Tag Archives: worksite

Document Management article written for Managing Partner magazine

Back in April I wrote an article for Managing Partner magazine. I was asked to hold back on publishing myself for a few months, but now you can read the post in full here.

This isn’t an article evangelising SharePoint as the next Legal Document Management System (DMS). Nor is it an article focussing on which DMS you should choose (be it HP Autonomy’s WorkSite, NetDocuments or OpenText)

No, the intention here is to look at the operational issues and challenges in running a DMS in Legal. It is written from experience of HP Autonomy’s WorkSite product, but don’t let that put you off if you use another DMS. A lot of the experiences, lessons and benefits could apply to any of the four listed above.

Key challenges to address in the DMS world

The challenges found when using a WorkSite DMS can be broadly placed into two categories. Those that are purely technical in nature and those that are related to end user usage.

The WorkSite application servers are the “hub” of the DMS and are fairly simple to maintain and monitor. From the technical view we have rarely experienced issues with these. We’ve switched from physical to virtual servers without difficulty and because more can be added as the business grows, they have proved fairly trouble free.

Sizing the other parts of the system for your firm is one of the biggest challenges. Examples of the issues we’ve encountered are problems because our database was not sufficiently powerful and in later years because our index servers were not sized correctly. The WorkSite application utilises SQL queries to work out and display your workspaces, folder structures and document content. This can be quite “chatty”, and ensuring your SQL Server can handle the transaction volumes for the size of firm and size of document database is key to a performant system. Processor power and RAM are the key variables here and if possible size the latter to be big enough to keep your databases in memory, this saves having to keep those database indexes constantly “tuned” to maintain a consistent performance. The indexer has become more an integral part of WorkSite with the IDOL engine from Autonomy integrated. As early adopters we found setting this environment up quite a challenge. Now Autonomy support provide recommendations based on specific details of your proposed platform and usage. However time taken with design of the IDOL environment will pay dividends over time.

Another challenge we have had as a firm is distance. One limitation of WorkSite is the distance of your end user to your WorkSite infrastructure, the further you (the end user) are from the servers the slower WorkSite will perform. Latency at work! (to be fair to HP Autonomy this is the case for most software!). There are a couple of technologies that can help here. Firstly HP Autonomy provide their own product to help in the “WorkSite cache server”: this is pretty much a WorkSite application server located nearer the end-user that caches documents locally; it takes away some of the “traffic” from the end-user PC to WorkSite servers, thus improving performance. The other option is to use network optimisers (or WAN accelerators). In our experience the later simplify your WorkSite environment and work very well, but this may not be the case in every environment.

Aside from the technical there are the challenges of the end user. Introducing a DMS is a big business change and this shouldn’t be underestimated. A DMS is a very structured way of filing electronic information and is never going to be as quick and easy as saving to the hard drive of a laptop. Managing this change is one of the key ingredients to success of the system.

Also once you introduce a DMS, from a lawyer’s point of view the whole of their Microsoft Office environment becomes the DMS. And from an IT point of view this can be problematic: there can be many pieces of software that all interact with Word and Outlook and getting them all to work correctly is one of the biggest challenges when upgrading.

Any tips for how to meet some of these challenges?

So what advice would I suggest to a firm embarking on introducing a DMS? And how can you address some of the challenges? I’ve broken this down into four sections:

1. Don’t skimp on the hardware!

This was alluded to when discussing the SQL Server and Index servers. Within WorkSite these are the key components to giving good performance, the rest you can scale out later e.g. by adding another application server. So take your time, work with an IT partner who can help with the sizing (or get access to Autonomy’s support site and take some time to read their guides on sizing).

Understand your likely growth, both in terms of year on year document growth and how you expect to grow as a firm. Project this information forward a number of years to get the storage size you will need, then add a bit! Also ensure you understand limitations in your hardware. You don’t want to fill that 1Tb disk only to find you can only increase the capacity by replacing hardware because the server you bought can’t handle larger drives.

