Tag Archives: imanage

Document Management, Execute the Matter, Manage Matters

Back to Basics – “Your firm should have a system for managing files, including digital files. All your staff should be aware of this system”

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Remember when matter centricity was a big thing, or when maintaining a good paper file was king and getting e-filing going was hard? This used to be a focus in firms, we’d have workshops at conferences discussing the best electronic template for files, we’d talk about getting metadata detail on documents.

It doesn’t seem a thing anymore, I’d like to think that’s because everyone has it nailed. But I suspect it’s more a broken window scenario and that the deluge of email has let “just enough” creep in.

Anyway a conversation with a colleague recently on this very topic led to me being passed a link to PowerBI Connector for iManage which looks to be a really simple tool to create dashboards to monitor say who is filing and who isn’t. Anyone use this or have other examples of tools, please add to the comments.

But I guess my more fundamental question is; Is it time to get back to basics and start to re-instil those good filing habits. Or maybe to be a bit bold and see if the old documents and email file is still valid for the DMS or whether we need a more fundamental shift in what a file now consists of? Maybe as Matter Centricity was a thing in the early 2000’s that moved us from simple tagging, we need a new shift to a more collaborative multi message approach to the file?

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General Legal IT, Mobility, Office365

Back from ConnectLive 2018 with some thoughts on the two days

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So yesterday I got back from ConnectLive 2018. The iManage event for their customers. Held again this year just across for the Millennium Dome…sorry O2 arena. The event consists of two days packed full of sessions that suit the engineer through to the CIO and many roles in between, whether in IT or other functions, within law firms or corporates. The day is geared around iManage’s suite of products as you’d expect. It kicks off with keynotes from the senior team before breaking into four tracks that run through the day, there is also a full vendor hall for partners.

 

Thankfully unlike last years ConnectLive event on June 27th 2017, this one was relatively uneventful for me 🙂

So what were my personal thoughts on key things to look for?

  1. The RAVN indexer. Not the most exciting thing on the face of it. But there are a couple of things that I really liked. First off the architecture, it’s old school iManage, simple, well thought out components (not like IDOL, though shall I publish that blog post on initial thoughts of IDOL now from the early days of the Autonomy merger?). It’s also been designed to scale. But overall seems it will require less hardware and storage than IDOL. Second and more important it will fulfil a promise that I was looking for at the time of the Autonomy/Interwoven merger that never materialised, this being one index to fulfil many solutions, so once you’ve indexed your DMS you can use this index to get all the good stuff from Extract , Insight and the excellent idea that is Classification (using machine learning to auto classify/profile those documents!). No need for an index for this, another one (of the same document set!) for something else.
  2. New cloud. Sorry I’m not sure what the actual name for this is, but it’s the new architecture that is designed from the ground up for the cloud. It uses all the latest tech that is used to scale all those platforms that are MUCH bigger than any law firm data set, twitter and the like. Rafiq’s keynote on the tech on the second day was one for the tech geeks, great! Be good to see this platform in the wild.
  3. Security Policy Manager. Now this product has been around for a while, but it was a couple of things on the horizon that made me think that this is becoming more than a replacement for “the other product”. First off was the ability to use it to manage policies of other legal products, for example the policies for Workshare Protect, very interesting concept and could be great to reduce admin in stretched IT depts. Second was talk of DLP (data loss prevention) and DRM (digital rights management), imagine one place to manage the rights to client/matter information that then manages where that data can go and if it goes outside the perimeter it can be managed and controlled or blocked! This could be really exciting and the DRM aspect is one I’ve suggested before.

