Tag Archives: worksite

General Legal IT

Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5 and on

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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.

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General Legal IT, Technical, WorkSite Tips & Tricks

A WorkSite question – one library = one fileshare?

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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?

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General Legal IT

Rolling out WorkSite 8.5

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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).

computerweekly
Vote for Jason Plant - IT Blog Awards 2010

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General Legal IT

Time to sort out search in law firms

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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”!

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General Legal IT, WorkSite Tips & Tricks

Using WorkSite 8.5 with IDOL? This is for you!

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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.

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

You know I never knew that! A tip for WorkSite searching in FileSite

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You work with a product for years and every so often you find something new, something so obvious you probably should have known but it had escaped your notice. And that’s exactly what happened to me with iManage WorkSite last week. Finding a small feature in v8.2 to do with searching.

Basically if you use FileSite then you have the ability to use the Advanced Search in Microsoft Outlook to search your folders/workspaces.

Just simply select Advanced Search:

Outlook Advanced Search

And then you can use the Browse to select folders etc from within the FileSite. The limitations of Outlook are the same as if you have a PST (archive file) attached, in that you can only search something in the Inbox OR FileSite but not both at once.

This feature is pretty useful for searching for emails as you can use the From: lookup to select email addresses to search for.

As far as I know this is available in v8.5 as well. That is it’s on page 28 of the User’s Guide (it probably is in the 8.2 Guide but being a techie I’ve never picked up the manual for the current version! I just dived straight in), I just haven’t used the feature in our v8.5 test environment yet.

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

The Human guide to Workspaces

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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 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
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

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

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
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).

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General Legal IT, Technical

Human Computer Interface

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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.

winmo_7_peoplescreen

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.

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!

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General Legal IT

Familiar Faces

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Looking back on 2009 there seems to be a few familiar names that have branched out from the large Legal IT companies to set up their own businesses aimed at Legal IT.

I mentioned Paul O’Connor from Interwoven/iManage UK and the GS Link Warden product he’s been working on for Grant Select back in August.

There are two more that I thought worth pointing out.

The first is Simon Ellison-Bunce who some of you may know from Tikit. He has started a company called FellSoft Limited. They are focused on CRM and in particular InterAction and have recently released a product called Feed Watch.

Feed Watch is an add-on product for InterAction that basically can bring in content from the web (via RSS) into InterAction.

The second is Keith Lipman who some may know from Interwoven/iManage. He has started a company called Prosperoware. They are focused on information management and have a product available called Milan.

Milan is an add-on for Autonomy iManage WorkSite and adds a number of useful tools for managing the environment.

I think 2010 will be an interesting year for Legal IT as there does seem to be a wave of new software companies providing innovative add-ons and expansions to the “core” Legal IT products.

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General Legal IT, Technical

Looking after those WorkSite links

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Last week I had a webex with Paul O’Connor from GrantSelect, Paul’s an ex Autonomy iManage employee and was demoing a new product GrantSelect have developed for WorkSite.

There are three main areas to the product:

Sending WorkSite Documents/Links

This I think is the neatest area and is a very simple (from a user perspective, not for one minute suggesting technically it’s simple!) solution to a classic WorkSite problem.

For those that use WorkSite, do you default your “Attach worksite document” as an NRL link or as a Copy of the document? If it’s set to the former you risk sending your clients useless NRLs, but if the later you could clog up your inboxes internally with large attachments (and lose all your version control as people use the copy in the Inbox rather than the latest copy in the document management system).

The GrantSelect solution is a service that sorts this out. You can set WorkSite to always send an NRL link, if it’s internal then great! People get the small link and all the version control, security etc WorkSite brings. If it’s external then the GrantSelect product swaps out the link for an actual copy! Thus your client gets a useful document.

It’s a simple yet effective solution to a simple but annoying problem. My only question is will it be cheap enough? It’s one of those problems that probably can’t justify a high priced solution.

Receiving documents in emails as attachments

Next part of the product is for incoming emails, specifically those with attachments. The email is processed before the inbox and the documents are replaced with NRL links, the documents are then filed in a secure workspace (I think Paul said they are secured to the email recipients, but can’t be 100%).

If you subsequently file the email from your inbox into WorkSite, the documents are also refiled to the same workspace (for example, alongside the email in the client matter workspace).

This one I wasn’t too sure about and after a few chats I got similar feedback. Which is although the storage saving and single version controlled instance of the attachment is very nice, you’re ultimately messing with the email. We couldn’t help thinking that fee earners won’t appreciate their email not being as it was sent from the client.

I would love to hear other people’s comments on this one:

What do you think about the whole "email as a record" question?

Do you think people in general will get it?

Working remotely (without WorkSite for BlackBerry!)

This one’s another nice simple idea, especially for those Blackberry or Outlook Web Access (OWA) users without access to the document management system.

Basically it allows you send an email to a "Doc Request" email address, be it either an NRL or just a document number. The product will then email you back a copy of the document for you to access either through your BlackBerry or OWA.

Again like “Sending WorkSite Documents/Links” it’s  a simple solution to a common problem (especially if you started defaulting all your internal links as NRLs!).

Paul also mentioned that they were considering this for InterAction, so you could email in a contact and receive details of that contact in return.

 

Overall I think these are very nice simple solutions to common problems (they’re not major WorkSite issues, but niggles that crop up time and time again). The key to these products will be cost and scalability. I can’t see people wanting to spend huge amounts on these problems (especially at the moment), but at a reasonable cost they could form part of a usability and email management solution. The scalability due to the volumes of emails medium/large law firms will receive.

There is also the benefit of reduced storage space (which for email could be considered a major issue due to the exponential growth of the stuff!) and keeping the multiple copies of emails with links to single instances of the documents will facilitate this, but as I’ve mentioned I’m not sure about the ramifications of this email “alteration”? Also this area will need some hard case study evidence as to the cost benefit.

The full name of the product is GS Link Warden for Worksite and there’s more information over on the Grant Select website (http://www.grantselect.co.uk/products/products.htm)

One final thing that I thought was in relation to my recent posts on email management. That is with WorkSite 8.5 on the horizon, Zantaz EAS (or other email archiving) and Exchange already in use, it’s a lot to think about tying all these technologies together into something that in the end makes file management (especially of emails) easier for the fee earner. I mean the fee earner doesn’t care about IT storage issues, they want their electronic file to be as easy to browse, read and manipulate as the paper one was/is!

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