What do you need in terms of resilience for the firm? Is redundancy in one environment acceptable? Do you want a hot standby disaster recovery site or do you want a full duplicate business continuity site? Each costs more than the previous, but build the best you can for what you need for your firm (talk to the lawyers to understand how the firm would cope without the DMS for periods of time).

2.Expect a trough of disillusionment after the business change

based on Gartner’s hype cycle concept

I find that Gartner’s hype cycle diagram is a great representation of the peaks and troughs of user experience when introducing a DMS. It helps to understand that you will hit a “trough of disillusionment” and prepares you to set off with the expectation that end users won’t understand or accept it immediately. This isn’t a smartphone app that is intuitive and can be picked up in no time without any training. Not only is there a big technical change, there is often a shift in how the business manages files, documents and emails. Plan for as much training is realistic; add earlier sessions a few weeks before with more of a presentation style in order to set the scene, and then do follow up training a few weeks after go-live. Effectively communicate and train the key objectives and the change as much as possible.

3. Understand your environment

Plan for the full lifecycle of your documents: understand how you’ll age your files, how you’ll retire them from your DMS to an archive, how you’ll delete files. This will usually be done in conjunction with infrastructure capacity management, but what we’re talking about here is the business view of archiving and storage not the technical. So think at what point a matter workspace will go from your live library to an archive; what will happen to it then etc?

Unicode:  if you have overseas offices (particularly in places where the Latin character set isn’t the norm e.g. Russia, China) then you’ll want to watch for “Unicode”. It’s a bit complicated to go into the technical detail of ascii, Unicode, codepages etc here, but in terms of WorkSite just remember you WILL need to consider character sets if you plan to use version 8.x.

Business first: finally when planning your environment, firstly look at what you want from your business before considering the technical limitations. This will avoid setting up libraries for individual offices/countries because of latency issues when the business requirement is for the DMS to bring sharing of documents across all offices.

4. Get a partner

I’ve mentioned IT partners briefly already, but they are worth mentioning in their own right. It really is a benefit to work with a partner when implementing and running a DMS. Firms like Tikit and Phoenix will ensure you get what you need from the DMS. But as well as thinking about the implementation also think about the on-going support relationship; understand how knowledgeable their support team is as well as their pre-sales team and maybe even get them involved in the implementation project if possible.

What’s the impact and what ROI could you expect when using a DMS?

Our objectives in implementing WorkSite to replace an existing DMS were to gain:

–          Full version control

–          Email management/filing capabilities

–          Storage of documents other than Word, Excel

–          Integration with other legal applications (e.g. document comparison)

–          Allow expansion (global)

It is easy to see that WorkSite (or any of the other DMS listed at the start of this article) fulfilled our objectives. However as the business changes so do the requirements and we’ve had a number of additional objectives to address based on the requirements of the business. The biggest has been dealing with the explosion of email. To illustrate this here are some rough stats on document numbers in just one of our libraries: in 2004 we had approximately two million documents with a negligible amount of email on the electronic matter files. We now have approximately twenty million “documents” in that library and over 80% of these are email.

The ability to serve a global firm is now taken for granted; the thought that 6 years ago lawyers in each office had great difficulty sharing a matter file with each other without having to email documents back and forth is a little hard to believe now.

These all are obvious benefits realised, however it is hard to measure a return on investment in terms of £’s. A lot of what a DMS brings is allowing end users to manage a good e-file. However if this is achieved, then cost savings can be made in the saving of paper and printing costs incurred in maintaining paper files (plus the subsequent storage of those files). Of course the truly paperless office is a bit of a myth, but a serious reduction can be achieved. And most people would be staggered by the costs incurred in this area alone in law firms!

Future challenges

So what are the key challenges for a mature DMS implementation? These will always change, but right now there are three looming large.

