Tag Archives: Autonomy

General Legal IT

Explaining IDOL

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On Friday I got a simple explanation of how IDOL fits together with other applications (like WorkSite and Zantaz). I was so simple and obvious that after a few days mulling it over I can’t believe I’d got confused. But for those new to world of IDOL I hope this little video of the explanation I got may be a light bulb moment for you too!

Also it may be worth mentioning that this video was put together in about 10 minutes! Take a look at the site http://www.xtranormal.com/ it’s a great tool for quickly putting together an animated video to explain things.

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WorkSite Tips & Tricks

The Human guide to Workspaces

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Workspaces. They’ve been around for quite a while and I’ve thought about doing a post on what they are since starting the blog. The aim being to try and easily explain the concept of workspaces and libraries within the Autonomy iManage WorkSite document management system (DMS). So basically removing the tech speak and explaining what they are in “real life” terms. I was going to title this post “The Dummies guide to Workspaces”, but apart from possibly getting sued for copyright infringement I figured the concept of Workspaces and libraries are terms that to be fair aren’t that easy to grasp. So, here it is. Let me know in the comments if it hits the mark.

Let’s start at the top. That green blob in Outlook under FileSite or the application called DeskSite on your desktop. The document management system (DMS) itself, think of this as your firm. In a paper world this is where everything is stored. DMS = Your firm

Now inside your office or firm you can have many of Filing cabinets. This is the place where your documents are stored. In the DMS these are pretty much what are known as the libraries. Library = Filing cabinets

You can group these in logical ways just like filing cabinets, a row for Litigation, a row for Real Estate or maybe you just have a bank of cabinets for all the firms clients. It’s exactly the same for your libraries in the DMS. You might have one way of grouping them, you may have many. e.g. Litigation Library = Litigation filing cabinets

Right what’s in the cabinets? Yes, files and typically lots of them! In the DMS this is known as a Workspace. Workspace = File

Your firm will probably have hundreds or thousands of these files. Some of which you’re working on, some of which are just stuck in the filing cabinets (let’s not touch on those in archive today!). How do you organise those you’re working on? This is where your desk comes in! Your desk, the place where you put your files. In the DMS this is like the list of files under “My Files” (you may have it labelled My Matters or My Woirkspaces). My Files/My Matters/My Workspaces = Your desk

This list can be changed by removing files or adding new ones. Remember though you’re just using these files, they aren’t just yours. Update them and all the office can see the updates. To add these in the DMS you would use a search to find the workspace (file) and add it to your My Files, in the real world you would go and get it from the filing cabinet and put it on your desk. Same concept.

Back to the file. Within the paper file you can arrange the documents with tabs and/or folders. Within the workspace (file) in the DMS  you can do the same. Tabs = Tabs, Folders = Folders

Within tabs you can store folders, within folder documents and emails.

Finally that thing called “Subscribe” what on earth is that? This is basically the ability to look at your colleagues desk and see their files!

For those that struggle with the concept of workspaces, hopefully that will make some sense. From here you can read on and learn about how you can apply security to these workspaces (files) (worksite security pt1 and worksite security pt2).

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General Legal IT, Technical

Human Computer Interface

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Such a dull title, but that was the title of one of my final year modules at University. The textbook is probably in the loft somewhere. It was all about designing applications to be intuitive and easy to use (a much harder job when everything was DOS based!).

A couple of things over the last week got me thinking again about the design of applications from a user perspective and how important this is.

First off was the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series.

winmo_7_peoplescreen

Clearly Microsoft finally “got it” with this release. They went back to the drawing board and designed something from a users perspective. Grouping things together in a logical human way (rather than technical grouping). Take a look at the video over at MSDN.

Second though was the interface with the most potential, Microsoft Live Labs Pivot.

Pivot

Basically it is an interface into huge amounts of information. It allows you to slice up information in different ways, allowing you to go from huge amounts of data down to small amounts and back out in logical and connected ways.

It’s quite difficult to explain how this works using text, so take a look at the video over at the Microsoft Pivot site – http://getpivot.com/

In a law firm the possibilities for this are huge.

Law firms have huge amounts of data in documents and emails that this kind of interface would be perfect for. Imagine this being the main interface for Outlook or your document management system. You could slice up your emails quickly to find the information you were after. Or slice up your documents to collect together specific types of agreements, in specific jurisdictions etc.

