Last week I attended a Workshare user group event down at Herbert Smith’s offices in London. If you’re a Workshare customer I can say that (apart from Herbies meeting rooms being far too hot even with the aircon on) the user group is worth attending. It was a good mix of user feedback, product direction and case study and definitely not too heavy on the sales.
The point of this post though is to look at a couple of interesting products on the horizon. Both in my opinion take Workshare up against vendors that traditionally haven’t occupied the same space in Legal IT.
First up is “Document Doctor” (I’m not sure these are actual product names as yet).
This is a product they are working on to look at restyling and repairing documents. The idea being that it would work as part of the flow of what you are doing e.g. a comparison fails due to corrupt document and then it would prompt to try a repair. It’ll be available as standalone and also integrated into Workshare Professional (WSP). I wasn’t sure if it was an additional cost bolt on to WSP or part of WSP 5.5.
To me it’s clearly looking at an area currently held by another well known legal IT vendor, maybe not in direct competition but if they get the licensing right it could be a viable alternative for a lot of firms.
Next up is the integration with Sharepoint 2010. And there are two parts to this:
First off document collaboration, workshare becoming the glue between your DMS (Document Management System), Word 2010, traditional Workshare functions and Sharepoint 2010. Allowing you to leverage the collaboration features of Sharepoint 2010 and Word 2010, yet maintain the control your DMS gives you. The thoughts I had were of collaboration portals for clients. So you could use an extranet version of Sharepoint for collaborating on documents with clients, yet keep full control of versions etc within your DMS. This could be very exciting.
Second for me was the biggest surprise. This is where Workshare enter into another new legal IT arena, one I wasn’t expecting. It’s their product that adds matter centric working to Sharepoint. Allowing you to work on and store your documents in a matter centric content management system.
Some of this functionality was announced in conjunction with the Office and Sharepoint 2010 launch.
A very interesting development indeed!
Hi Jason – glad you found it interesting, the feedback from the User Group was really positive. If you don’t mind me saying – Workshare is looking for design partners for both the restyle and repair and the SharePoint solution. If anyone wants to find out more please drop me a mail at emeamarketing@workshare.com
Jes Breslaw
I am not surprised to see Workshare branching out into more areas around document lifecycle management. It makes sense to offer an end to end solution based on an integrated Workshare platform. I think it also makes sense for them to branch out in ways that increase the value of the product beyond just comparison. MS Office is getting to be too good at comparison, and it is going to take more to entice (especially small) firms to buy.
Regarding the matter centric part, is Workshare effectively creating a SharePoint based DMS for legal? (Or at least, the ‘navigation’ aspects of a DMS). Sounds… erm… brave.
At the moment I’m definitely questioning whether we’ll be renewing our Workshare license once we’re on Office 2010. Oh dear, sorry Workshare.