ILM (information life cycle management): how to control and manage the growing volume of documents/emails from creation to destruction. Planning this from day one would be a huge benefit (and a lesson learnt from hindsight!). Control can be achieved though, through use of tools like HP Autonomy’s workspace archive manager (WAM) which can move complete matter files from one library (database) to another (e.g. from a live library to an archive), maintaining meta data (like document number or document history). These archive libraries can then be moved to cheaper storage, separate archive DMS’s (which can have less resilience than the live environment where close to 100% up time is essential), backups and eventually retired completely if required.

Email: the growth is staggering and although the rate of this growth may be plateauing, even at the current rate it creates a very large volume of data to handle. Add to this the increasing number of devices emails can be created and consumed on and control can be a nightmare. I’ve seen lawyers with inboxes of 50,000 items: how on earth do you start to sort that into organised matter files? HP Autonomy have introduced the WorkSite Communications Server in recent releases that links the email and the DMS together at a server level. This allows a better experience to the user through functions like “filing folders” and “send & file”. But I can’t help think though that further work needs to be done by all DMS vendors in this area and leverage the storage that email systems are already using.

Consumerisation of IT: as the smartphone and tablet take off, then the demand for ease of use in the desktop increases, as does the demand for applications to use documents/emails from the DMS on the personal portable devices. HP Autonomy does provide an iPad application and I’ve seen impressive beta’s from companies like Prosperoware which take things one step further by adding your inbox so that you can manage all your emails on the move in one App whether in the DMS or not.

Summing up

The main piece of advice I would give if you’re starting on the journey is to both seek out an IT partner and also to speak to other firms and learn from their hindsight. These will really help with your planning. Also realise it’s a never ending journey!

A DMS is the bread and butter of a law firm. As such it is often taken for granted and seen as an “old technology”. But the demands of a law firm change over time as does the IT that is used to access the data. The challenge for the DMS is to keep up with these and ensure managing the electronic matter file is as simple, easy and efficient for the lawyer as possible.

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SharePoint – bogged down and out of the battle?

Back in February 2011 I wrote a post titled “Is iManage WorkSite about to be outflanked?” where I looked at two up and coming DMS (Document Management System) technologies that were looking to take iManage WorkSite’s crown as the legal DMS of choice for mid to large law firms. After 18 months I though it would be worth taking a look to see how one of those “manoeuvres” is progressing.

The SharePoint offensive.

Leading the front is Magic Circle giant Clifford Chance, their drive started back in 2010 (at least that’s when I first heard of their plans to replace legacy DM5 systems with SharePoint at ILTA 2010 in Las Vegas). A post on Legal IT Professionals this month nicely brings us up to date on how it’s going and below are some of my comments on the progress.

My first concern for any big law firm thinking of SharePoint is the length of time taken to reach the objective. The project is getting on for two years old and so far only half the firm is live (3000 staff), as an example we have recently put nearly 1000 staff onto WorkSite in a project taking a little over 6 months (the main logistics of the rollout being the last 7 weeks of the 6 months where we also replaced the desktop estate too). Yes you could argue that any new technology brings delays, but you have to weigh those up against the benefits you’re going to get. One of the main benefits touted for SharePoint is the cost savings!

The biggest concern though for me, and I think should be for any firm, is the lack of email management. Managing the volumes of email today is much more critical to firms than just the documents of the firm. Keeping an up to date electronic file with todays mobile lawyers is an essential part of any DMS. Clifford Chance say “We are still deciding how best to present email content in SharePoint”, this is two years in! As Joanna puts it in the article “So basically you don’t have and will not have for the foreseeable future one folder or site-collection with all your matter related data including knowledge, email and related documents”.

Now an interesting point is raised here, “it is not totally clear to me that a single folder for everything is going to be what people actually want” says Clifford Chance. And I agree from a technical perspective, but from a lawyers point of view I think the feel of one place for all the matter material is essential. In fact I’m starting to think that maybe the DMS isn’t the right place for email, but that is for another day/post. Regardless you still want the UI (user interface) to present you a matter folder so from a user perspective you feel all your file is together.

