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Note: The article below, written by Brian Podolsky, originally appeared in March 2017 Issue #17 of Legal IT Today. It is reprinted here with permission. Please visit Legal IT Today to subscribe and read more from the legal technology community.

The DMS industry is dynamic. Sometimes the change is linear, as when popular products add new functionality. In 2016, we saw major advancements from the market leaders. iManage introduced a new responsive web interface, while NetDocuments further solidified its integrations with Microsoft Office 365 and Azure. Worldox expanded its cloud platform to the UK and announced a major integration with Workshare.

Sometimes change is exponential. The recent rising market share of NetDocuments comes to mind. Other times the long shift ends up being circular: think of saving to folder structures before the DMS, then saving to profile cards, and now saving to matter centric structures. With this in mind, let’s see how the market is taking shape.

The ‘new’ new iManage

iManage quickly reinvented itself after its split from HP. Newly unrestrained from its former parent company, iManage put major investments into R&D as well as customer support. The result was that in 2016, project ‘White Rabbit’ was morphing from vaporware to actual software. With the release of iManage Work 10, it’s here as the New Professional, or Work 10 for Office. The new interface is fast, responsive, and intuitive. The document timeline feature exposes the vast history of a document that’s often been covered in dust within the database. The new and separate Threat Manager product goes a step further, using all the historical data within the database to develop behavioral baselines for each user. With an eye on current activities, Threat Manager only learns, but will also notify an administrator of any anomalies within the system.

Will the new interface work for everyone? Probably not (at least for this initial release), so iManage still provides the classic FileSite interface. Since this is the first release of Work 10 for Office, I expect there to be a few bumps in the road and limits to customization. As with other DMS products, I expect to see improvements and further enhancements later in 2017.

Although iManage Work 10 can be implemented on-premise, it is meant to be used via the software as a service model. The new responsive web interface requires an additional server to render document previews. The recommended specifications for this server are frankly shocking and may cause small to mid-size firms to take another look at the cloud. Under the hood, the iManage 10 Cloud has been rebuilt as a true cloud platform. It is no longer just a hosted set of dedicated WorkSite and IDOL servers in a data center. It is a multi-tenant, secure cloud platform that uses Lucene’s Elasticsearch technology. That’s right, no more IDOL in the iManage Cloud. When will we see the last of IDOL in the on-premise release?

NetDocuments 3.0

I’m not referring to product version numbers but to the iteration of the company itself. NetDocuments 1.0 came out of the ashes of SoftSolutions in 1999. A cloud-only DMS, ahead of its time when
it began, NetDocuments 1.0 had its customers but never really caught on. Three years ago, a large capital investment allowed the company to vastly improve its data center infrastructure storage,
security, performance, and reliability. Combined with the introduction of direct integration into Microsoft Office with ndOffice, these improvements spawned NetDocuments 2.0. This is the company that has seen incredible growth across the legal sector. It may not have directly inspired iManage’s focus on the cloud, but it made its competitor aware that it needed a truly modern cloud platform to compete in this space.

Now we have NetDocuments 3.0. So far this year, the company has already announced an additional level of its SOC 2 certifications known as SOC 2+, as well as ndFlexStore, which allows customers to hold certain content in any local or private data center. These advancements continue NetDocuments’ effort to break down all the roadblocks that have traditionally prevented law
firms from adopting the cloud.

On 2 March 2017, NetDocuments announced a new investor, the $3bn private equity group Clearlake Capital, which is purchasing the stock of NetDocuments’ previous investor. Unlike other DMS vendors who have been bought and sold in the last decade, the current NetDocuments management team will continue to run the company and maintain significant ownership.

With more resources and a focus on additional R&D and potential acquisitions to broaden the functionality of their product, there is significant reason to be excited about what’s in store. Expect more advanced integration with Office 365, a revamped workspace interface, enhanced collaboration, and new encryption at the bit-string level of the search engine. One item I am particularly interested in is the integration with Microsoft Flow, allowing for document and matter workflows leveraging Office 365.

