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General Legal IT

News on Autonomy/Interwoven

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Got a communication from Tikit today regarding some information on the Autonomy/Interwoven merger. Nothing really new, but in case you’ve not had any updates here’s what news there is.

What’s happening in terms of technology / product change?

I&A have confirmed that the Autonomy IDOL engine will be embedded into Interwoven WorkSite v8.3 (replacing the Vivisimo Velocity search engine).   In fact, this is seen as a top priority and as such work has already started and the target is to have this "substantially technically completed" by the time the acquisition finalises.   As with all good software companies they are preserving some mystery around the actual completion date but the original statement was ‘sometime during Q2’.  It seems to us that the indications are that this will be finished earlier rather than later, with talk of late March even being a possibility.   It is expected that this change in search engine technology will be covered by your WorkSite software subscription.

I&A have also confirmed that the next version of Interwoven Universal Search (Version tba) will also include the Autonomy IDOL search technology. Once again, the technical effort is already underway and the target for completion is deal-day. This is a larger piece of work than with WorkSite but, according to Interwoven, progress has been "very positive and is currently on target".

What’s the likely impact on product release plans?

Plans for the Limited release of WorkSite v8.5 are under review – they intend to provide a Limited Availability release (to customers who specifically request it – English language only etc.) in March but whether this is based on the Vivisimo Velocity engine or the new Autonomy IDOL engine is still to be decided. Either way, this will enable clients already on v8.3  to move to v8.5 and take advantage of the much requested and eagerly-awaiting new email management and offline working functionality. Then the General Availability release of WorkSite v8.5 is due in June 2009 – this will include the other language versions.  All future versions will be solely IDOL based.

With regard to IUS, it must be said that the release dates / plans are a little more vague.  But it would seem to us that any impact in the short term is limited to those firms who are about to embark on implementing IUS.  I&A are hoping to bring the release of IUS on IDOL forward from the initial target of June.

What about the big picture?

Up at the commercial level, the proposed acquisition has been almost universally praised.  One clear indicator of that is the Autonomy share price, which rose by approximately 20% over the last three weeks alone. 

On this last point I worry a little. The only reason the market would boost a share price is because of returns on investment and not because the customer is going to get benefit. Which re-enforces my concern that the goal for Autonomy is to try and sell all their products to the Interwoven legal customers.

Let’s hope not (or at least not at the detriment of Interwoven product development and integration).

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General Legal IT, Technical

Calling Autonomy!

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I’ve had an idea! You might want to take notes…..

I’ve been using your Zantaz product a little bit this week, specifically I’ve been trying to address an issue in the firm with large Outlook calendar folders. During this time a thought hit me….imagine a future release of WorkSite and Zantaz that are perfectly integrated with Autonomy’s IDOL engine and each other. Here’s what I came up with…

callingautonomy

  • Emails are no longer physically stored in the WorkSite environment, but are solely stored within Zantaz – BIG savings on WorkSite storage costs (our DMS is 70% full of email!), additional benefits from Zantaz de-duplication, compression etc
  • However you can still file an email to a matter, either by continuing to do a simple drag and drop or by using the Interwoven “Send and File” functionality. BUT rather than move the email into WorkSite, it would just “tag” that email as belonging to the WorkSite matter in question. You could still browse the matter workspace in WorkSite and see the emails in a folder, but they would be just returned from Zantaz using an IDOL search on the “tags” – benefits here would be in performance as the email doesn’t have to get moved from Exchange to WorkSite etc
  • “File and Send” itself would become more efficient as it wouldn’t have to scan WorkSite for emails that are already filed, to flag in your Inbox. Instead a simple IDOL query could be used against the Zantaz store. In fact if journaling was being done, it would know the email was already logged and “tagged”!
  • By changing to “tagging” you could easily add many “matter tags” to one email, it could then belong in many WorkSite matter workspaces – perfect for all those emails from a client that refer to many matters.
  • ALL emails could be journaled into Zantaz and then IDOL could be used to intelligently “tag” emails based on content, recipients, senders etc automatically. This could be used to suggest filing locations to the fee earners or even just file the email as soon as it reaches the Inbox – big benefits in time saving for the fee earner. Also if the fee earner has been particularly lazy and not filed their emails by the time a Zantaz policy archives it from their Inbox, it would still have some matter information tagged against it.
  • Best of all Search! The Express Search would become incredibly powerful allowing full access to all documents and emails with a simple “Google like” search. You could also leverage Outlook search to consolidate results from Exchange, Zantaz and WorkSite, ALL matter documents and emails in one search.