On current progress in legal, SharePoint doesn’t look to me to be a threat to iManage anytime soon with these two issues. However there could be one secret weapon up Microsoft’s sleeve that may turn the tide.

Office 15.

As Clifford Chance point out “firms would gravitate towards SharePoint because it integrates with everything on the desktop” and this is the key point. The user experience is becoming key, the consumer UI that Apple brought us with the iPhone and iPad and now Micorsoft are bringing with Windows 8 mean people are demanding easy to use applications. The integration of Office 15 and SharePoint could be key, as Clifford Chance say “most people like the way SharePoint looks and the way it works. It is very similar to using a Microsoft desktop at home, and it is a lot easier than learning to use a piece of additional software that keeps popping up and getting in your way all the time!”.

On this current attack though I don’t think that iManage needs to worry about being outflanked. If costs are to be believed (“said that they invested over £1 million in consultancy”) then there are few firms that can afford the cost or the luxury of a two year project. But there is the question over iManage now it’s part of HP and how it will adapt in the next few years? The battlefield is about the change considerably with Windows 8, cloud and mobile computing and it’s going to take an entirely different set of equipment to cope!

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WorkSite Send and File explained

The idea for this post came about after a recent internal email query from colleagues in our Australia offices where we’ve recently started a WorkSite roll out. When you live Send and File for a long time you forget how confusing it can be for even the tech savvy. It’s not all simplicity in this Applesque consumer world, complex desktop software does exist! So this post is an attempt to simply explain the ins and outs of Send and File.

Lawyer is sending email to their client. To file the email, the lawyer uses Send and File (the subject line will be appended with a subject/luggage tag on send). In our set up the email address of the workspace will be in the BCC field.

Client responds to the lawyer. The email is received into the lawyers inbox and the email is filed using InboxFiler automatically, without any user action (such as pressing File) required.

Since the original email had the workspace address in BCC, the client would not have visibility to it when doing a reply/reply-all. We don’t allow incoming external emails to our workspace addresses, so even if the workspace address was in CC, then the client would get a bounce message returned. This is to prevent spam and other emails directly getting to the workspace. The important thing to note here is we are relying on the luggage tag, to file, NOT the email address for incoming email.

Lawyer then responds to the client. Now this is where our lawyers got confused, as there is an expectation that once they’ve started a Send and File then the whole thread gets filed. But as we’re using the luggage tag the lawyer needs to either:

  • Tick the box next to File To on the EMM toolbar to ensure this email is addressed to the matter workspace upon sending
  • OR ensure they select Send & File when the dialogue box pops up

When the client then responds the email is filed using InboxFiler automatically again. It’s just the Sent Items that that lawyer needs to remember to always file.

Couple of gotchas also worth pointing out in the S&F world:

  1. If during this process the Luggage Tag (in the subject line) is removed, the InboxFiler will be unable to identify and file the email. In this case a manual file will be necessary.
  2. Watch out for “rogue filing”! Scenario: I’m a lawyer and I receive a copy of an email originating from a Senior Partner with a luggage tag in the subject, I forward on the email to a colleague calling the partner an “idiot”. If I left in the luggage tag and the colleague was in my firm with EMM installed, then this email will get filed into the Senior Partners workspace. Oops!

Thanks go to @bashaa from whose email explanation to colleagues I cribbed the jist of the scenario from.

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Upgrading to WorkSite Communications Server 8.5SP2

I first saw a demo of WorkSite Communication Server 8.5SP2 when it was introduced a year or so ago. Since then its had some missed deadlines but finally was released in GA a couple of weeks ago. Partly the reason for its delay however was because of the many architectural changes in the software. The underlying code has been completely overhauled and the operation of WCS 8.5SP2 has been changed in a number of ways.