Worldox innovates

There haven’t been any new Worldox versions since GX4 was released in late 2015. That doesn’t mean the company has been sitting idly by. Worldox engineers have been hard at work
expanding its cloud platform to the UK and developing several major new technological initiatives. The first is a collaborative product called Worldox Connect, powered by Workshare.

Worldox Connect allows professionals to securely access and collaborate on Worldox files while on the move or using mobile devices. The second major innovation is the redesign of the Worldox Indexer as a Windows service. Consumers have wanted this functionality for years and it is now becoming available with performance and management improvements. Lastly, Worldox will be rolling out new functionality that will encrypt the entire document repository. This will ensure that the only application that can decrypt and read documents on the file server will be the Worldox client itself. Look out for these advancements in 2017.

Currently, there are no plans for a Worldox GX5 release. As Worldox can easily be upgraded, GX4 may be the last version released, just as Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows.
New features, rollups and functionality will be added, and they will likely receive technical or branded names (think ‘Windows 10 Creators Update’), but it’s still Windows 10. Perhaps the GX4 platform will be rebranded with that type of upgrade model, or remain as it is.

Will Matter Center finally matter?

Finally, any review of the DMS landscape must include Microsoft’s Matter Center. After all, legal technology is Microsoft’s world – we are just living in it. While Matter Center itself has been essentially open-sourced and made available on GitHub before it was ever finished, third-party integrators have taken it across the finish line.

Epona’s DMSforLegal is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch. DMSforLegal has been a standalone add-in for SharePoint for several years. But now, with the newly developed Matter Center for creating and managing clients and matters, Epona has integrated with Office 365 to provide a true DMS in the Microsoft Cloud. The product demos beautifully and integrates almost so seamlessly into Outlook that you’d think Microsoft wrote it. The company already has a foothold in Europe and is currently gaining traction in North America. I expect more market penetration in the small to mid-size law firm areas throughout 2017. A key indicator of how the upcoming roadmaps are faring will come in the run-up to ILTACON in August. Will there be hints of major releases? Or will there just be press releases citing cloud-adoption growth and new customers?

The post Race to the Cloud: the State of the Legal DMS Market appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

Wow. That may have been the most packed ILTACON I’ve ever attended.

In my ILTACON Preview post last month, I highlighted more than a dozen educational and vendor sessions that I thought would be interesting. I hope you caught them, because I think I barely went to more than two or three. I’m looking forward to watching any recordings or slide-decks for the ones I missed. There were just so many sessions, great discussions at our exhibit hall booth, and one-on-one meetings and pull-asides, that I hardly had time to make it to the sessions I’d planned on!

Perhaps the most informative session I did attend was Everything You Need to Know About EU General Data Protection Regulation, But Were Afraid to Ask (Until Now), which was a panel led by Ian Raine, Jeff Hemming, Robert Cruz, and Grant Shirk. If you are not familiar with GDPR, start getting familiar. GDPR s a new EU law that consolidates the data privacy laws of all 28 EU Member States. Companies in violation face stiff penalties. Think your company or firm is safe because you don’t have offices in the EU? Think again. If your organization offers goods or services to EU citizens or monitors the behavior of EU citizens, you could be impacted. The regulations go into effect May 25, 2018. So the clock is ticking.

Other than that, I caught up with many industry peers and vendors. Here are some highlights:

AI, aye aye!

The buzzword now is AI — artificial intelligence. AI bots. AI lawyers. AI AI O. Lots of companies used this term, but the biggest one that may actually mean it is iManage. With the acquisition of RAVN, iManage brought on technology that can learn and generate information from your entire repository, distilling it where appropriate. Whether it’s building a clause bank, or auto-classifying and identifying documents that are subject to specific regulations, iManage plans to have the system work for you. At ILTA, iManage announced three new products on this front: iManage Insight, iManage Classify, and iManage Extract.

Shuffling of the DMS deck

On Monday, I led the panel for DMS Upgrades and Migrations: Look Before You Leap. It was extremely well-attended. I’d say it was standing room only, but there also people sitting in the aisles. We polled the audience, and about 80% of attendees said their firm was ready for a major DMS upgrade or migration within the next two years.

