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.