On the developer page there are a number of challenges. One of which is a front end to SharePoint. I’m going to put my own challenge out there for any legal software developer to front end Autonomy iManage’s WorkSite, imagine this being the user interface of DeskSite!

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General Legal IT

Familiar Faces

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Looking back on 2009 there seems to be a few familiar names that have branched out from the large Legal IT companies to set up their own businesses aimed at Legal IT.

I mentioned Paul O’Connor from Interwoven/iManage UK and the GS Link Warden product he’s been working on for Grant Select back in August.

There are two more that I thought worth pointing out.

The first is Simon Ellison-Bunce who some of you may know from Tikit. He has started a company called FellSoft Limited. They are focused on CRM and in particular InterAction and have recently released a product called Feed Watch.

Feed Watch is an add-on product for InterAction that basically can bring in content from the web (via RSS) into InterAction.

The second is Keith Lipman who some may know from Interwoven/iManage. He has started a company called Prosperoware. They are focused on information management and have a product available called Milan.

Milan is an add-on for Autonomy iManage WorkSite and adds a number of useful tools for managing the environment.

I think 2010 will be an interesting year for Legal IT as there does seem to be a wave of new software companies providing innovative add-ons and expansions to the “core” Legal IT products.

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General IT, General Legal IT

Head in the clouds?

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Cloud computing. The latest buzz word in IT, one that is probably only knocked off the top in a Legal IT game of “buzzword bingo” by eDiscovery! I started writing this blog post a few months back, at a time when I’d been flash mobbed by “cloud computing” companies. The intention was to put down some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting  for Legal IT people, together with some of my thoughts on “cloud computing”.

So what exactly is “Cloud Computing”? According to Wikipedia:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”

That help?

Probably not, let me try. It’s basically the infrastructure (all the hardware currently located in many firms computer rooms or data centres) and rather than being in your firm it is hosted somewhere else by someone else. The location you don’t care about (in a technical sense). It’s out there somewhere and it’s always big enough for you to add all your new applications and data to.

Basically so that the worry of keeping enough space to hold all your data or enough power to run your applications is taken care of by someone else (subject to you paying them more money for more space/power of course!). And all the disaster recovery and business continuity work is taken care of.

So some of the things I’d seen that may be interesting  for Legal IT people?

One of the first to catch my eye back in the summer was Legal Cloud, I  was obviously interested in their "Legal" angle. And I subsequently ended up on a call with the CEO of Legal Cloud, Mark Hadfield. You can read on their site what they offer, but for me as an IT applications focussed person I picked up on the possible benefits for testing software. When you’ve the masses of data a lot of law firms now have it becomes difficult to test new upgrades in a way that is close to your live environment, after all finding spare storage for a few terabytes isn’t easy! Legal Cloud though can offer a “temporary use” option, i.e. you can use a few terabytes in the “cloud” which you could utilise to test say an upgrade of your DMS (Document Management System) along with the millions of documents.

Autonomy iManage’s Digital Safe product also got my attention. Allowing a consolidated archive of the vast amounts of email and documents within a law firm. This also integrates with their WorkSite DMS (which is the DMS of an awful lot of law firms) and also the IDOL engine for retrieval.

Finally I caught a few news stories about Microsoft Azure and their offerings for data, SQL server database and .NET services running in a "cloud". I was especially interested in their Web Platform Installer which to me seems a great platform to run all kinds of applications on the “Azure cloud”. As someone posted on twitter, for the home PC market this platform could do for Microsoft what the App Store has done for Apple’s iPhone platform.

As well as tangible products like these there is unfortunately an awful lot of hype surrounding cloud computing. But much as the media likes to advertise the wonders to consumers and remind us of how it will be a multi billion dollar industry in n years, at the end of the day for the most part the end user won’t notice any difference. After all if their data is sat in your computer room in the Rotherham or sat in a giant data centre "somewhere" what do they care (so long as it’s safe)?

My thoughts on cloud computing then?

First let me link you to a post on a blog I follow “3 Geeks and a Law Blog”, this post by Greg Lambert was on the possible IT reservations with the Cloud.

“The ‘Devil’ on my right shoulder starts to put two and two together and wonder if my IT/KM friends are also seeing this effect of the "cloud" and playing on the basic fears that the law firm leadership has about putting any information or resources outside the physical reaches of the firm?? Meanwhile the "Angel" on my left shoulder shouts that I’d better listen to my IT/KM folks and not be such a ‘greedy bastard’ (he’s a little foul mouthed angel) in trying to save money while exposing my firm and its information to all kinds of access, security and ethical risks.