The status quo is not sustainable. A couple firms are migrating from NetDocuments to iManage. Many other firms (including some large ones!) are migrating from iManage to NetDocuments. In the arms race for cloud DMS, more firms are making the leap. Among our panelists was Barry Peters, who led Baker Bott’s migration from on-prem iManage to iManage Cloud. Another panelist was Jared Gullbergh of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, who migrated from on-prem OpenText eDOCS and iManage (via a merger) to the NetDocuments trusted cloud platform. David Woodman of Blank Rome, our third panelist, described some major consolidations and upgrades to the firm’s on-premise iManage system. All the panelists stressed the importance of planning, communication, and training to the success of their projects. At our booth and in our demo room, I had many conversations with firms trying to decide which DMS product is right for them. This looks to be a significant year for DMS technology, with cloud security and stability being key factors in determining which horse is going to win the race.

Techies love Star Wars (and Spaceballs!)

The theme of the Monday evening Exhibit Hall opening party was “ILTA’s Vendor Galaxy,” and the vendors did not disappoint. By my count, there were at least eight Darth Vaders, four Chewbaccas, and of course plenty of storm troopers. To my delight, there were also at least two Dark Helmets, two Barfs, a Lone Starr, a Dot Matrix, and even a Prince Valium and a Pizza the Hutt. May the Schwartz be with you!

If you were ask me to sum up ILTACON this year, I’d go with this: the atmosphere was great, the food delicious, and the knowledge shared plentiful. Here’s to a successful rest of 2017, and we’ll see you back at ILTA next summer at the National Harbor near Washington, DC.

The post Takeaways from ILTACON 2017: ECM Edition appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

In the nine months since iManage 10 was released, there’s been a lot of curiosity and excitement about the New Professional Experience and the new iManage Cloud. Whenever I demo the New Professional Experience, attorneys tell me it is very intuitive and they can see the value of using it in addition to the traditional FileSite/DeskSite client experience. Along with this excitement and praise, there’s also been a bit of hesitation.

I think the reason for this hesitation is that iManage has done such an excellent job with its 9.x product line. WorkSite 9 was updated several times to support Windows 10 and Office 2016. It pains me to say it, but often firms will only update their DMS if they need to. And, well, if firms are deploying Windows 10 and Office 2016 or Office 365, they don’t need to upgrade to Work 10. They can simply stick with 9.x and deploy the latest 9.x client. Upgrading to iManage 10 is a bit of a tougher sell, but lately there are more and more reasons to get there. Here are a few reasons to start your planning now:

Work 10.1 and the new RAVN Indexer

Three words — NO. MORE. IDOL. Need I say more? Okay, I’ll say more. The iManage RAVN Indexer will improve search performance and reduce the cost of full text searching. You’ll be able to take advantage of RAVN’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform and gain new insight into your document repository. In addition, Work 10.1 will introduce a Server-side Refile Service. One of the most annoying things in iManage has always been the confusing Refile prompts that users see when they drag & drop documents or folders between workspace folders. Until 10.1, eliminating that prompt required the purchase of a third-party tool to process proper metadata & security refiling. With 10.1, that back-end functionality is now native and available.

Work 10.1 also greatly expands the functionality of the New Professional Experience on the web. Better search features, customizable views, and improved personalization will make the experience even better.

Security Policy Manager

iManage Security Threat Manager

Part of the iManage Govern suite, iManage Security Policy Manager (SPM) is the true ethical wall solution that iManage customers have been waiting for. SPM takes the content segregation and need-to-know access model and places it one level higher than the actual security tables in the iManage database. Unlike other third-party ethical wall solutions, iManage SPM will actually protect the Client/Matter lookup tables themselves — in addition to the workspace and document content assigned to those values. That means that the metadata for confidential matters will be completely protected too. Security Policy Manager is delivered as a virtual appliance that can be easily configured to protect an iManage library. SPM is administered through the overall iManage Control Center (IMCC) that comes with Work 10, meaning there is a single entry point to all management operations.