There were a couple of other areas that I need to think on a bit more:

  1. Go drive. This is a product I think I can buy into, but think I would want to use it myself for a bit and maybe try it with a few lawyers first. There are a few parts to mention.
    1. First there is the functionality that is essentially like OneDrive is for cloud files on Windows 10 but looking after the documents from your DMS (wherever that is). I can see plenty of use cases for this.
    2. Then there is the tech underneath to manage the file transfer better that allows for improved experience over links with high latency. Again can get this.
    3. Lastly is the ability to display the DMS in file explorer, now this I can sort of see but think I would need to use a bit I think to make a final view.
  2. Auto update feature. I get this, it’s the move Microsoft and others are making to ensure we’re all on the latest versions. But with MS we’re using their tooling to manage all of the updates in the new Windows 10 Office and 365 evergreen world, another set of tooling to manage the iManage updates? Will it scale to organisations with thousands of machines to update from Seattle to Brisbane? Need to look some more at this.

Overall another great conference, one that other large legal vendors should do in Europe. In fact it’s a great template for other legal events which for me are aimed more at the manager. ConnectLive is a bit more ILTA that caters for all and ends up being so much better for it!

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General Legal IT

Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple.

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I don’t like blogging about software that much, especially products I don’t use day in day out. In a small field like legal I don’t like to criticise companies online and so I tend to stick to the saying our mothers taught us “if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all”. However I got a demo of Bundledocs the other week and thought it worth a mention, mainly because it ticks a box I’ve blogged about previously. Simplicity. (see here and here and here)

The product demo took about 10 minutes, simply because the product does it’s one job easily. It’s designed to create document bundles or binders and the interface is designed to do just that. Upload your documents, adjust the order, group them how you want, redact any text you don’t want in the final bundle and that’s it. Then as it’s cloud based just fire off a link to who needs a copy (which also allows collaboration on the creation if you want).

There’s also DMS (document management system) integration to give law firms direct links to where the documents are, I saw the iManage integration but I notice on the site there is netdocuments too.

Even the pricing was simple, no complicated per user or enterprise size model.

This isn’t a recommendation, take a look yourself over at bundledocs.com where you can try it out for 30 days. I know of others in the legal industry that think Nikec’s product in this space looks really good too. This post was more about the simplicity of this software. Something I really admire in products.

My only worry is the comment on there website “Bundledocs is continually adding new features and enhancements”. A small plea, don’t overcomplicate it please.

 

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General Legal IT

Should we just take email out of our Document Management Systems?

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So here’s my question. Is the Document Management system still the best place to store your emails?

This is a topic I’ve pondered for a few years, pretty much since the time email became about 80% of our DMS (document management systems) repositories. In a perfect world the inbox would be free of the client and matter related material in a law firm, in reality for a whole host of reasons it isn’t and so we duplicate storage and more.

This past week the following update from Microsoft and their Groups product (is it a product or a concept?) triggered me to think about this again.

Now within Groups you can drag messages from your personal mailbox to the group mailbox, so if you had a group created for each matter that got spun up for the matter team, then within core Microsoft technologies (Outlook and Exchange) you could drag and drop and have that email available to the whole team. In Outlook on the desktop, on the web and on mobiles. No addins, no plugins, nothing.

So because of this I ask myself again, isn’t using this better than putting in another system? Just keep the DMS for documents?

The other option of course is that the Group mailbox is transferred to the DMS as a whole on completion, meaning the day to day access can stay in the core Microsoft architecture. Then at the end the matter file is complete and in one place for future searching requirements.

Either way though, the take up of Office 365 (Exchange) is coming I’m sure. We see firms moving already and Microsoft engaged directly on this very topic with a large number of firms. We need to start to think about how the DMS vendor cloud architectures work with the Microsoft cloud world in a way that goes beyond replicating the way its worked on premise don’t we?

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General Legal IT

Yes sorry it’s another AI (and Uber) post – but also Ravn and iManage!

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Honestly this isn’t Legal AI click bait! But on the back of the big news in Legal IT recently (the news regarding Ravn and iManage, not the Tikit and NetDocuments news yesterday) it reminded me of this interesting post on Uber’s use of AI I caught in the tech press.

This was the article, Uber using AI to adjust prices according to the rider. It caught my eye as I am always intrigued by Ubers continued use of technology. Whether it’s pushing the envelope with the AppStore to try and fingerprint itself to track reset devices or use of specific apps to detect and avoid city agencies sting operations with the tool called greyball, their innovative use of tech (if not their moral use of it) is fascinating.

