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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.
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In an announcement today, World Software Corporation — makers of the Worldox document management system — shared the news that their latest release now supports Office 2010. According to my notes here, this makes them the first DMS vendor in the legal space to officially support integration with Office 2010.
There are a few caveats. At this point, only 32-bit Office 2010 is supported. No word yet on 64-bit support, but they say it’s coming. You also need to be running the latest version, Worldox GX2, and you should contact Worldox support to download the updated integration files.
With Office 2010 being unleashed on the world, many customers are asking when their DMS products will support it. No need to ask around, because we’ve gathered the official stances for some of the major vendors.
- WorkSite iManage 8.5: “We will look to certify/support Office 2010 within 90 days with the current 8.5 Worksite clients and later”
- Open Text eDOCS DM 5.3: “We will release v5.3 beta this summer and the final release is scheduled to be launched in late September”
- Worldox GX2: “Office 2010 integration files should ship within 30 – 45 days of the official general release of Microsoft Office 2010″
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010: “Come on, we’re Microsoft. It’ll work day one!” (Disclaimer: NOT a real quote)
So as of right now, it looks like Worldox may win the horserace to support Office 2010. As soon as official release announcements are made, we will be sure to test functionality in our research lab. Of course, simply supporting integration with the application doesn’t mean that the DMS product will be able to leverage any of the extra features of Office 2010, such as the Backstage view or simultaneous editing (which requires the document live on SharePoint 2010).
Simultaneous editing for collaboration is one of the most hyped features in Office 2010, however it’s only supported over the web in the Excel 2010 web app. For Word and PowerPoint simultaneous editing, you’ll need to have the full client versions of the Office 2010 products. This will likely be a disappointment for people who were hoping to collaborate on documents from kiosks anywhere in the world.
There has been a lot of chatter in the market about SharePoint 2010. Kraft Kennedy is currently running the SharePoint 2010 Beta, and is in the process of seeing which features could most benefit our clients. One feature that is not installed out-of-the-box (if there is such a thing as “out-of-the-box” with SharePoint) is the suite of Microsoft Office Web Apps. For details on installing the Web Apps on your SharePoint 2010 Beta, please check out this technote. This post is designed to show a little of what the Word 2010 Web App looks like, and how this can change your Intranet forever.
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?
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