I hope Interwoven’s WorkSite engineers are allowed the scope to look at the full Autonomy product suite. This merger could really be great news for law firms if they are! I’m also so glad we made the hard decision two years ago to drop KVS and buy the Zantaz solution 🙂

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

Searching for a folder in a workspace – WorkSite help part 2

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WorkSite tech help part 2

How do I search for a folder in a WorkSite workspace?

I received a query recently from a colleague, wanting to know how they could find a folder within a workspace (using FileSite). The workspace in question had grown to have 100’s of sub folders.

Using a document search was not an option as a common template had been used to create the majority of documents and thus they all happened to have names that were too similar.

What was needed was a way to find the holding folder, which was specifically named and thus could be easily identified.

We were close to concluding that the only option was to create all the holding folders as workspaces, until we came up with the following:

Start by right clicking on “My Shortcuts” (just below your My Files/Matters/Workspaces) and from the menu selecting “Add Shortcuts…” (you could do this on other levels, but as you’ll see this is more logical).

You then get the enhanced search dialogue, from here you can select to Search for a folder.

foldersearch1

Selecting this brings up a dialogue where you can pick your “database” (i.e. worksite library) where your workspace is located and add some further search terms, example below:

foldersearch2

This will return you a result list of matching folders, you can then highlight the required folder and click Select. A shortcut to that folder will be placed in your My Shortcuts for you to access your documents from etc.

Once you’ve finished working with the folder you can leave the shortcut there or just delete it.

It’s not perfect I know, but it does the trick. Let me know if you know of a simpler method?

Final point: it is much easier to search for folders in WorkSite Web, but for us most fee earners and support staff work in either FileSite in Outlook or through the MS office integrations.

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Legal

Are you ready for the upturn?

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There is so much in the news about the economic turmoil. Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Hammonds making redundancies, we’re questioning the very make up of our firms, Osborne Clarke outsourcing staff, the list goes on and on. Then there’s the commentators all over the media predicting the worst recession since 19xx and our own Prime Minister making a “slip” and claiming we’re in a world depression! What with the weather as well (Brits, we always give a mention to the weather!), you just want to bunker down and hope it goes away quickly, right?

So is now the time to ask whether we’re ready for the upturn?

I say “Yes I think we should” and I think others are starting to give the same answer. Seth Godin this week makes a case for getting some breathing room and being creative at times like this to “change the game”. Lee Bryant of headshift, again this week, puts forward a case for using the recession as an opportunity to introduce web 2.0 into Law Firms.

Now is a time for support departments in law firms to shine, a time to equip the firm for the upturn. While the lawyers work hard to keep the clients and win the business in a difficult market, the support staff can ensure things are ready for when the firm begins to grow again. Because irrespective of all the comment on whether things will get worse or when things will end, one thing is for certain, it will end and there will be an upturn in the economy!

What can we do?

  • For years in the “good times” we’ve wished for a period of consolidation to shore up the foundations. A chance to get those IT systems “sorted”, a chance to really look at costs and get even better deals with suppliers, exploit the the systems we have rather than add more systems, a chance to exploit Knowledge Management and show the value it can really deliver (I’m not a KM practitioner, but read Karen and Toby’s articles), etc
  • It’s a time to look at those destructive technologies. How can we get these into organisations, ready to be exploited when the upturn appears. And not be chasing the pack trying to implement these systems when they are the norm and our firms are growing. Remember some of the new technologies now will be the next equivalent of corporate email (and email will probably be dead!).
  • Time to be wary and look after your remaining staff. Growth will bring churn into your departments, there will be opportunities galore for people as other firms grow and need to move beyond the skeleton staff they’ve had to operate with under current times. Your best people will be out the door first if they haven’t been “looked after”.
  • Maybe now it’s time to use any downsizing to re-organise and refresh your teams, mould them for what’s to come. Not for what is now!

But basically get out of the bunker, be creative and get ready! The upturn is coming!

Update: I wrote this Wednesday evening and scheduled it to post on the blog today. Every day though I realise getting back in the bunker is so easy to do, today I find a relative is facing redundancy and all those questions and worry creep back! I still stand by the post though, the upturn will come and for those of use fortunate to keep our jobs the time to look ahead and get creative is now!

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

Saving an email attachment as a new version – WorkSite help part 1

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WorkSite help part 1

Saving an attachment on an email as a new version of your document in WorkSite

This is the first in what may become an occasional series. A series of tips and tricks for software found in the Legal industry. The aim is to try and explain some of the more useful features of these pieces of software using common social media sites (like YouTube).