The AI article though got me thinking, is this a use of AI that law firms could utilise? On the face of it it looks a little bit dishonest or a recipe to annoy your clients even more, but factor in some specifics like acceptance of risk the client is likely to take, speed over quality or vice versa, whether they are a key client, a loyal client or a one off engagement, or a client in a market you want to break into, their location (ie for global firms in jurisdictions where the average local rate is much lower than the firms average global rate) etc etc and you could start to get an interesting model that is consistent to the client and tuned to their need, but also financially beneficial to the law firm. Of course as @jordan_law21 put it on twitter, “You can have a flat fee, or you can see our dockets, but not both. Build client trust and they won’t ask for the latter”. As with fixed fees you would need to be up front with the client that this “tailored rate” was in play but they would get the best value using it!

Like I say I’m not sure it would fly, but for innovation to flourish in law firms we need to have a few wild ideas, poke them a bit and be willing to bin them if they just won’t fly.

For those that missed it, this was the Ravn/iManage news that came out of ConnectLive17.

“that iManage, the leading provider of Work Product Management solutions, today announced that it will revolutionise the way companies find, extract and act on key information from documents and emails through its acquisition of RAVN Systems, whom as you know are leading experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Search” – press release here.

If you’re a customer of either it’s got to be exciting or at the very least interesting news. The possibilities of all that core law firm data in your document stores combined with Cognitive Search and AI are numerous. It also makes the introduction of AI solutions more about what you’re trying to do than about the technology complexity of getting all that volume of information through yet another system.

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General Legal IT

Tikit signs new partnership deal with NetDocuments

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I don’t usually blog about press releases but the news today from Tikit is worth a post. It’s been quite a year in the document management world (looking back at my last few posts, there are a higher proportion of DM posts than anything else), and today Tikit announce  they have signed a global partnership agreement with NetDocuments.

From a purely commercial sense as a reseller it seems an obvious move, there are likely to be more new installations for NetDocuments, simply because most folks have already got iManage and if you’re moving the only alternative is ND. I suspect resellers make more from new sales than ongoing support costs. Also there are many competitors in the iManage reseller, services and support space and not so much in the ND space, so first to a new market and all that.

Does it change anything for iManage customers? Probably not. But it offers a bit of validation that ND has moved into the space of #1 challenger in the DM space. As the world moves to a SaaS/cloud/hosted model it will be good to have two companies vying for business to accelerate development.

For Tikit it gives comfort that they are still  pushing in legal, though when I heard rumours of a press release this morning my initial hope was to follow iManage’s lead and an MBO from BT 🙂

A few lines from the Tikit release:

This new partnership, which makes Tikit the first Global Premier Partner for NetDocuments, is a continuation of our strategy of offering choice to the market and offering customers the best of emerging technologies from existing and new partners across the world.

Our product roadmaps will remain the same, but integration with NetDocuments will shortly be available for our products, TMS and eMS. As always, we will continue to invest in our own products, making sure they are kept up-to-date, to deliver what our clients and the market wants and needs.

 

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General Legal IT

Well it’s back! iManage Gear Up returns with a new moniker ConnectLive!

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London

Through the dark days of Autonomy and HP, iManage blew away the cobwebs and returned with a new version of the old “Gear Up” user conference, titled ConnectLive 2016. To celebrate it’s return a rather unique post , dual authored with Mubashir Mian. First my view of the conference through a view of day one and Mubashir will cover his view through day two.

Day One – author Jason Plant

Keynote

Things kicked off at the Park Plaza Riverbank London with the usual keynote address, giving a chance for some old faces (Dan Carmel, Neil Araujo, Mohit Mutreja, Rafiq Mohammadi) and some new faces (Dean Leung the new Chief customer success officer) to run us through the rebirth of iManage and what it means for customers. It does feel like someone at the top of the new iManage issued a “The Internet Tidal Wave” style memo to the firm, that famous call to action that Bill Gates sent round Microsoft in 1995, the one that refocused the software giant back on the right path.

