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!
Good article and some interesting concepts there.
Along with the fact that it will be difficult to come up with budget for these extra apps, I think some of these ideas, especially the first & third, are fairly “common sense” and should be present natively within the iManage product itself(maybe using Comms Server?). GS have done a good job of identifying and working on these shortcomings and well done to them but isn’t it time Autonomy iManage took these sort-of-standard features and developed them in? I know they (mutually) enjoy a flourishing relationship with third party app providers, but times are hard, budgets are tight and expectations are greater than ever before.
Secondly, its all very well getting these new apps but deploying them in an enterprise with other FileSite add-ins can cause problems; As we know in DLA Piper, like having to repair things in a certain order, issues with .dll’s being shared between apps and above all adding all this “bulk” on top of a poor Outlook client thats already bloated
Let me declare my interest , I’m Paul O’Connor, Head Of Solutions at Grant Select, the product author. I’d like to thank Jason for taking the time to review ‘Link Warden’, and for his blog, a great forum for these technology dabates.
I’ve had quite a few direct emails to paul@grantselect.co.uk enquiring about ‘GS Link Warden’, and thank you for your questions. I will respond to what I can here.
I’d like to comment on a few areas -‘Email as a Record’ , ‘Disconnected Users’ and ‘Price’, and would welcome comment.
‘Email as a Record’
I’ve been chewing over this issue for years, and have been greatly impressed with Filesite, and the enhancements it has bought to this area, but it has created a problem in its own right, much as Exchange did itself, an explosion in content. Let’s start with the basic assumption that a firm should always have a record of correspondence/documents received from external parties. This is so that the appropriate actions are carried out during the transaction, and that in the extreme case where, in a dispute, the firm has a record of all communication.
GS ‘Link Warden’ was written as a cost effective solution to this, as current offerings fall short in this respect. In native systems (Exchange, Outlook and Worksite) there is no protection from users either –
deleting the email before filing into Worksite;
not filing the email and attachment; or
accidentally modifying the attachment before filing.
Firms that deploy archiving solutions, can journal every email, for proof in the case of dispute, but this is too late. Any ‘email records’ filed are not guaranteed immutable without Link Warden. Perversely, with other email archiving solutions, greater confidence can be achieved, by not filing until the attachment has been stubbed, so that the original attachment is fetched from the archive!
With Link Warden, the document is protected by being placed into Worksite as a single instance record before any user can access it. All subsequent access is then audited. The audit trail will show date received, from whom and to whom. This is much better record management.
The integrity of an email and attachment isn’t so much about the storage mechanisms, attachments will not live in Exchange if any email archiving product is used, be it Symantec EV, Zantas, Mimecast or any other system. The only difference with Link Warden, is that the true location of the attachment (i.e as a record in Worksite) is accurately given, and all access is audited. With the trend towards hosted Exchange or Archiving systems, the implications of holding multiple copies of client documents makes an even more pressing case for that single instance in Worksite.
‘Disconnected User’
Here I am talking about laptop users, that do not have iManage OffSite, and cannot get an internet connection. GS ‘Link Warden’ as of today, partially addresses this issue. Currently, if a user receives a link, and they know they need the attachment off site, they can either open the link, thus caching on local machine through recent documents, or forward to ‘DocRequest’ to get full copy emailed back. Either of these do require an explicit action on the user before leaving the though.
Some thoughts I’ve had-
Users with laptops and blackberries, should be trained on how to download and transfer attachments 🙂
Sender also sends CC to ‘DOC Request’ , this will force a full copy to be sent to recipients , with email/document title changed to something along the lines of ‘Non File Copy of…’. This has the benefit that any emails from DocRequest can be automatically expired after say one week.
Have an extra email command in Worksite as ‘Send Non File Copy’ which will send attachment internally and not link
I really do need feedback on this area, as to how much of an issue it is.
Price.
We recognise how tight budgets are, that firms cannot stand still, and need to maximise the benefits from their existing investments. That is why we have developed Link Warden. We will make it affordable, and can also offer it as a monthly subscription, avoiding large capital expenditure. ROI is of course easier to calculate on decreased storage requirement, but I believe the real value is in usability and compliance.
Respect for the audit trail, quickly locating the file copy when searching, rather than the umpteen copies as email attachments, and of course the simplification of retention management, gained from a single instance held within the DM, rather than tracking down those extra copies.
Lets hear your thoughts
Paul
Thank you for posting such a useful, impressive and a wicked article.
this sites found to be too good, for the informations on law firms .
Any advice on how to go about changing the default attachemnt to a link instead of a copy of the document? Most of our users send links as opposed to copies and would like to be set as the default whenever they go to select an attachment