Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. provides technology and strategic consulting services to law firms, corporate legal departments and financial services firms. We can help you analyze, plan, implement and manage business and technology solutions to optimize your organization's functionality and processes.
| Brian Podolsky is a Senior Consultant in the New York office of Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. Brian joined Kraft Kennedy in 2004 after graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology with a B.E. degree in Computer Engineering. Brian drives Kraft Kennedy’s research on the latest ECM technologies and helps provide guidance and best practices for ECM implementations. He can be reached at podolsky@kraftkennedy.com. |
Security is always a concern in a law firm, and is especially important in the legal department of a corporation. Lawsuits sometimes include the company’s co-workers, competitors, or other sensitive information, where certain matter information needs to be completely hidden from all but a few matter assignees. Securing documents or DMS folders is often simply not enough protection.
Does the system hide the matter from appearing when doing a table look-up on a search form? Does it hide the matter when accessing the matter table via the DMS web module? For some cases, you want to hide the actual matter itself, so users won’t even know it exists.
Continue reading…
I recently performed an upgrade from iManage 8.2 to iManage 8.5 Update 4. Update 4 was released on January 14th and resolves several issues regarding service stability and wildcard searching. It adds support for the new WorkSite FileShare, iManage Workflow Manager, and iManage Digital Safe. I plan on blogging about these modules soon, so keep an eye out for that.
But the real reason for this post is that Update 4 sets the database schema version as 8.51 (all previous releases of 8.5 had set the schema version as 8.50). This value is listed as the MHVERNUM column in the MHGROUP.VERINFO table of the WorkSite database. For those of you looking to migrate from an environment with WorkSite Indexer 8.2 SP1 P2 (Verity), there is a compatibility problem with this change. Although Indexer 8.2 SP1 P2 was released in order to support iManage 8.5 servers for a transitional period, the 8.2 Indexer services fail to start when the database has been upgraded to the 8.5 Update 4 schema. Autonomy’s workaround for now is to modify the MHVERNUM value and set it to 8.50. This can be done by executing the following SQL query:
Continue reading…
A couple weeks ago I blogged about the XML patent infringement that Microsoft had to deal with. As mentioned in that post, they’ve released new code that removes some of the custom XML functionality that was built into the Office 2007 system, and brings them into patent compliance.
We’ve just heard that there is at least one vendor whose product is now basically non-functional due to the code change. This sort of problem can result in products needing to be completely re-engineered to work with the new XML limitations.
Organizations who have already implemented or are looking to implement Office 2007 should reach out to any third-party vendor who would be integrating with the Office 2007 XML format to determine compatibility with the new rules. In addition, any custom code that has already been written would need to be tested and possibly re-written if any issues come up.
Kraft Kennedy has worked with numerous third-party vendors that integrate with Office 2007. If you find yourself in a tough spot due to this issue, let us know and we can help walk you through the process of finding the right solution.
As you may have read, a judge recently upheld a court ruling which bans Microsoft from selling Word 2007 after January 11, 2010, due an XML patent infringement. That was yesterday.
Today, Microsoft announced that they have released a patch which corrects the patent infringement, bringing the Office 2007 code under compliance:
The 2007 Microsoft Office OPK Master Kit Download, available on Microsoft’s OEM Partner Center, strips Word and other Office programs of custom XML editing capabilities.
“The following patch is required for the United States,” Microsoft said in a message on the site.
The 2007 Microsoft Office OPK Master Kit Download (12.9 MB) can be found at the Microsoft OEM Partner Center. The site also says:
After this patch is installed, Word will no longer read the Custom XML elements contained within DOCX, DOCM, or XML files. These files will continue to open, but any Custom XML elements will be removed. The ability to handle custom XML markup is typically used in association with automated server based processing of Word documents. Custom XML is not typically used by most end users of Word.
Pretty quick turnaround, but I have a feeling they were working on this for a while…
One of the most overlooked pieces of technology in law firms is PDF creation. Yet it’s also one of the most important to an end user. It needs to be simple, stable, and usually needs to integrate well with a DMS system.
With iManage, you have three main choices. Do you A) use the built-in “Convert to PDF/Send as PDF” utility function, B) find a third-party tool with full integration, or C) use the native Save As PDF option available in the Word 2007 Office Button.
One of the most anticipated new features of Microsoft’s upcoming Office 2010 release is the ability to perform simultaneous editing on documents – in other words, allowing two authors to work on a document at the same time. Those of you who have used Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 are already familiar with the concept. A OneNote 2007 file can be placed onto a network share, and multiple people can access the live version. I’ve personally found OneNote’s co-authoring functionality an extremely valuable tool for note-taking during a group meeting or brainstorming business ideas.