There were three key things that came across to me at the keynote: 1) They understand the “new professional” in law firms and their requirements, 2) they understand the desire for firms to use the data from their DMS’s for other purposes and 3) they realise quality and customer service was lacking in the dark days of Autonomy and HP and are actively doing things to improve this.

To highlight point one, there was a video that was shown during the keynote that for me summed up the vision for iManage products and how they see them enabled the new professional, better still gave a timeline for this to happen. If there is anyone from iManage that reads this, can you point me at a direct YouTube or Vimeo link so I can link it here?

Edit: Thanks to iManage here is the link : http://go.imanage.com/2016-New-Professional.html

And on point two there were some nice demos of the analytics work iManage Labs are doing, for example, using the data in the DMS to look at threat analytics using machine learning. A nice concept to identify rogue behaviour that is more intelligent than simple thresholds. There were also demo’s of the compass UI that uses analytics to show you info around documents, emails, matters, people, relationships etc. Given the number of documents and vast amount of meta data in our DMS (Document Management System) it will be interesting to see how these concepts develop to leverage value from that data.

Sessions

At this point in the day I got hijacked by Dan to record some customer thoughts on the key concepts iManage brought up in the keynote. It was a glimpse into the life of television and endless takes, I’m sure I answered one question five times and really got sick of hearing “just try that one again”.

I did then get to a number of the sessions, but I’ll highlight a couple:

iManage Share

I saw what was LinkSite quite some time ago and the current incarnation is still very similar to early days, just more polished. The view that you get from within the worksite application (sorry iManage Work) is really slick and has a great UI and UX. And although the client view is nice, with a slick interface now using “html5 type” functionality, like drag and drop files to the website for me I can’t get past the feeling that it’s still another interface for the client if already using a deal room (e.g. HighQ)

But within worksite the UX back and forth is really very slick, very few clicks to do stuff. Audit trails kept etc. Integration into outlook so if attachments go above limits it suggest replacing attachments with smart links (however if you’ve got Workshare too this could mean a pop up for send and file with WorkSite EMM, another for meta data stripping from Workshare and then one for smart links!!). Again with attention to detail they’ve thought through a few of the client access requirements too, so the login requirements are minimised.

On the roadmap are SAML SSO compliance (H2 2016), responsive interface (H2 2016), BYO key for encryption (H2 2016) and in 2017 video, comparison and enhanced collaboration.

iManage Cloud

I posted a tweet during this session that sums up my thoughts, I don’t need to say who the other cloud is in the Legal DMS world is do I?

The iManage solution is more a “hosted” solution in my opinion, it’s the iManage stack that you know but built, managed and looked after by iManage in their datacentres. The benefit is that moving to it really is as simple as a DNS change from the address of your servers to theirs (once the data migration is done of course!). There was lots of information in the session on the hardware that will support this, that the implementation is yours and not shared, on the security aspects and on the locations they’re building out in the US, Europe and AsiaPac. It’s a different proposition to the competition, thus my tweet, and it will be interesting to see which get’s traction as I’m sure “cloud” will become more and more a part of legal.

Summing up day one

One of the most surreal things about the new iManage is the number of old faces that are back, and it was great to see so many of them over in Europe (Aaron Rangel, Tim Hurren, Melody Easton) along with those folks who stayed through the HP days but rarely got to these shores (Chris Rubert, John Fenley, Garth Hermanson) and of course Geoff who’s been with us all this side of the pond through the whole journey. A great opportunity to catch up with these folks.

Overall I thought the day was a great start to a two day conference, I only could attend one day though and as such the day felt a bit rushed. The keynote didn’t kick off until 11am and then the sessions were pretty much back to back until the day concluded. If I could offer a suggestion it would be to start the day earlier and have more gaps to network and chat to vendors. The end of day drinks are a great time to catch up and the time between these and the dinner was just about right.