Today’s post is to show how you can use a very well hidden feature of Interwoven’s WorkSite 8.x to save an email attachment into the DMS (Document Management System) as a new version of your original document.

For example, you send a v1 draft out to the client for comment, he/she returns a marked up Word version that you would like to store in the DMS as v2. You can then work on v3 maintaining a full history of the document in the DMS.

Saving an attachment as a new version of your document in WorkSite 8
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General Legal IT

Interwoven and Autonomy – WorkSite, IDOL and iManage?

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This week I had a short telephone conference with Interwoven, the main purpose of my attending was the topic of the Autonomy takeover and what that means to our firm.

Given that we didn’t discuss anything confidential and a lot of it is out in the open already or will be communicated to other customers/potential customers, I thought I’d blog a few interesting things that came up.

We talked about where the deal had come from and they mentioned that they had been in the market for some kind of deal for a while, realising they didn’t have solutions for workflow really or email archiving and they were at risk in the indexing arena (they don’t own the Vavisimo engine and therefore there is a risk a competitor could buy the product and pull it from under Interwoven). When Autonomy came in the a good deal both companies realised the technologies were quite complimentary without much overlap.

We touched on the financials for the deal, the fact that Autonomy expect cost savings of $40m over the first year. In particular what this  meant to technology development teams in Interwoven? The response was pretty much the same as in the announcement you can hear on Autonomy’s website. They aren’t going to save on development etc, but the savings are expected by reducing the need for doubling up on some marketing, financial, legal teams etc.

In fact Autonomy do seem to want rapid introduction of their technology into Interwoven, this effectively means bye bye Vavisimo. The Autonomy IDOL engine will become the engine behind WorkSite and IUS (Interwoven Universal Search). Personally I’m still struggling to understand why IUS will stay, isn’t it just and Enterprise Search that Autonomy provide already? But the indication was it will live on.

What does this mean for WorkSite 8.3 and 8.5? Well my guess (certainly not confirmed) is to expect a delay on 8.5. The limited release will be released on schedule with Vavisimo as the index engine, but the full release will not be on Vavissimo and WILL be on IDOL. Technically the feeling was that this wouldn’t be a huge job and that Autonomy were willing to ship developers to Chicago to ensure a quick transitions. Interestingly it was also mentioned that IDOL was their first choice post verity, but that commercial reasons meant it didn’t happen. Vavisimo was seen as very good alternative though.

I queried the hardware requirements of IDOL (given as if you’ve gone to 8.3 you’ll have invested in new servers/storage no doubt). The indication was it would not need any more power, but these weren’t Interwoven technical people so take from that what you will.

The feeling I got from the telcon and also from the press releases and market briefing was that there really does seem to be a big focus on the legal vertical. On the one hand this could be great news for new functionality, development and integrations, but on the other it could be that Autonomy just see the market as a sales opportunity! Time will tell.

We asked about suppliers and what this means for the Tikits, Phoenix or the Baker Robins, the Interwoven resellers. Especially if, for example, you have Autonomy’s Zantaz and a different reseller. Will the new Autonomy use resellers as much? Will they ensure resellers know all their products? Will it allow firms to rationalise their suppliers? I don’t know, unfortunately we had a reseller on the call too so the answer was very vague.

Overall there wasn’t a whole lot of comfirmation or news, it’s early days and the Interwoven people are only just engaging with the Autonomy people in anger, I expect there will be plenty more news in the coming weeks.

Finally don’t be surprised to see the iManage brand back. It was mentioned as a bit of a throwaway joke in the meeting, but the brand was also on the slides from the market briefing. Maybe there was more to the joke? The Interwoven name will probably be dropped, so will we in fact see the DMS (Document Management System) revert to the old brand name?

Will the brand be back?
Will the brand be back?
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Legal

The law firm of the future

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Seven years ago we had a training day for the IT department, we were set a task to set a task to prepare a very short presentation on “The Law Firm of the Future”.

The reason I remember this was thanks to an article I saw re-tweeted on Twitter last week from the Financial Post in Canada. The article was about changes in law around the globe that effectively enables law firms to launch an IPO.

This reminded me of a slide we put together in that 2002 presentation:

futurelaw1

Looking at the rest of the slides some of our other points weren’t bad either.

  • Fixed price contracts for legal work, leading to lawyers working on projects rather than cases.
  • Full project management expertise for the legal project manager who has a team of lawyers, secretaries, IT personnel etc for each project.

