Sorry, I know that’s a terrible pun!
A warning, this is a bit of a techie post. So for the non-IT readers of the blog, a summary of the post: “if more vendors/suppliers did what bigHand do in their software design your IT department could upgrade software or change the settings for you much faster!”
On with the post…
As firms grow in size there are a number of IT challenges that can become more and more difficult due to the additional numbers. One of these challenges is those “small” upgrades to get to the latest version that seem to lengthen exponentially with the number of extra desktop PC’s supported. This also goes for changing the configuration or settings of those software applications. Especially when you want to alter a setting that is located locally on the PC (for example, iManage FileSite holds a lot of it’s client settings/configuration in the local PC registry, whereas with Workshare it’s in an XML file on the PC).
bigHand though seem to have a different approach.
At the moment we’re looking at an upgrade of our bigHand digital dictation installation to v3.2.3 and because of this I spent Tuesday on a technical training course for the new version. During the course we went through the client configuration.
And in bigHand for the most part these can be set using roles in the central database. This means they’re very simple to change instantly and also means you can simply manage different configurations for different people. All this can be done without the need to deploy patches, upgrades or do any amendments on the desktop PC.
Other settings for things like drivers to use for microphones can be managed using group policy using the bigHand provided administrative template file (.adm files). Again no mucking about on the desktop PC.
Simple and brilliant!
So if you need to disable a menu option for all the users? Simple! Just amend the role and apply once centrally! This makes upgrades easier as well as your client deployment can be a simple default install without the need to heavily customise for all those specific settings (especially if you have one configuration for fee earners, one for secretaries, one for support staff etc etc).