 

Day Two – author Mubashir Mian

To echo Jason’s comments, there was a great vibe throughout the event, an energy and enthusiasm from the iManage folks that hasn’t been seen in a while. A distinct and memorable theme was iManage viewing their different types of users as personas. A “new professional” is someone on the move, accessing and sharing content across smart devices and remote working options; “classic users” requiring performant, stable software on their day-to-day workstations to carry out the bulk of the work. It’s a pretty good idea and although I’m not sure it is as neat as that in a law firm, the definition is well enough to work around requirements for both camps.

I talked to a number of iManage team members at the event, each keen to share the developments in their respective areas – management, mobility, support, server, consulting. Everyone displayed great passion in what they do and were full of optimism for the future. A cynic might say the post-MBO high is still at work, but to counter, there have been major milestones delivered – White Rabbit, 9.3 and there’s strong strategic planning across all the components which are complementing each other harmoniously.

Just a quick follow on from the first day sessions, Mohit did an in-depth technical session on Work Communications server. Personally, I’ve been closely involved with the product since the beginning (see here and here) and have gone through its many iterations and faults. The strong message given was think about upgrading to 9.3, or at least 9.2.2. There is a lot of work gone into these later releases and even though due to the ever-evolving nature of Work-Outlook-Exchange it’s always been “work in progress”, the latest version is robust and can handle many different scenarios around delegate filing & sent item filing (every Work techie’s nightmare) and Mailbox Sync. I’ve resisted Mailbox Sync so far and speaking to my peers they have similar concerns about it’s impact on Exchange but the new “event driven filing”, which will come in 9.4 sounds interesting and will work with Exchange on a lighter footprint.

Moving on to the second day, Nancy had an interesting session on Office365 covering amongst other topics, co-authoring in Word. Admittedly, I’m not sure how much uptake there is for co-authoring over here, but as Office365 and Office 2016 deployments are taken up within the enterprise, this will become more common. Working with Exchange online and Work’s use on the iPhone and Mobility were delivered in some detail.

Something you hear with the new iManage is a recurring message of “we should be doing this already”, a tangible example of which is the introduction of Control Centre. This is designed to update the admin tools that have been around for years and are woefully out of date. The team were clear to convey their direction – that the Work product software should come with its own ability and tools to administer the software. There was talk amongst peers of an inevitable clash with partner products, however I don’t see it this way. The products that are widely used in the customer base have been around for some time and have matured to what they are today. iManage seems like they’ll focus on rebuilding the core and so there will always be a market for supplementary third-party products.

A regular feature in iManage events is a Feedback from the Field session, where the support teams relay back what common issues they’ve seen and what the latest patches & software builds are recommended if you are looking to upgrade today. It’s almost always run by Chris Rubert, this time joined by John Fenley and its still invaluable now as in the past – this session itself makes it worthwhile attending an iManage event. One thing I did relay was that even though it disseminates excellent knowledge, it never quite finds it’s way back into the iManage websites where you can find it again. A tip I found that works for me is before looking at a version upgrade, find the slides from the last known event, an ITLA or a user group and use the recommended release versions from there. Hopefully this will be taken on board and using the (now excellent) Help Site, this dynamic information can be found quickly.

The team are involved in generating a lot of content and knowledge which will be hosted in the Help Centre. Personally I’m a big fan of the podcasts, I find them an easy way into a topic that is new (the iPhone app, for example) rather than picking up and reading the huge manual. A really interesting feature that’s coming is to expose the NT lifecycle on the Help Centre, meaning when a problem is reported by another client, iManage will make it visible at the earliest possible point whilst working to apply live updates on when the problem will be resolved. If I had a pound for every time I reported a bug and got given an existing NT number…

There was ample time to network with partners and colleagues from other firms and overall, it was a superb event. Clearly a lot of effort & dedication by Geoff, Melody and the rest of the UK team and great engagement from Dan, Neil, Mohit and the exec team.