WCS 8.5SP2 has a number of key features all rolled up into one release

  • Greater integration with Exchange 2010 CAS
  • Load Balancing across multiple WorkSite Communication Servers
  • Mailbox Sync/Mailbox Agent
  • Numerous bug fixes

 

If you are moving to Exchange 2010 and currently have WCS SP1 installed you may want to check my earlier post for further information.

In this post I’ll focus on a couple of the features that come with SP2 and share with you some of the useful tips I picked up along the way.

Exchange 2010
One of the eagerly anticipated feature of this release, especially for larger firms, is the deeper integration with Exchange 2010. In SP1 EFS configuration was based around filtering on the WorkSite database/Exchange server pair; which was fine until the number of filing folders in a single database increases to unmanageable levels (how much time have we all spent waiting for that EFS pane to refresh praying it won’t crash??). Even then you could have explicitly list your Exchange 2003 mailbox stores (until of course the number of folders per database per mailstore got too large!) to filter further.

In Exchange 2010 Microsoft recommend you use the CAS alias for all external apps, meaning you were confined to using just one server if you couldn’t split your WorkSite database config down further. Autonomy still allow you to filter Exchange 2010 mailbox/database, however with the introduction of Load Balancing, this is less of a necessity.

Load Balancing using iManage Clustering
The core problem with running multiple WCS SP1 servers was that they all ran independently and it was up to the WorkSite Administrator to set up each of their functions according to infrastructure resources and business requirements. If one of the servers failed there was no mechanism for the processing to fail over to another server. In SP2, Autonomy require an installation of iManage Clustering, the same service that clusters middle-tier servers together. This works pretty well, you can now have multiple servers processing the same setup together by the efficient Clustering service.

I would advise you spend time to get to know how Load Balancing works. The recommended setting is to enable Automatic Load Balancing and let the system run on auto-pilot. This works well, on the whole, the users are split evenly across each server with the ValidUsers.urs file dynamically updated whenever there is a change in one of the nodes across the WCS cluster. Bear in mind once you click on Connect, all the options are greyed out and you will no longer be able to make any config changes. Just as well really, I agree with Autonomy this is necessary to prevent any unintended user action that may disrupt the process.

You may choose to run the manual Load Balancing, which is mandatory when filtering users according to WorkSite group. This is definitely a gem in the release; as a WorkSite Administrator I’ve come across a situation many times where users complain folders have not been processed for filing or some other problem. In SP1, to troubleshoot the problem meant to let MarkingWork complete a run and then trawl through the logs. However the logs can get chatty (in SP2 unfortunately the situation has gotten worse) and it is difficult to filter threads for a particular user. In SP2 all you have to do is add the user(s) into any WorkSite group, add the name of your group under User Group Name and away you go, MarkingWorker now only targets the users you want. Simple, but brilliant.

SP2 Tips

  • Use the new functions available to SP2 to go through your infrastructure again and see if it needs to be tuned. Especially if your firm is over the intial period of introducing 8.5 client, you may want to re-evaluate whether you still need to have an aggressive polling interval.
  • It also might be an opportunity to do some housekeeping & go through the EFS console to remove some of the folders marked Failed as a result of the user filing and then deleting them from Outlook. If in doubt, reset the folder and attempt to process again so you can be sure its ready to be deleted. Alternatively, you may want to check the status of the folder from Outlook.
  • Consider using User Group Name, should you want align your EFS configuration to target particular users more than others.
  • Be aware of how big the logs can get. Currently there is no way to tone down the logs from Verbose. The available setting only allows to tone down to Information or Error in the EFS console view.
  • Although you may not be using Mailbox Sync and have it set to Manual or Disabled; you still need to review the settings you have set in this node in EFS. In particular, notice how any WorkSite/Exchange settings change you make also get replicated into this window (under the Exchange Servers/WorkSite DMS area). If it hasn’t replicated, click away and then back again.
  • Clustering the EFS servers will require a DNS alias first, so get these in place before you begin your upgrade. If you aren’t using clustering, you are still required to input the hostname in the Cluster Name field.
  • When using Load Balancing, note how EFS generates files in the (hidden) ProgramDataAutonomy folder until LoadBalancer has finished at which point the ValidUsers file is placed in the Config folder. This file is the heart of the Load Balancing operation and initiates & controls the process.
  • Using Automatic Load Balancing means each node in the cluster has a number of users held in the ValidUsers file for that node to process. This will not get refreshed until there is a connect/disconnect on that or other nodes within the cluster. Which is fine, until the time you have new users added into your WorkSite databases who will soon start to create Filing Folders. These new users will not get added until there is a refresh and the ValidUsers file is reloaded.

