One such topic that tends to come up is DMS consolidation.   Firms are able to work in a distributed environment, and nothing is “broken” in that setup.  But the experience can be enhanced.  Consolidation can provide a number of advantages including:

• One location for all firm-wide matter-related documents and email in an iManage MCC or eDOCS Dynamic View environment
• One location to manage retention policies for archiving
• Easier cross-office collaboration and searching
• Less backend infrastructure to maintain, such as middle tier servers, indexers, SQL databases, file shares

This sounds amazing, but remember that any DMS consolidation project requires a big backbone of non-DMS equipment and technology.  There’s the WAN connection bandwidth & latency, WAN acceleration devices, and redundant and highly available storage, database, and application server systems.   These foundations should be in place in order for a DMS consolidation project to stand on it’s own successfully.  Notice how we haven’t even started discussing the number of DMS servers, indexers, and the redundancy of those systems.

Beyond the infrastructure requirements, Firms can also be hesitant about consolidation for DMS-related reasons such as document number changes, document history preservation, long migration time-lines, and high consulting costs.   All of these concerns can be mitigated through our use of technology together.

Now is the time to start thinking about how your global Firm can collaborate and manage your enterprise content in a more efficient way.  The first step is ensuring your infrastructure can handle it.

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.

Vendors have been known to describe their products as having Ethical Walls, when in reality these products only provide security at the document or folder-level. The matter itself can still exposed on a look-up table.  One possible workaround to this is giving these secured matters a very general description of “Secure” without exposing any matter details.  However, this severely limits the ability of users to perform a matter-name search for the secured matters they are assigned to.

Worldox GX2 has a built-in Ethical Wall that is just what it says it is. Worldox’s Ethical Wall feature is solid and will actually hide the matter itself from even appearing. The only downside with the current version is that it requires a lot of hands-on maintenance to set up the proper rules. Maybe in a future release it can be synced to some external security database? A consultant can dream…

When looking at Ethical Wall solutions, you want to make sure that all doors are closed to the matter information. The last thing you want is to purchase an Ethical Wall and then find out it’s an Ethical Window.

The advantages of using SharePoint as a DMS are many:

• Being able to wrap an intranet or extranet around all of your content.
• Having basic matter management features available in every workspace, such as a shared calendar, task lists, and discussion threads.
• Having access to document workflows.
• Being able to search all of your repositories with Enterprise Search (available free with Microsoft Search Server Express.)
• Being able to integrate business intelligence dashboards.
• Providing access to web 2.0 features such as wikis, blogs, and personal sites.
• Leveraging native Word features, and not having to rely on vendors to update their software to support the latest version of Office.

The main way to ensure a successful SharePoint deployment as a DMS is with proper planning.  SharePoint can all too easily be deployed out of the box, with no oversight in place.  While this may work out ok for an intranet, it spells disaster for a DMS.  Thought should go initially into defining what content types are needed for the firm.  Content types are similar to document types in a DMS, and allow for the classification of documents by defining metadata, retention rules, associated workflows, and starter templates.  After defining content types, you would need to create a taxonomy, or hierarchy for all of your clients and matters.  One structure that works in WSS is to create a team site for each client, and then a document library for each matter.  We’ve successfully written scripts to create client and matter workspaces based on this approach, and to import documents from the file system into SharePoint.  When a user saves their own document into SharePoint, they would drill down the client site to the matter library, and then simply have to choose a content type associated with the document.

The thing that seems to scare people the most is something architectural rather than functional—the fact that SharePoint stores files in SQL blobs, rather than in the file system.  This causes fears that corrupt files will not be able to be recovered, or that disk costs will get expensive or lead to unmanageable databases.  However, we should remember that there are plenty of excellent third-party solutions for doing backups and restores of SharePoint at the individual file level, as well as native backups and restores in SharePoint.  Microsoft Exchange stores all of its messages in a database format, and no one has ever raised an eyebrow.  The backup and restore process in SharePoint ends up being quite similar to Exchange.  In fact, Exchange stores its data in the JET database engine, which is even less robust that SQL.  Microsoft has also certified their enterprise search engine to be able to index 50 million documents in a single SharePoint repository, and SharePoint can manipulate files in SQL faster than a traditional DMS can manipulate the files on a file system.  All in all, it is our belief that this architectural design of SharePoint should not be a contributing factor in determining whether or not SharePoint is viable.