Mubashir Mian is the Senior Applications Specialist at a major City law firm. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here.

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General Legal IT, Mobility, Office365

Technology for the future lawyer

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To kick off 2016 (where have the first three months gone!!) I thought I’d put up a post based on my recent talk at the British Legal Technology Forum in London. The talk was titled as this post and looked at some of the key challenges Legal IT have for the core technology lawyers use in their day to day work.

I started by using consumer technology to show how a simple tool can become really complicated.

Old style simple TV of the Eighties! Multiple TV channels, Multiple platforms

We started with a simple concept of a handful of TV channels.

Then we introduced digital television through satellite and multi-channel offerings, which was great initially as we had choice. But then came the competing sports channels, meaning if I want to watch all football competitions, the cricket and the boxing I needed to pay for multiple extra channel packages.

Then came the multiple delivery platforms, so I no longer can watch everything with just Sky I need Sky, Netflix, Amazon etc.

So before you knew it something simple had become a complex range of services and channel packages to watch all the TV you wanted. Posing the question:

So are we better off?

If we then play through a similar story in Legal IT we see the same complexities.

Whether it’s the choice of mobile device, do I go iPhone or Blackberry? The choice of device to work on, is the future Surface type hybrid devices or iPad Pros? Then even in the software delivery things get complicated, so do I download Outlook from the Appstore or use the desktop app or maybe I use the web app?

It’s enough to drive a lawyer mad!

Stress. Woman stressed is going crazy pulling her hair in frustration. Close-up of young businesswoman on white.

So what does the future hold?

In the talk I took a journey through the key areas for a lawyer to see how things could become simpler. How do we go from the existing, at times still very Windows XP type world, to a simpler future?

Documents

Documents are key to a lawyer and in this space Microsoft are already moving into a much simpler Office model with Office365. The ability to edit documents on different devices or on the web. Bringing mobility and allowing you access, through OneDrive, to your documents wherever you are. And the big DMS (Document Management System) providers get this, talking to the new HP  free iManage you get the feeling they understand this new world and have real plans for the direction Microsoft are going. In the shorter term they are already releasing versions of their mobility app on iOS that allows easy editing within mobile versions of Office.

NetDocuments are also aware of this and have plans for 365, they’re also in the cloud already so document access anywhere is easy.

Finally I touched on some discussions I’d had with Microsoft and their move to look at allowing document mark up using their pen technology that they have with the Surface. Imagine being able to mark up the documents with a pen and then manage them inside the .docx using track changes/comments in document review.

Finance

Here I briefly talked about the IntApp/Rekoop merger and the indication that there is a real understanding of the mobile news of lawyers, moving their technology very much into the cloud and mobile space.

Communications

Finally I talked about communications and how in the consumer world it’s simple enough for grandparents to set up and use video calls, but that also we need to be aware that there is a new wave of people entering the workplace where using a phone to talk is quite alien! A lot of law firms are using Skype for Business, some enlightened ones are actually replacing handsets off desks and really making calls and IM truly mobile.

Skyping the Grandparents

What do you mean talk?

 

The final section of the talk took a look at mobility, looking at the different ways two software giants are taking. Focusing on mobile as the device or looking more at the mobile person.

The mobile lawyer

Citrix

The Citrix strategy seems more about making your desktop or your application available on many devices, so in the talk I showed the concept of running your firms desktop on an iPhone or iPad using Citrix Receiver (and XenApp or XenDesktop in your datacentre). I also showed a cool device that Citrix have launched called the X1 Mouse, this talks to Citrix Receiver on the iOS device and allows you to use a mouse with an iPad! So when paired with a Bluetooth keyboard aswell gives a very mobile desktop experience.