These two bullets may be specific, but I think we were trying to point out that the traditional bill by the hour partnership model would not last. Quite in line with current “in vogue” thinking during the today’s economic climate (for example, see Optima Legal’s warning on small firms and the Adam Smith, Esq. blog report from the London City firms)

Not bad thinking for a bunch of IT geeks!

Back to the IPO point in the Financial Post though. I wonder how long it will be before we see the first IPO of a larger firm? Given the current economic turbulence, probably not soon. But thinking about the proceeds an IPO would probably realise for partners of a top 200 firm, surely it can’t be that long before someone tries!

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General Legal IT, Technical

Jaiku v Twitter

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Is there any point in me introducing Twitter? It’s hit the mainstream press now, so like Facebook if you’re online reading this blog you probably have heard of the latest internet hit. But have you heard of Jaiku? My guess is probably not.

Jaiku was founded in 2006 and then purchased by Google a year later, it’s basically a “twitter clone”. It generated a fair bit of publicity last week amongst Google’s announcements that it was culling a number of it’s offerings.

Now I know Jaiku is never going to beat Twitter just like Microsoft Live Search is never going to beat Google. Twitter is now the defacto standard for micro blogging. So why then title a blog post in such a way that it indicates that there is some scope for a challenge?

The answer is in this paragraph from the Google announcement.

we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers

I can see so many uses for Twitter internally in a law firm. IT notifications of service interruption, legal project teams working together globally on cases using it to communicate, marketing teams communicating pitch information, you could fill a page with knowledge management use alone etc. The problem though is security. You may use Twitter now, but I bet you keep your tweets vague enough to not give any personal or confidential information away?

Now with an open source Jaiku, you can have an internal Twitter. Hosted on your own secure network. Keeping it in your own network means you don’t have to limit the content. Also with it being open source you can guarantee that soon there will be Adobe Air clients, BlackBerry clients, Mac clients etc etc

This could do for internal social networks what Twitter has already done for external!

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General Legal IT

Autonomy buys Interwoven

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Interwoven Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Autonomy

Well it wasn’t a shock that Interwoven would get taken over in 2009, there were plenty of rumours indicating this was likely to happen. What was a shock is the company who has bought them. I’d heard from sources at other well known document management system vendors talk about it being HP or Oracle, as neither had a foothold in this market. But Autonomy, that was out of the blue.

No doubt in a lot of law firms right now there are a raft of questions doing the rounds.

What does this mean for IUS (Interwoven Universal Search)? Doesn’t this compete with Autonomy’s products?

Where does Velocity fit into the long term WorkSite plans as the indexing/searching engine?

Will WorkSite v8.5 get delayed as Autonomy’s search engine gets integrated?

Ultimately will the niche document management product (WorkSite) get sidelined for Interwoven’s other offerings?

No answers yet.

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General Legal IT, Technical

Google vs Interwoven – email send & archive/file

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Google have introduced a “Send and Archive” function in their Gmail (Google Mail) application. This is a labs feature at the moment and so isn’t turned on by default. I caught sight of this from a post on Mashable in my RSS feeds, which in turn refers to the Google Labs blog announcing this feature.

I already posted a link to this via twitter on Monday, but I thought I’d add some thoughts here now that I’ve used the feature in Gmail. And to say that it is very similar to a feature introduced by Interwoven in WorkSite already, their “Send and File” functionality.

sendandfile

On the left is Interwoven’s product integrated with Outlook and on the right is the Google labs feature.

Basically both are designed to get your emails out of your inbox into a long term storage area. In Interwoven’s case this means into a Workspace for the matter you’re working on and in Google’s case into your Archive area within Gmail.

After playing with the Gmail version for a while, two things struck me:

  1. Subsequent replies to your email don’t seem to be auto filed in the archive, I had to chose to archive these (admittedly one click archives the whole email thread). The Interwoven version though will “tag” the outgoing email so it can then file the incoming replies automatically.
  2. There is no structure to the archive (unlike say sub folders or workspaces), it’s just a big “bucket”. Google can handle this either by labelling the emails (from what I can see rather like a categorisation tag) or alternatively by just by relying on their search engine to find your stuff.

It’s this very last point I want to touch on. This to me is the killer feature! When your search engine is as good at returning what you’re after as Google’s, why bother structuring it at all?

After all email is an absolute pain to file in a rigid structure. For example, that email you received from the client may refer to two matters and some personal information just for you, how do you file that in a single folder? But a big bin with a fantastic search capability might just work!

Will the velocity engine from Vivisimo that’s in Interwoven WorkSite 8.3 bring the “Google search” to WorkSite? I’ll let you know when we get it up and running!

And if you’ve already got it up and running why not post a comment? 

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