 

What do you think of WCS SP2 so far?

 

Mubashir Mian is the Lead System Specialist at a major international law firm. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mubashirmian)

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WorkSite 9

Vote for me in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011

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.

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Migrating to Exchange 2010 with iManage WorkSite Communication Server

Quite a few Autonomy customers have implemented 8.5SP1x WorkSite Communication Server (WCS) to take advantage of the enhanced server-side filing features brought in by the new Email Management (EMM) client. Although the legacy “send & file” functionality existed before 8.5, it was a bit clunky & basic. Using the filing toolbar and other neat features bought the fee-earner even closer to matter collaboration and email volumes in WorkSite have increased.

Separately, there has been a push in the enterprise towards Exchange 2010, as the Exchange Administrators are keen to make use of the CAS high availability and new Outlook Webapp amongst other features, the most obvious one being Outlook 2010

This blog post will take you through some of the things to note when migrating your mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 and what the impact might be on your WorkSite user.

First the easy bit, the legacy WCS (SMTP) service that runs the filing via email address. There are no major changes to carry out here. The email filing functionality at the back end is still the same, with the SMTP service on the WCS picking up the incoming mail directed to it from your Exchange server using the mail connector The mail connectors from your Ex2003 environment will have automatically been migrated to your Ex2010 so things should pretty much remain the same, so any mail destined for yourworksitedomain.yourdomain.com will still go through. If you want to reconfigure the bounced email to be redirected to your new service account, (see below for why you need a new service account) you can make this change quite simply in the Communication Server Properties. A restart of the WCS service will be necessary, however the messages will queue during this time.

Things get a bit more interesting when it comes to the Email Filing Service (EFS). The EFS handles two of the main services, the FilingWorker (for Email Filing) & MarkingWorker (for Filing Folders). There are two key changes to be made within the EFS when the mailbox migration process begins.

First of all you need to review the Email Server Connection tab. Here you will have added the details of a Ex2003 service account which has relevant Send As/Receive As permissions. This service account field needs to be updated to a Ex2010 service account (a mailbox hosted within Ex2010). I guess you could also migrate the existing service account but I wouldn’t advise this, just so it doesn’t impact your current environment. Naturally, the Send As/Recieve As permissions need to be added for this account and should also have this access to the Ex2003 environment. In the Service Account/Server Name field you need to put in the name of your Ex2010 CAS name, whether this be a single server or an alias for the array and ensure you add this using the FQDN. All this can either be done manually or via the Email Filing Server Configuration Wizard, which will also change the local Outlook profile on the server to the new service account. If you use Trusted Login with the WorkSite administration account on EFS then you should ensure this has relevant NRTADMIN permissions in the database.

Secondly, depending on how many WCS’s you have and how they are individually configured, you may be filtering the Email Server Connection according to how you want each WCS to service Exchange. If this field was left blank, so the EFS could connect to any mailbox, then you can leave it like this. If however, you are using more than one WCS OR explicitly defining the Ex2003 mailbox stores, then you will need to add the same Ex2010 CAS name that you added into the Server Connection/Mailbox servers field. The benefit of explicitly defining what Exchange servers I want to filter on is it helps with troubleshooting and also keeps the WCS for the two Exchange environments separate. On the other hand you may wish to remain Ex2003/10 agnostic and want to leave it blank.

