Thursday 26th September saw the launch of version 6 of Tikit TMS at BT Tower, the iconic building of Tikit’s new parent company. I last saw this product when I was presenting at the Tikit Word Excellence Day back in 2011 and it’s come on a long way since then!
The key ambitions of the TMS development team were that:
- It would require “no code”
- It would separate the developer and template creator
- Use native Word functionality
The first bullet was stressed a number of times during the presentations, a move that certainly will be welcomed in a lot of law firms as it will allow the end to end development of templates to be moved away from developers to the Word experts. Yet still maintain control of the firms templates and enable the sometimes complex functionality demanded.
Mark Garnish kicked things off and explained some of the key features and desires for version 6 in his intro.
- An aim to reduce deployment time
- No custom code (there’s the no code again!)
- Native support for any language – Unicode
- Two-way sync with any SQL database
- Compatible with any DMS
- Built in integration with carpe diem
- Uses windows workflow
- Use native office functionality
Clare Waller then took us through a demo of template creation and it was pretty impressive. Once things have been set up in the Tikit Template Manager they are available to built a template in Word through either drag and drop from the right hand pane or selecting from the ribbon. It’s hard to summarise all it can do without a demo, but some of the workflows you are able to set up verge on a simple document automation tool.
Nathan Lusher then delved a bit deeper into some of the workflows a developer could set up for a template creator. The key being that once they are set up once they can be reused by the creators. Using the built in data-links and form designer, together with some simple SQL a simple but effective “update person details” form was created that pulled and then updated details in a database. To finish off some of the actions were shown that could be integrated into the workflows. A simple integration with carpe diem was demoed, so once you closed a template it would fire an action to prompt the lawyer to record time directly into carpe diem.
I had a few questions that I had noted at this point, these though were answered either in Mark’s summing up or during other peoples questions:
- How does it deal with Styles? A: Tikit’s restyler will be standard in future versions
- How does it manage remote offices or offline? A: it uses a local SQL database to manage the templates
- Can it use loosely coupled data sources, say a web service? A: coming in future versions
The product has been built from the ground up and so to move from v5.5 to this version is to start from scratch. This though is a good thing as legacy code and support for legacy office products can be left behind, also the version is no charge to those currently on previous versions (presumably paying maintenance still!).