There are also some additional differences to keep in mind if you’re used to a traditional DMS:

• Re-filing is more difficult in SharePoint.  Metadata will not automatically update if you move documents between different matter libraries, and you’ll need some additional user training or third-party software.
• Document permissions may be harder to keep track of.  It’s important for the administrator to correctly assign permissions at the site or library level, and for users to individually secure their documents if need be.
• Some features are only available in MOSS, the licensed version of SharePoint, such as document trail auditing.
• The user interface is completely different.  The firm will need to be open to working differently and retraining users.
• SharePoint does not natively number documents—it only creates a unique URL for each document.  We recommend an inexpensive tool from MacroView Wisdom for doing unique document numbering.  Also worth noting is that SharePoint 2010 is supposed to natively support unique document numbering.
• While SharePoint libraries can be viewed in Outlook, messages cannot be dragged into a SharePoint folder in Outlook.  We recommend another tool from MacroView Wisdom for email management in Outlook.  In addition, SharePoint Workspace 2010, which is a full desktop client for SharePoint, may alleviate some of this need in 2010.

As firms look for creative ways to cut costs, while maintaining functionality, it will be interesting to see if SharePoint gains momentum as a DMS in the legal community.

After the initial roll-out of the GA release, there were several issues that appeared, and were confirmed with Autonomy iManage technical support.  The first issue involved security inheritance, and manifested itself when saving documents into folders with specific users or groups added to the permission ACLs.   In these instances, the document would simply inherit the default security of the folder (Public, View, Private), ignoring any additional ACLs.  The second issue regarded Outlook stability, where toggling between a WDS-integrated Outlook search and the Inbox would result in a crash of Outlook.  This crash was fairly common, since users tend to search their mail items daily.   The third issue was more cosmetic, but annoying nonetheless.  When disregarding a draft email, the message remained in the Drafts folder of Outlook.  Again, not earth-shattering, but annoying to have to see Drafts (15) in your mailbox after a few days.

In the past couple weeks, Autonomy has released WorkSite Server 8.5 Update 2, along with the FileSite/DeskSite/OffSite/EMM 8.5 All Languages release  (you will know if you are running the All Languages release of the iManage client software because the build number will be 8.5.200.x).     We are happy to report that this back-end and client update neatly addresses and resolves all three of these issues, in addition to several others.    Outlook is more stable, and there is no longer any issues with security inheritance.   If anyone is hesitant about moving to iManage 8.5, rest assured that the latest release appears to be stable and functions as advertised.

For those with access, more information on these updates can be found in the WorkSite 8.5 Resource Center at the iManage technical support web site.

We have been running a Beta version in our virtual research lab for a few months now, and tested these new features as well as a few other highlights.

A few screenshots and comments are below the fold.

• Outlook Integration - Starting with the release of Worldox GX, users were able to have some integration between Outlook and Worldox.  With GX, users could create Email Quick Profiles which translate to drop-folders in a new WORLDOX folder in the user’s Outlook mailbox.   Worldox GX2 introduces new integration between the Outlook drop-folders and the full Worldox system.  Users can drag and drop any email into the drop-folder to save into Worldox.   As shown in the screenshot below, when opening the drop-folder, the user is presented with the full Worldox file list for that particular client and matter within Outlook.