After you have saved the above settings you should run Test User Connections against both Ex2003 & Ex2010 users to ensure everything has gone through smoothly. Clicking on Marked Folder Management you should still see the listed of Filing Folders you had as before.

A subtle change to review is that any MarkingWorker or FilingWorker jobs carried over prior to migration will appear exactly the same in Folder Sync Monitor/Email Job Monitor lists. However, any new Filing Folders created or any new Filing jobs queued will have their mailbox entry prefixed by the Exch2010 CAS name.

So to summarise

  • Have a new Ex2010 service account with relevant permissions
  • Update the Email Server connection to use this account with the CAS name
  • Consider how best you can use the Exchange filter, to help you with troubleshooting and splitting across multiple WCSs
  • Set up a few test accounts with Filing folders, migrate, set up a few more and see how these differ in Folder Synch Monitor area. The same principle will apply in the Email Job monitor pane.
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Outlook search – #11 the final cool thing in Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #11 Search

Well I’ve been on an end of summer vacation and so it’s taken a while to finish the series, but at least we’ve saved the best feature until last! And that’s the search that comes with Outlook 2010.

After years of the clunky Advanced Search in Outlook 2003 where you were forced into carefully filing emails in very specific folders or experienced a world of waiting for Advanced Search to go through all your folders in the hope of finding that email you were sure you’d filed into Project X only to find you’d accidentally dropped it in Project F.

But no more.

Now simply type your search term in the box above the emails and Outlook quickly goes through that folder looking for the term you’ve entered. And I mean quickly.

Should you not find the item in that folder just click on the link below the results to expand the search across all your folders. And the speed at which it does this will blow you away if you were expecting Outlook 2003 Advanced Search type performance!

As you use the search the ribbon shifts into the Search Contextual Tab and from here with a simple click you get even more options. Like just show me the emails with attachments.

Take a look at this site for more information on the options available to make Outlook 2010 even more powerful.

Now if only Autonomy would hook into this and add a “Try searching again across emails in My Workspaces (WorkSite)” link below the Microsoft one, a link that would fire an IDOL search across all your filed emails in the WorkSite document management system!

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Previewing attachments within an email in Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #9 Preview documents within the email

This feature is simple yet brilliant.

You receive an email with one or more attachments.

Single click on the attachment and the document is displayed within the email body.

So no loading up a separate copy of Word, just a preview of the document quickly within the same application!

“What if we’ve a document management system and we send links rather than copies of the document?” well from what I understand a preview of NRL links sent using iManage WorkSite is on the roadmap for development! Which is great news if it is released. If you’re reading this and work for Autonomy and can confirm this, please post in the comments.

 

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Conversation views

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #1 Conversation views

One of my favourite features of Outlook 2010 is the Conversation view.

conversationview-1

Basically it’s a way to group all your emails in a thread regardless of which folder those emails are in.

So in the example above from my Inbox, the first two emails are unfiled. Then Outlook has pulled all the other emails in the thread together from sub-folders. Thus allowing me to see the whole conversation in one place.

When first expanding the thread Outlook will only show those most recent, I can then click expand again to see all the emails. These settings are configurable on the View ribbon -> conversation settings.

Another couple of new features that are related are worth mentioning at this point:

conversationview-2

Clean Up will remove superfluous messages from the thread and Ignore will remove any future messages from the thread. I’m not entirely sure about the latter one though!

One word of warning for those using WorkSite 8.5 SP2 u4 or less, there is a small problem with conversation views if you use the apply to ALL folders. Things work fine though if you just apply to folders one by one. Autonomy are aware of this and it is scheduled to be fixed.

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Is iManage WorkSite about to be outflanked?

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!!

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