Threat Manager

iManage Threat Manager

Another part of the overall iManage Govern suite, iManage Threat Manager (TM) provides 24/7 continuous analysis and detection of internal and external security threats, using a combination of adaptive behavioral modeling and machine learning. TM provides smart analysis and notifications on suspicious or abnormal behavior. It’s smarter than just alerting you if someone exports more than 100 documents in a session. It’ll alert you if someone is suspiciously working outside of their normal day-to-day behavior, even on a small set of content. But wait, you may ask, how does it know what normal day-to-day behavior is? With Threat Manager, iManage has made your Document History table useful and valuable. TM takes a large sample of historical data in the iManage library to establish a baseline of normal user activity. Finally, that history table in your database is more than just a list of View and Modify entries. Certain thresholds of what is considered “suspicious” can be tweaked using standard deviations, and certain user roles can be excluded from threat analysis if it is their job to access different secured content (think of Word Processor resources).

I have been trained and certified in Security Policy Manager, Threat Manager, and the iManage Work 10 platform. SPM and TM are add-on modules to the base iManage 10 Work product. Each of iManage 10, SPM and TM can either be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. iManage’s acquisition of RAVN technologies enhances the future of the entire iManage product line. Now is the time to start planning your upgrade so your firm can take advantage of these exciting new technologies in 2018.

The post Now’s the Time to Plan Your iManage Work 10 Upgrade appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

Meltdown and Spectre have been all over the news recently, and rightfully so. If you aren’t familiar, here’s a good explainer by Wired magazine: A Critical Intel Flaw Breaks Basic Security for Most Computers. If you’re too lazy to read the whole article, here’s the gist: “Meltdown allows malicious programs to gain access to higher-privileged parts of a computer’s memory, while Spectre steals data from the memory of other applications running on a machine.” The best part is that the vulnerability has also been seen in AMD and ARM processors too — not just Intel!

Microsoft is in the process of releasing critical patches for this (though the Microsoft patches for AMD processors have been temporarily halted due to bootup issues). The Wired piece goes into how Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google are addressing the vulnerabilities. All on-premises Windows systems should be patched as soon as possible. But what about the Legal DMS Cloud vendors?

iManage released the following announcement (login required) about the impact on iManage Cloud:

The iManage Cloud back-end infrastructure hosted in public cloud platforms—including Microsoft Azure—and in managed CenturyLink and Cyxtera data centers are affected by these vulnerabilities. We are following our standard protocol to protect iManage Cloud servers by applying necessary patches released by vendors vulnerable to these attacks. This is an ongoing process and many servers have already been patched. There are no system outages required for the application of these patches.

NetDocuments released detailed security initiatives in a Support Article, but the summary is below:

NetDocuments recognizes the serious set of security vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre and is actively monitoring developments regarding these vulnerabilities. Because of the extensive multi-layered defenses and controls implemented within the NetDocuments Service infrastructure, together with the inherent protection created by the architecture of the Service, the ability of someone to directly exploit either of these vulnerabilities within NetDocuments is extremely unlikely. NetDocuments is actively reviewing strategies to ensure ongoing protection of customer documents while also maintaining optimal performance of the Service.

The key takeaway is that no one is immune from Meltdown and Spectre. Everyone must patch their environments as quickly and safely as possible, and that includes your Cloud vendors as well.

The post Meltdown and Spectre in the Cloud DMS appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

When working with a database driven application, engineers are often asked to automate certain tasks based on information from another data source. A common example that our clients see is pulling metadata about clients and matters from an accounting system, and using that information to drive matter-centric folder structures in HP WorkSite iManage.

Queries could be run against matters in the source database, and all sorts of information can be retrieved, such as:

Client and Matter descriptions
Department or Practice Area designations
Billing Attorney, Supervising Attorney, Responsible Attorney, Originating Attorney assignments
Recent billing activity

With this kind of information and third-party tools, you can do all sorts of automation and customization to the matter-centric environment to make the system more efficient. You can update already existing workspaces in iManage with changes to matter descriptions from the accounting system. You can automate the creation of specific sets of workspace folders based on the Practice Area. You can publish workspaces for an attorney’s recently billed matters to their My Matters area, or you can publish workspaces for any matter listing the attorney as the “originating attorney”.

