Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on an upgrade from Workshare Professional 4.5 to 5.2 SR1 and during this time we’ve been getting a lot more information on Autonomy iManage WorkSite 8.5. The combination of these two got me thinking that either Workshare or Autonomy iManage need to work together on user experience around email sending.
In Workshare we have the Protect module configured so that as you send an external email you will get prompted with a pop-up box like that below. This allows you to utilise the Workshare functionality to removed meta-data, turn the document into a PDF etc
In WorkSite 8.5 you can utilise the Send & File functionality to ease email management, in particular filing of Sent emails into the matter workspace (see my previous article on Send & File functionality). Again as you send an email you will get prompted with a pop-up box like the one below.
What happens if you have both installed? I can see our lawyers getting really annoyed with multiple pop-ups when all they want is to get the email fired off to the client!
So a call to Workshare and Autonomy iManage, what we need is a Send, Protect & File integrated dialogue!
Got our hands on Workshare Professional 5.2 SR2 beta last week, not really had time to get our hands on it (we’re still on a live 4.5 release and struggling with some specific issues with our environment and 5.2 SR1!). But thought it would be worth blogging what’s new in this release:
In Compare (i.e. Deltaview part of Professional)
Comparison of embedded Excel tables – this is the data not the formulae in the tables, but still a pretty useful feature.
Comparison of images – no it isn’t that fancy as to show what’s changed (i.e. that person has a scarf on in that photo!), it just checks whether the image has been modified, deleted etc
OCR support for PDF comparison – nice, BUT you need to have ABBYY recognition server configured
In Protect
Manual redact – is this a growing demand?
Cleaning password protected documents
Previewing cleaned or PDF attachments
In Review
PDF combine – this could be really useful. The ability to combine multiple files into a single PDF. Useful at the close of a case when you want to combine many documents into a single file. BUT although it supports the combination of the following file types into a single PDF: DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, PDF, TXT, HTML. The PDF Combine functionality is only available from the local file system!! i.e. NOT the DMS!
When we’ve got it up and running successfully I’ll blog some more thoughts, particularly on:
Is the configuration easier to manage/understand?
Lightspeed clean in protect – how much faster is it than v4.5?
Well I find out today that Interwoven will be releasing a v8.4!
It’s all part of the takeover by Autonomy and I know that until the merger goes through it’s difficult for them to disseminate information to customers on something that isn’t confirmed. But customers are still moving forward with projects and if you’re in the process of moving to v8.3 for the Vivisimo search, then you may want to take notes of these upcoming releases!
For those mid-project, here’s the order as a guide:
v8.5 is imminent (with Vivisimo Velocity) on a limited release (Limited release is fully tested production code but only released to clients who ask for it so they can be given preferential support)
v8.4 (with Autonomy’s IDOL engine) would follow this at some point. A server side upgrade retaining the v8.2 client – expect it to initially be a limited release while knowledge of IDOL grows within Interwoven.
v8.5 would then be released with Autonomy’s IDOL engine as a limited release
IUS (IDOL) limited release on a similar timetable to 8.5 IDOL
General availability of all above would follow later in year
Along with additional v8.5 modules such as SharePoint integration, WorkSite Web, IRM, language packs etc
After all this there comes the Fileshare release (I’m looking forward to this one! From what I understand you can make your workspaces available through a windows file share!)
In terms of architecture, the feedback is that the IDOL engine requires a similar capability as Vivisimo Velocity, so in their words “we can ‘simply switch’ from one index to the other”.
I’ve had a look around and can’t find an equivalent for twitterers in Legal IT, so I thought I’d start to compile one (if there is one out there already then let me know!).
So if you work for a law firms IT department or you’re a lawyer, KM practitioner, legal librarian, ex-employee of law firm or whatever with an interest in legal IT and you have a twitter account, then let me know.
Either comment on this post, DM or @ me on twitter (@nooption) OR use the contact page on this site to email me.
My intention is to create some high level groupings of twitterers on the page, something like:
IT Management/Project Management/Risk
Applications/Business Systems/Desktop
Infrastructure/Network/Servers
Front Line Services/Help Desk/Support
Training
General interest in Legal IT
So when you contact me if you can let me know the grouping you’d like to appear (or more than one if you like)?
UPDATE:
The page is now up, I haven’t broken it down as above as I decided against such a rigid structure. If you’re on the list and want to be removed -or- if you want to be added to the list, then contact me and let me know!
This week we launched an archiving process for our Document Management System (DMS). Underlying the process we used a product from Interwoven called WorkSpace Archive Manager (WAM). The WAM tool basically moves an entire electronic file (the documents, emails, folders and the meta-data) from one library to another, in our case from the Matters library to an Archive library.
I intend to blog about our general process and what we discovered working with our lawyers at a later date. The purpose of this post is to point out a bug or should that be a “feature” with the WAM tool. One that will probably cause you problems in the future if you don’t address it before you start.
We found in our analysis that keeping document numbers when moving documents between libraries was essential for the lawyers, especially as these numbers are often used in references on the documents themselves. We did look at using the WAM tools ability to store the document number in a separate “old document number” custom field, but lawyers didn’t like this. They wanted the document number to be the document number, end of!
Basically what this meant was, if you have ready to archive:
matter 1/1 with document numbers 100 and 101
matter 1/2 with document numbers 102 and 103
We would want them to appear in the archive with exactly the same matter numbers AND the same document numbers.
If you intend to archive everything in one big batch job and then seal up the archive and never write anything else to it then you’ll probably never hit the bug. But in reality you’ll probably want to archive in phases or even more likely on an ongoing basis. If that’s the case then you’ll likely hit the problem.
So in the example above, say we archived 1/1 one week and 1/2 a few weeks later. We would see the problem occur because we’d need to use two WAM jobs to do this. What happens is that the WAM run will create a webdoc entry in the document table (docmaster) of the archive library for the workspaces/folders using the next available document number (in the example of 1/1 it would use 102 – the next available number).
And this is where the problem occurs, when you come to archive 1/2 and it can’t maintain document numbers as 102 and probably 103 are already in use!
The trick to resolving this is to “seed” your document number in the archive libraries high (we chose 75000000), thus the next available document number for the webdoc entries is 75000001+. This will ensure all the actual document numbers can be maintained as they will unlikely “meet” a duplicate number. To me this is a flaw in the product as when you archive, you’re archiving the folders etc as well and thus surely these should maintain their numbers from the source library too.
It certainly should not go creating new entries in the archive with new numbers!
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).
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…
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 🙂
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?
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.
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!
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.
A law blog written by someone from IT or an IT blog written by someone who works for a law firm