Worldox GX2 Outlook Integration

• Ethical Walls – From the WDADMIN utility, Ethical Walls can be created for particular clients, matters, or even document types.  Default access for the entire profile group can be granted, in addition to special Read-Only or Block access for users or groups, as per the example below:
  

  Worldox GX2 Ethical Wall

• Enhanced Search Lookup – When starting to type a search term into either the Full Text field or a metadata field, a drop down of suggested words that are in the full text index appear.   For Full Text searching, a Sounds Like is included too.   This could be useful when users are a bit unsure on exactly what they want to search for.  An preview of this feature is shown below:
  

  Worldox GX2 Enhanced Search Lookup

Early indications are that Worldox has once again made a step in the right direction, bringing in features that either match or exceed those of competing products on the market.  We’ll continue testing Worldox GX2 and see how firms out there can leverage this new version of a very popular legal DMS product.

Usually, what they are used to is an inconsistent, multi-level directory structure with custom folders containing perhaps a handful of specifically categorized documents each. This kind of structure makes sense when the only way of finding a document is by knowing which folder it’s in — as is the case without a DMS. In this scenario, you wouldn’t want to scroll through hundreds or thousands of documents in a folder. Rather, if you can limit the number of documents in a folder to a handful, then it is easier to find the document you need. This is what leads to the numerous directory levels and (in my humble opinion) overly specific classifications.

In the DMS world, there are much better ways of finding documents. The obvious option is the full-text search, which will provide efficient results (given the user properly knows how to perform a full-text search). In addition to the search, folder lists can be sorted and filtered based on any metadata column, and the WorkSite Miner is a nice utility to carve up the contents of a folder into more manageable groups.

iManage offers two levels of classification for documents — the Class (which generally corresponds to a WorkSpace folder) and it’s child Subclass. As the designer of the WorkSpace structure and metadata, you may get requests for numerous Subclasses. There are two main disadvantages of using Subclasses. First, requiring the Subclass adds dreaded extra clicks and keystrokes to each save action. If the Firm decides on using Subclasses, it is a best practice to make them required. If they are optional, they lose all value. There’d be no guarantee that searching for the “Loan Agreement” Subclass will return all loan agreements. This leads to the second key disadvantage — it will prevent the proper update of metadata when dragging-and-dropping documents from one WorkSpace folder to another, since it is up to the user to select a Subclass when saving into a folder.

So how do we get attorneys to accept not using Subclasses? Make sure they grasp all the different ways documents can be identified, sorted, filtered, and found in the system. Perhaps bring up the idea of a naming convention for the description of documents. Or perhaps make a deal — try it without Subclasses for six months, and then the issue can be re-evaluated. Chances are they will appreciate the ease of simply saving into a WorkSpace folder, and agree that there is no need for Subclasses. After all, less is more.

But in order to design these virtual Redweld structures (iManage calls these “WorkSpaces”), input is needed from each Practice Area or department of the firm.  Since many of the users have no idea what Matter Centricity is, and some may not have any idea what a DMS is to begin with, it can be difficult to obtain the information needed to design a structure.

Here are a few tips to get the message across:

• Give a high-level 20-minute presentation prior to your WorkSpace design discussions with a user group.  Provide some screen captures to display a sample structure.  Briefly discuss how they would interact with the structure on their desktop environment. Even with this presentation, it is hard for some people to grasp the concepts and visualize the structure
• Take notes during the presentation and the following design discussion.  Try to identify those users who are having a more difficult time.  Notes are also very helpful when following up with certain attorneys or administrative assistants.  The user will appreciate that you remembered their comment from the discussion.
• Create some sample structures in a lab environment, based on the initial input of the user groups.  Invite some of the people who had a hard time understanding the concept and demonstrate how to save and access documents from the structure.  Hopefully this will help them along and their ideas can be included as well.

Using these tips, the hope is not only that the users better understand the concept in general, but also have a better idea of how their input for the design will be translated into technology and their daily work process.

In future posts, I’ll discuss how to interpret all this input and combine it with iManage and Kraft Kennedy’s best practices.