This all sounds well-and-good and is straightforward with the right tool. However, the process relies on data within the accounting system and if the data is wrong there, users are going to see unexpected results. Here are a few common tickets and questions you may see trickling into your Helpdesk queue:

Why does matter 0567 have Litigation folders when it is a Tax matter?
Why do all my Real Estate matters have Employment Benefits folders?
Why am I seeing 50 matters that I don’t care about in my My Matters list? They won’t go away.
Is it Friday yet?

Many times it is best to trace the information back to the source — and I don’t mean the database. Where did the data really come from? Usually that involves some sort of Matter Intake Form. This form typically has fields and choices to identify the appropriate practice group and attorney for the matter. In some environments, the Practice Group is driven by whoever the Originating Attorney is. In other environments, these two can be two completely separate choices. The key is understanding how this data is entered and ensuring that it is accurate. Sometimes attorneys are designated to the wrong Practice Group. It happens. Maybe there was an accounting upgrade or data restructuring that caused several thousand matters to be classified with the wrong department or practice code. Sometimes attorneys are creating documents for matters that are closed in the accounting system — now that the matter status can be synched, maybe that matter is now disabled in iManage. These sorts of data errors are often invisible to the end user — until, that is, it is shoved in front of their face due to some automation script or third-party tool.

We can do many things to make iManage and other DMS systems more efficient, automated, and customized. But we are only as good as the data that is provided to us. Keep this in mind when planning a new integration or automation task into your environment. Make sure that everybody knows where the data is coming from and try to run some validation queries and send the results to responsible stakeholders.

One possible solution is to divorce the practice group from the workspace folders, and go with a much more general approach to the folder design: Emails, Drafts, Final Documents. Who could argue with that? Other solutions, such as Prosperoware Milan, can allow users to pick from a predefined list of optional folders that can be used to customize a structure on a per-matter basis.

This may be a great time to review the matter intake process with key stakeholders engaged in the strategy of the firm, and perhaps suggest changes that can more accurately define information on each new matter as it is created. Discussions could include how and why matters are currently categorized. Are matters categorized to ease the organization of attorneys, the assigning of work, or for marketing and reporting efforts? How often are your current matter types being used, and are there some that can be consolidated to make the ongoing management of them easier. This may involve surveying representatives from each practice group.

These are just a few of the potential issues we have seen when integrating accounting data to the DMS. However, these sorts of problems can occur with any automation script that ties two different systems together.

The post Garbage In and Garbage Out: The Importance of Source Data When Categorizing Matters appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

Call it the circle of life. Early this morning, Legal IT Professionals reported that the leadership of iManage has completed a buyout of the complete iManage brand, products, and services from Hewlett-Packard (HP). Original co-founder Neil Araujo, who has stayed with the iManage product through the acquisitions by Interwoven, Autonomy, and finally HP, is now CEO of iManage Inc. Fellow co-founder Rafiq Mohammadi rejoins the band as Chief Scientist. Other leadership, sales, support, and account executives are also coming to the new company.

IDOL will still be included with WorkSite Indexer, and iManage says they are able to retain the hosting and infrastructure of the HP data centers for the WorkSite in the Cloud offering.

So what does this all mean? Well, as with every big shift in the legal technology industry, only time will tell. However, I am already seeing more optimism about this spin-off than we’ve seen about previous acquisitions by large companies such as HP and OpenText. I think there’s an aura of relief delivered in the words blasted on the new iManage.com website. In a partner webinar this morning, there was a sense of nostalgia, suggesting that the sunny days are here again. Industry leaders are also expressing positive reactions to the news, and some believe that iManage’s competitors may have had their hopes dashed.

Keith Lipman, himself a former Director of Legal Solutions at iManage and now president of Prosperoware, tweeted:

iManage an independent company again. Congrats to the @imanageinc team. Sorry to those who had dreams of converting their customers

— Keith Lipman (@keithlipman) July 21, 2015

Even other vendors seem happy. Workshare tweeted:

@imanageinc Congratulations on the completion of the deal!

— Workshare (@Workshare) July 21, 2015

Back in 2011, when HP acquired Autonomy, I wrote the following: “I do wonder though if this will make iManage customers feel smaller, as they are now under an even larger umbrella.”

