Today was going to be “Autonomy day” and for the morning that was the case. The first session I attended was “The Search Is Over with iManage IDOL: Frontend and Backend Perspectives” (#AUT1). Initial feeling about the session was that it was going to be a bit of a sales push for IDOL search, but some of the presenters actually gave a real good “war stories” type run through of implementations.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was how sessions at ILTA can just come together. I met with @newroccindy on Monday who mentioned she was looking to set up a get together to talk and share stories on WorkSite 8.5 IDOL. By Tuesday evening there was a session in place with not just 10-20 firms attending, but also Neil Araujo and Kevin Hicks from Autonomy. A great demonstration how ILTA can pull together people with similar problems/queries to discuss them with the people that can fix them.

One thing struck me though from the first session on Wednesday, there was a real different viewpoint on IDOL from the presenters (one from legal, one from IT). The legal side showed a real enthusiasm for IDOL, the later not so much. But I hope the view I got from both sessions, that Autonomy are really looking to help, will be the case and IT departments struggle will just be teething problems of a new indexer.

Next up was the general iManage corporate update session (#AUT2). It’s probably just worth bullet pointing some of the key points from this session.

• Autonomy Express Search – not the iManage Express Search that comes with 8.5, this is another product that hooks into IUS to enable searches across a number of repositories (incl. WorkSite). Also includes a desktop IDOL install to index your PC data! Very nice, but why another product?
• WorkSite 8.5 SP2 – the Office 2010 compatibility service pack. Gives functionality as per previous versions of Office. Doesn’t exploit new functionality yet (that’ll be in 9), also doesn’t support 64bit Office.
• WorkSite 9.0
  • 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.
• WorkSite indexer patch – update 2 which is due soon.

Then a quick lunch in order to get to a Workshare demo. They were showing three new products at ILTA.

• PDF product – aims to bring a lot of the functionality of Adobe Writer at a fraction of the cost.
• Protect Server 2 – taking the meta data stripping off the PC. Allows different stripping profiles that can be triggered by an email address. For example, trackchanges@verybiglawfirm.com would trigger a different stripping profile that would remove track changes.
• Workshare Point (working title) – the bolt on the SharePoint to provide matter centric functionality to SharePoint 2010.

Also was the indication that Workshare Professional 7 was on the horizon. Focus for this is on improvements in the installation and deployment and also additions to make it able to integrate more with the above products.

Mid afternoon I met up with fellow Legal IT Professionals columnist, Christy Burke. Where I spent some time being interviewed for a podcast which will be on the site by the time you read this (not exactly sure how it went, but I think it was OK. Although I’m sure I ended up using the word “predominantly” more in 5 mins than I have in the last 4 months!!)

Final session of the day was “The CIO in 2020: The Business-Savvy Strategist” (#ORG10). This was a discussion session on where the role of the CIO is going in law firms and what this role will look like in 10 years time. There are some good quotes on the twitter hashtag that will give you a feel of the session. There was also a good article mentioned “Why CIOs Are Last Among Equals” which is worth a read. I did thing though that a lot of what was mentioned (communicate with the business etc) should be being done by most legal IT professionals.

In the evening there was another vendor event to attend, this time by Workshare. And then it was off for a meal with colleagues from the UK and US.

End of the last full day at ILTA 2010 in Las Vegas!