Before Christmas I went along to the Interwoven UK conference and saw a sneak peak of WorkSite v8.5 which is due for release this year. As we weren’t asked to sign a non disclosure agreement I thought I’d jot down some high level notes on some of the proposed new features that I think are great reasons to look at this upgrade.

Enhanced offline ability : There are some great additions here to the OffSite product. Bringing in seamless on to offline switching, background sync, granular selection of content and a new architecture to improve performance.

In fact my only gripe is with the current licencing model for OffSite. Surely it should really now form part of the FileSite licence (as should Email Management), these are core to the product functioning as you’d expect.

Multibyte support: unfortunately not unicode yet, but it’s better than now. This is for the key description, comments etc fields.  (Limitation is the need to have the characters on the same codepages, so unfortunately if you’ve multiple offices whose native language falls on different codepages this may not be what you’re after).

Indexing: there is a start to leverage the new indexers introduced in 8.3. This includes full text indexing of workspaces (meta data and descriptions). I can see two benefits here; the first it removes some load off SQL which can only be a good thing and second they’re providing a Quick Workspace Search bar, and thus as the meta data is indexed it can find matters in a much more “Google like” way.

Email Management:  Server side filing! Anything that takes the load off the desktop is a good thing, should increase performance of large email drag and drops! There are plenty of enhancements to the email management (send and file) piece which should improve things no end. For example, suggestive filing based on filing history and delegated filing (great for secretaries or should that be for fee earners?)

From the latest email I received from Interwoven the release dates are as follows:

Limited Release
Phase I
Core Components with Limited Platform Certifications March 2009

Phase II
Web with Limited Platform Certifications May 2009 
 
General Availability
 
Phase III
Core Components with Additional Platform Certifications June 2009

Phase IV
Desktop & Web Language Releases August 2009

Phase V
Tools & Other Miscellaneous Components September 2009