Citrix Receiver and the X1 mouse in action 1Citrix Receiver and the X1 mouse in action 2

Citrix Receiver and the X1 mouse in action 3Citrix Receiver and the X1 mouse in action 4

 

Microsoft

Then I looked at Microsoft’s strategy, which is more about developing the apps as universal apps. This allows them to run on any device size, but change the behaviour based on that size. It also has the advantage of not needing a large datacentre implementations to facilitate it. Plug it into a full screen and it just works like a desktop app. So as you can see from the images below you plug the phone into a dock (which has USB ports for peripherals, e.g. mouse and keyboard but also USB drives etc) and it behaves like a Windows 10 desktop with start menu etc. Clearly Windows Phone (or Windows 10 Mobile) hasn’t a huge market share, but I think Microsoft’s play is to bring in a new kind of smaller computing device to work on rather than go after a smartphone consumer. It is a concept much as the first Surface RT was, one that will iterate a couple of times until we all go “Oh Yeah, now I get it!”

Microsoft continuum in action 1Microsoft continuum in action 2

Microsoft continuum in action 3Microsoft continuum in action 4

 

I finished off summarising things by saying what lawyers really want for their future world are two simple things:

  1. Get the basis right – make the documents, finance, communications apps quick, simple and easy to use without all the complexity.
  2. Mobility – prepare for a world that makes it possible for a lawyer to do their work wherever they are on whatever they want. This is the mobile lawyer, not the mobile phone.

I did have a few slides at the end on Artificial Intelligence, but this was really as it was mentioned in my early synopsis and I needed to at least touch on why I hadn’t covered it in detail!

You can listen to the talk in full and see a copy of the slides to follow on the British Legal Technology Forum website.

https://youtu.be/EqOMEfhszuI?t=1m6s

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General Legal IT

The future of document management?

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I’ve been reading a bit on Office 2016 this week and getting interested around their real time collaboration on documents using any device, true mobility (meaning ubiquity not device type). The challenge for legal here is the DMS (document management system), how does this fit into the picture?

It feels we’re on the cusp of change here, like the shift in DMS when Windows 95 and Word came online, out went stand alone DMS desktop apps and in came integrated Open, Save etc within Word. What we need now is a DMS that is fully aware of Microsoft’s emerging ecosystem to allow us to take full advantage of the new features of Office 2016. Ignoring Windows 8 and, to a large extent, Office 2013 (by ignore I mean taking advantage of the new systems rather than compatibility) was fine, most law firms skipped these, but Windows 10 and Office 2016/365 I think will be different.

You get the feeling this is no longer just about access on mobile devices, but something more fundamental. It’s ubiquity of access to what you want to do. Working wherever, whenever, on whatever. I’m sure for law firms Microsoft Office will still remain the core to this, as will the need for industry strength robust DMS’s. But the the next generation DMS needs to swim faster with the Microsoft Office tide in true document mobility rather than just constrain itself to addressing iPad access and being in the cloud.

Maintaining a good electronic file in the DMS is key but it can not afford to be at the expense of efficiency in creation of what is part of the core business, the legal document.

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General Legal IT

The HP and Autonomy era is gone! iManage leadership completes buyout.

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Well this morning sees the official announcement that the iManage leadership team has completed a buyout from Hewlett-Packard (HP). I’m not going to post comment yet, I’ll let the dust settle a few days before that. But here are some links to read what’s currently being said:

From the Legal IT Insider : “The Boys Are Back In Town as Team iManage complete management buyout from HP”

From Legal IT Professionals : “iManage Leadership Completes Buyout of Business Unit from HP”

The brand new iManage website press release : “iManage Leadership Announces Buyout from HP”

From Phoenix’s website : “Phoenix congratulates iManage”

Post from Neil Araujo on the iManage site : “Who is iManage Today?” and on LinkedIn Pulse “Who is iManage Today?”

Post from Kraft Kennedy : “iManage Splits from HP, Becomes Independent Company”

From Forrester : “The Rebirth of iManage: A New Company With A Familiar Name Re-enters The ECM Market”

From Ascertus : “iManage buy-out great news for the market”

Nothing from Tikit as yet?

I’ll update this page through the day with new articles, so if you’ve got any comment or posts that’s not just the press release please point them out to me on twitter @planty

 

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