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?
A law blog written by someone from IT or an IT blog written by someone who works for a law firm