I’m probably being over simplistic in my example, but this type of argument is probably going on right now. Cost versus Security… Cost versus Access… Cost versus Risk…. Over time, it seems that the cloud based infrastructure is going to close these holes and create a much harder argument for technology departments to win.”

Generally I have never worried about this. I am of a generation that completely understands that not only do you not have a job for life, but the industry you’re in may not last your lifetime! The IT industry certainly is not unused to outsourcing parts of if not all of its functions, so I’m not sure my “coolness” on cloud computing is through fear of my job.

The big issue I see right now though is a point Greg also raises:

“we will need high-level contract negotiators to craft the contracts between the firm and the companies providing the services”

This may prove easier for US Law Firms where the data can be hosted in US data centres. But for the global firms that cross multi jurisdictions there will be a whole raft of contracts to ensure clients know where there data is.

On the whole though I just can’t get excited by the whole cloud computing concept. For the end user it’ll be nothing different, just that your data and systems might not be sat in your computer room in the Slough office but in a giant data centre "somewhere". And maybe that’s how we need to see it. A potentially very useful piece of technology, but certainly not a silver bullet technology that is going to save billions, save the planet and sort out every one of our technology problems!

Addition: you may also want to take a read at this blog post I caught today, it has some good explanations of the different models and delivery methods of cloud computing.

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General Legal IT, Technical

Looking after those WorkSite links

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Last week I had a webex with Paul O’Connor from GrantSelect, Paul’s an ex Autonomy iManage employee and was demoing a new product GrantSelect have developed for WorkSite.

There are three main areas to the product:

Sending WorkSite Documents/Links

This I think is the neatest area and is a very simple (from a user perspective, not for one minute suggesting technically it’s simple!) solution to a classic WorkSite problem.

For those that use WorkSite, do you default your “Attach worksite document” as an NRL link or as a Copy of the document? If it’s set to the former you risk sending your clients useless NRLs, but if the later you could clog up your inboxes internally with large attachments (and lose all your version control as people use the copy in the Inbox rather than the latest copy in the document management system).

The GrantSelect solution is a service that sorts this out. You can set WorkSite to always send an NRL link, if it’s internal then great! People get the small link and all the version control, security etc WorkSite brings. If it’s external then the GrantSelect product swaps out the link for an actual copy! Thus your client gets a useful document.

It’s a simple yet effective solution to a simple but annoying problem. My only question is will it be cheap enough? It’s one of those problems that probably can’t justify a high priced solution.

Receiving documents in emails as attachments

Next part of the product is for incoming emails, specifically those with attachments. The email is processed before the inbox and the documents are replaced with NRL links, the documents are then filed in a secure workspace (I think Paul said they are secured to the email recipients, but can’t be 100%).

If you subsequently file the email from your inbox into WorkSite, the documents are also refiled to the same workspace (for example, alongside the email in the client matter workspace).

This one I wasn’t too sure about and after a few chats I got similar feedback. Which is although the storage saving and single version controlled instance of the attachment is very nice, you’re ultimately messing with the email. We couldn’t help thinking that fee earners won’t appreciate their email not being as it was sent from the client.

I would love to hear other people’s comments on this one:

What do you think about the whole "email as a record" question?

Do you think people in general will get it?

Working remotely (without WorkSite for BlackBerry!)

This one’s another nice simple idea, especially for those Blackberry or Outlook Web Access (OWA) users without access to the document management system.

Basically it allows you send an email to a "Doc Request" email address, be it either an NRL or just a document number. The product will then email you back a copy of the document for you to access either through your BlackBerry or OWA.

Again like “Sending WorkSite Documents/Links” it’s  a simple solution to a common problem (especially if you started defaulting all your internal links as NRLs!).

Paul also mentioned that they were considering this for InterAction, so you could email in a contact and receive details of that contact in return.

 

Overall I think these are very nice simple solutions to common problems (they’re not major WorkSite issues, but niggles that crop up time and time again). The key to these products will be cost and scalability. I can’t see people wanting to spend huge amounts on these problems (especially at the moment), but at a reasonable cost they could form part of a usability and email management solution. The scalability due to the volumes of emails medium/large law firms will receive.

There is also the benefit of reduced storage space (which for email could be considered a major issue due to the exponential growth of the stuff!) and keeping the multiple copies of emails with links to single instances of the documents will facilitate this, but as I’ve mentioned I’m not sure about the ramifications of this email “alteration”? Also this area will need some hard case study evidence as to the cost benefit.

