When a new user is created, a new matter is also created under a client called “Employee Private Documents”:

Creating the employee's private matter.

Since Worldox is configured to save documents in a [Client ID] -> [Matter ID] directory structure, setting the matter code to match the user’s ID makes it easier for administrators to identify which folder belongs to which user from the back end.   Next, we set up the required Ethical Wall by going to Security -> Groups in WDADMIN.  When adding the Ethical Wall, we base it on the newly created client and matter.

Creating the Ethical Wall

Finally, we assign the appropriate security permissions to that new matter.  We explicitly deny access to all users by selecting Block for the Profile Group, and Allow access for Worldox Managers and the owner of the matter.

Setting the Ethical Wall security

What’s the end result?  When a user looks under the “Employee Private Documents” client they should only see the one matter assigned to them, and a search against that client will only return their own documents.  Likewise, other users (with the exception of Worldox Managers) won’t be able to see that user’s private matter.

Additionally, because we have AD security integration configured in this implementation, the permissions set by the Worldox Ethical Wall automatically translate to directory-level permissions in the Worldox repository.  Setting this up initially was a little time consuming as we had to go through the process of creating an Ethical Wall for each user, but the setup has been well received by users and administrators alike.

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.