre-release version of Autonomy very soon and will be looking to get it set up ASAP. We’re specifically targeting Protect Workflow in the SR 3 version of Professional (Oct/Nov) so I will hopefully have some feedback for you around this area soon – and how we will be looking to cope with the multiple Autonomy pop-ups.

I’ve no idea how Workshare found the blog, but regardless I’m impressed that they took time to read and respond to their customers. More companies should follow suit and get their product development and sales staff on twitter and other “web 2.0″ technologies to get dialogue going with people who use their applications.

If you want dates for the Workshare releases I got told the following:

• SR2 Beta refresh– April 17th

• SR2 General Availability -  May/June

• SR3 estimated release – Oct/Nov

Workshare Protect v Autonomy iManage Send & File

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on an upgrade from Workshare Professional 4.5 to 5.2 SR1 and during this time we’ve been getting a lot more information on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5. The combination of these two got me thinking that either Workshare or Autonomy iManage need to work together on user experience around email sending.

In Workshare we have the Protect module configured so that as you send an external email you will get prompted with a pop-up box like that below. This allows you to utilise the Workshare functionality to removed meta-data, turn the document into a PDF etc

In WorkSite 8.5 you can utilise the Send & File functionality to ease email management, in particular filing of Sent emails into the matter workspace (see my previous article on Send & File functionality). Again as you send an email you will get prompted with a pop-up box like the one below.

What happens if you have both installed? I can see our lawyers getting really annoyed with multiple pop-ups when all they want is to get the email fired off to the client!

So a call to Workshare and Autonomy iManage, what we need is a Send, Protect & File integrated dialogue!

Got our hands on Workshare Professional 5.2 SR2 beta last week, not really had time to get our hands on it (we’re still on a live 4.5 release and struggling with some specific issues with our environment and 5.2 SR1!). But thought it would be worth blogging what’s new in this release:

• In Compare (i.e. Deltaview part of Professional)
• Comparison of embedded Excel tables – this is the data not the formulae in the tables, but still a pretty useful feature.
• Comparison of images – no it isn’t that fancy as to show what’s changed (i.e. that person has a scarf on in that photo!), it just checks whether the image has been modified, deleted etc
• OCR support for PDF comparison – nice, BUT you need to have ABBYY recognition server configured
• In Protect
• Manual redact – is this a growing demand?
• Cleaning password protected documents
• Previewing cleaned or PDF attachments
• In Review
• PDF combine – this could be really useful. The ability to combine multiple files into a single PDF. Useful at the close of a case when you want to combine many documents into a single file.  BUT although it supports the combination of the following file types into a single PDF: DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, PDF, TXT, HTML. The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!! i.e. NOT the DMS!

When we’ve got it up and running successfully I’ll blog some more thoughts, particularly on:

• Is the configuration easier to manage/understand?
• Lightspeed clean in protect – how much faster is it than v4.5?