The full name of the product is GS Link Warden for Worksite and there’s more information over on the Grant Select website (http://www.grantselect.co.uk/products/products.htm)

One final thing that I thought was in relation to my recent posts on email management. That is with WorkSite 8.5 on the horizon, Zantaz EAS (or other email archiving) and Exchange already in use, it’s a lot to think about tying all these technologies together into something that in the end makes file management (especially of emails) easier for the fee earner. I mean the fee earner doesn’t care about IT storage issues, they want their electronic file to be as easy to browse, read and manipulate as the paper one was/is!

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General Legal IT

Found my document, can I open the workspace in iManage WorkSite?

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This week we got a suggestion from a fee earner in one of our offices for improving WorkSite. It was a simple request and once I’d thought about it fairly obvious omission from the functionality.

It was a comment that came from a document search and from there you can see where the document is located. The query was once you knew where the document was located from the Where Filed/Where Used dialogue, whether there could be an enhancement to allow you to access the workspace from here?

Where Filed/Where Used dialogue

I can see how this could be a requirement. A colleague passes you a document and asks you for advice and mentions there are comments from the client in the emails folder of the workspace.

Yes, you could look at the document properties, then note the client and matter number, then search for the workspace, check it is the same workspace as you saw on the Where Filed/Where Used and then add the workspace to your your My Workspaces/My Files. But that’s quite a few clicks!

Or an option could be added onto the Where Filed/Where Used dialogue to allow you to add the workspace to My Workspaces/My Files. I can’t see how you could access the workspace direct from there, but a shortcut to the workspace seems feasible.

So I thought I’d put it out there in the hope Autonomy see this, if you use WorkSite and think this would be a good addition could you mention it in the comments of this post?

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General Legal IT

Sent Items – current bane of email management

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Here’s a problem for you all, let’s see if this blog post can generate some comments on possible solutions.

Lawyers travel a lot, whether they’re in a regional firm or a global firm they will travel and they will want to use IT whilst they travel (especially email). Now although we are in a WiFi world the hotspots aren’t always accessible or cheap and so offline or limited connection is still the norm away from the office.

The problem I’m building up to is caused when you want to file email in a matter centric way within a document management system (DMS). I’m sure the ideal for most lawyers is to maintain a full electronic file using the DMS just as they’d maintain a full and proper paper file. But the electronic file is usually the current file too and thus they want to have access to these emails when away from the office (the same as historically they would have carried a pile of papers in a briefcase).

As a lawyer in the office, from an Autonomy iManage point of view using WorkSite, I can maintain the electronic file for all my documents. But the answer for out of office access is either by using their OffSite product or by using the WorkSite for BlackBerry product. Both an expense, did I say I also didn’t want to spent a lot of money solving this problem?

Now with WorkSite 8.5 the new synchronised folders within the Outlook Inbox is fantastic, I can keep all my emails in Outlook/Exchange (which is running in cache mode so all my emails are on my laptop offline or available in the Blackberry) and I know that they are being filed/synchronised into WorkSite. Thus at the end of the matter I can remove the folder in Outlook with confidence that the emails are on the electronic file.

Perfect!

Now here’s the problem. Sent items! What do I do with them?

Filing them has always been difficult, products like Send and File help with this by suggesting filing locations as I send the email. However if I move the email on Send and File then I can’t refer to the emails out of the office? But I can’t copy as I want the ability to keep my Sent Items clean like my Inbox, removing emails I’ve finished with!

An ideal would be for Send and File to move the email into the synchronised sub folder in my Inbox, that way it’s filed, available offline and out of my Sent Items. But I’ve checked with Autonomy, it doesn’t do this!

So there it is. How do I keep my Sent Items clean and tidy, have access to my emails through Outlook cached mode and ensure filing in the electronic matter?

Comments very much appreciated!

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General Legal IT

Autonomy iManage’s first 100 days

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OK, I’m shooting the gun a little bit. It has only been 66 days since Autonomy’s takeover of Interwoven officially completed, but since it was announced back in January and 100 days has more of a ring to it I thought I’d round it up to the nearest hundred.

So what to make of the first 100 days of Autonomy iManage?

Let’s start with the Autonomy side of things. I can sum up my initial impressions with one simple statement “they are one hell of a marketing machine”. If they were on “The Apprentice” they’d walk it, Sir Alan loves a seller.