Office 2010 brings this concept to Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. For a preview of the look and feel, check out this Microsoft Office Word Team Blog post.
However, in the legal industry, the transition to allow simultaneous editing is not as simple as you may think. Even after leading DMS products such as Open Text eDOCS DM, Autonomy iManage, or Worldox announce their compatibility with the Office 2010 platform, companies and firms won’t be able to just upgrade to 2010 and start editing documents simultaneously. These systems are built on the idea of one person accessing a live document at a time — check it out of the system, work on it, check it back in. So let’s assume developers did re-write their code. Even that wouldn’t be enough for this functionality to work. According to what we’ve heard from Microsoft, the simultaneous editing will likely require working in either a Microsoft-hosted cloud, or having SharePoint 2010 on the back-end. This doesn’t mean that a migration from a DMS product to SharePoint is necessary, but it could mean that the DMS vendors would have to support a SharePoint document repository. Open Text has already hinted that their releases in latter half of 2010 may support this.
As an aside, the whole idea of checking-out and checking-in documents has been ingrained into the minds of all attorneys, paralegals and administrative assistants for more than 20 years. It won’t be easy to shake, and it might not even be accepted in the legal vertical. Anyone know of any attorneys out there interested in this feature?
For those of you keeping up to date with your Open Text eDOCS DM environment, you may have experienced the following issue with version 5.2.1 CU3 (and possibly other versions). When using DM Extensions, the new Save User Interface built into DM 5.2 may take up to 20 seconds or longer to render, causing annoying delays when saving documents.
Open Text recently posted a simple resolution for this issue. From the Open Text Knowledge Base:
This issue can be resolved by moving two files on the client computer.
1. Navigate to the following folder:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Framework\root\Hummingbird\Extensions
2. Move the following two files from the above folder to a safe storage location; do not delete the files as they may be needed for future logging or troubleshooting purposes:
Hummingbird.DM.Extensions.Logging.Logger_SN__Version_5.2.1.0.cs
Hummingbird.DM.Extensions.Logging.Logger_SN__Version_5.2.1.0.mof3. Restart DM Extensions.
DM 5.2.1 CU4 was recently released, and this particular issue is not listed in the Fixed Issues documentation. We’ll see if a future update resolves the issue entirely, but the steps above can be a simple way to immediatley improve performance if you are seeing this behavior.
For customers and partners, the Open Text Knowledge Base and software downloads can be accessed here.
The legal industry has traditionally been conservative when adopting new OS and software versions. Law firms need to know that whatever solution they choose to implement has been tried and tested. This isn’t news to anyone. Let’s see a show of hands of law firm CIOs who have overseen successful deployments of Windows Vista. *crickets*. Yep, that’s pretty much what I figured.
The landscape has changed though with the release of Windows 7. There are a few reasons why Kraft Kennedy is advising our customers to deploy Windows 7 now:
For reasons similar to this, Kraft Kennedy is also advising our Worldox DMS customers to upgrade the latest version, GX2, when implementing the new Windows 7 desktop. GX2 is already supported on Windows 7, and like Windows 7, is using similar (but much improved) code to its previous version, Worldox GX. Kraft Kennedy has had betas running in it’s research lab, and now has the final released version running as well. The new features of GX2 were described in a previous blog post.
This week, Kraft Kennedy will be completing its first 64-bit Windows 7 deployment and Worldox GX2 rollout at a client site. Initial pilot and lab testing has been successful, and the performance of launching Microsoft Word 2007 on 64-bit Windows 7 is a sight to behold! Look for myself and other Kraft Kennedy bloggers to report on the success of this deployment in the coming weeks.
It’s time to start implementing the future today.
Reuters is reporting that there are talks that Microsoft is interested in making a bid for Autonomy. Both companies are not commenting about this yet, but apparently the market is excited about it and Autonomy’s stock enjoyed a boost.
What could this mean for the ECM market? It would be bigger than Open Text’s acquisition of Hummingbird in 2006, as both companies were solidly in the ECM space already. But this is different. Could Microsoft integrate Autonomy’s EDRM sprectrum with SharePoint, with everything indexed by IDOL? Could all of this functionality be built into an OS? When I sat in on an early peek at Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 earlier this year, I took note that Microsoft is actually starting to use the phrase “ECM” in their presentations. Maybe this was foreshadowing. We’ll have to see how this story ends.
(1)
(4)
(28)
(2)
(31)
(5)
2
Back to top