If you look behind the marketing sheen you see the one product seems to underpin everything, the IDOL search engine. Before I had any dealings with Autonomy I had heard about IDOL and that it was a very good product, but you really needed to work with it to get it to do what you wanted.

As most Interwoven customers will know the IDOL engine was “rapidly” introduced into WorkSite, IUS and TeamSite. I use quotes as this is technically true, but having seen it in WorkSite it isn’t a simple fit for the customer. The reason for this is because IDOL is very much a product in it’s own right. WorkSite and IDOL are “loosely coupled”. The IDOL engine itself has multiple components and configuration requirements (the licence key itself is complex, tied to a mac address!). This is far from the original verity indexer that was pretty straight forward (and Vivisimo Velocity engine that was very briefly available).

Don’t get me wrong, the product works, but what was once a DMS (Document Management System) with a simple indexer component is now very much a DMS and full blown search engine to manage.

This is not unique to Interwoven’s products. Although I can’t comment myself on the Zantaz 6.1 release with IDOL, I found a comment on it elsewhere that has similar sentiments for this product:

I have it in my demo environment and running for one customer already. It kicks AltaVista’s butt – but it is a bitch to get up and running.

And where as the technical team were out of the blocks like Usain Bolt, the training teams seem to have made a 100m start like, well like me! And because of this it is where I see some short term difficulties. The initial training sessions have been web based and frankly weak and there are only just starting to be UK classroom courses being scheduled (these are specific IDOL courses too, where are the integrated WorkSite/IDOL courses?).

And IDOL will need training, in fact I think that there will be a need for an “IDOL DBA” type function in most law firms (after all WorkSite, IUS and Zantaz are all IDOL powered now).

I forget what the general release target for 8.5 was, but I am sure it was summer ‘09. If that is still the case, then there are going to be a lot of UK customers in a bottle neck waiting to get IDOL trained. If I’m being harsh I would say the promise made at the last user group that the UK team would be ready to support the 8.5 IDOL release sounds a little hollow.

And what about support? Well two things stick out. First there seems to be some re-organisation or upheaval going on, whether it’s support being aligned in Cambridge or something else I don’t know. Nothing has been confirmed and I haven’t heard anything from Autonomy iManage, this is just a feeling I get. The second thing is there still needs to be a lot of knowledge transfer, it seems that old Interwoven people don’t understand IDOL fully yet and Autonomy people don’t understand the WorkSite product.

However these are early days and it shouldn’t detract from the fact the IDOL is a very good product! And most importantly it works with large volumes of data, which is good news for the biglaw firms and for the goals of WorkSite 9.0 (which one of the objectives I seem to remember was 50m+ document libraries).

It’s far from negative. It’s just that I feel a little like I did listening to Tony Blair at the moment, the Autonomy marketing machine is in full swing, but behind the marketing sheen things aren’t quite what they seem, yet.

But as I’ve said IDOL works and it seems very scalable. And from what I’ve seen so far of Autonomy engineers, they are a very capable technical team and if they can marry this with the iManage team in Chicago then we could have product that will continue to improve rapidly. Once the training and support teams catch up then legal has a great suite of products to utilise underpinned by one enterprise search engine.

Unfortunately I just see a H2 2009 that may frustrate customers keen to exploit some of the great features in 8.5. So the next 100 days will be the real test, can they get WorkSite 8.5 and IDOL IUS in the field with the training and support available? I could be wrong, the Autonomy iManage team could just have all their focus (technical, support and training) on getting everything set for 8.5 IDOL launch. We’ll see!

What are your thoughts so far?

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General Legal IT

Give them a free DMS!

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Whilst working this weekend we were discussing how some people used the firms DMS (Document Management System) or rather didn’t! One of the team mentioned that

"they listen to the reasons for structured storage of electronic material, nod and then on returning to their desks revert to how they managed documents at law school”.

That is using a file share at best or the C: drive at worst. In fact I saw some fantastic Windows desktops this weekend, full of Word documents!

This led us to conclude that what Autonomy iManage and OpenText ought to do is give away copies of WorkSite and eDocs DM to law schools and Universities. So that when the lawyers join law firms they a) will have used a DMS before and b) understand how to manage an organised electronic file. It’ll then be much easier to adjust to working practices adopted by most law firms and also reduce the cost and burden of the law firms IT training teams.

So Autonomy/OpenText how about it? You never know these next wave of lawyers may also get into positions where they influence purchasing of software, meaning future sales too!

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