I think that ended up being true. We heard it from our clients, and we felt it ourselves as partners. HP WorkSite was a small speck of the overall HP business, and it seemed that a lot of the HP bureaucracy had restricted the WorkSite sales, support, and account teams. The quality of the first level technical support suffered. I cringed whenever we, as partners, had to join a webinar on an “HP Virtual Room.” It was an ugly, clunky web conference utility that seemed to have no audio control. We couldn’t join in via computer audio, and we had to dial in separately via a phone and then mute ourselves. When I asked someone at HP WorkSite why they were using that instead of a WebEx or GoToMeeting, he said, “Don’t get me started. We have to.” I think that conversation was a microcosm of what HP did to the iManage brand.

I look forward to the renewed focus expressed by Neil Araujo, and the exciting things to come as iManage comes full circle and goes back to its roots. As we head towards ILTACON next month, I’m sure we’ll see more announcements and industry reaction to this big shift in the legal DMS landscape.

The post iManage Splits from HP, Becomes Independent Company appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

Viva Las ILTACON! Last week was the ILTA organization’s annual conference in sunny (and hot) Las Vegas. It was a great week of meeting new friends with old problems, and catching up with old friends with new problems. I was one of fourteen Kraft Kennedy representatives who took the trip to Caesar’s Palace. Many of our practice groups were represented, including our Project Management, Enterprise Client Systems, Information & Security Governance and Infrastructure & Enterprise Systems practices. I was the sole representative of our Enterprise Content Management practice, so I focused in on the DMS and related legal technology announcements and session tracks. Here is a quick list of some key takeaways from the vendor announcements made and several of the sessions I attended.

Matter Center is not dead

At last year’s ILTA conference, Microsoft made waves in the Legal IT world when it announced a preview version of Matter Center. I was optimistic, and wrote an article with my initial thoughts, titled What Does Microsoft’s Matter Center for Office 365 Really Mean for Legal? Many of the questions remain to this day. Since the original announcement was made, Kraft Kennedy and other select partners and firms have been part of two beta waves. But there didn’t seem to be much development progress — at least to our eyes and fingertips. Over the summer, Legal IT Professionals published a piece titled Microsoft Matter Center? It doesn’t matter anymore…. In it, Rob Ameerun noticed some language changes on the Matter Center webpage, and speculated that perhaps the dream had died. Quite the contrary, it seems! In a series of announcements and covered in a Thursday session, Microsoft is making Matter Center available to partners and is looking to expand its pilot program with the legal community. In addition, NetDocuments announced to great fanfare that they will be fully integrating the NetDocuments services with Microsoft cloud technologies. The NetDocuments blog reveals:

NetDocuments is working with the Matter Center for Office 365 team to integrate additional Office 365 design patterns to provide an end-to-end robust document and email management solution on the Azure cloud platform. Matter Center development, a SharePoint-based collaboration system, will continue for use by Microsoft and will be externally available through select partners.

I’m not 100% sure what this integration will look like in the end, but it appears that you could have a NetDocuments front-end connect to your documents and email saved as part of Matter Center in Office 365. The front-end integration from Outlook and Word has always been the large feature gap in Matter Center so far, and it looks like Microsoft is looking to fill that gap with not only NetDocuments, but also Epona. From Epona’s website:

Epona DMSforLegal adds additional capabilities to Microsoft Matter Center which provides law firms and corporate legal departments additional flexibility to their DMS configuration in SharePoint Online (Office365). By combining both products full DMS capability plus mobile integration, additional E-Mail management capabilities and more make choosing Epona with Microsoft an excellent decision.

Look for a deeper dive into my thoughts on the future of Matter Center in the near future.

The Cloud DMS Wars

NetDocuments had a busy week! In between its announcements of the Microsoft cloud integration and three new AM Law customers, they also took the time to bash their competition at an ILTA session on Tuesday. It was a four-member session panel titled “Considerations and Consequences: Moving to Cloud Document Management”, and it featured representatives from two law firms have made the decision to go to the cloud (one with iManage, and the other with NetDocuments), as well as a representative from each NetDocuments and iManage. It started innocently enough with each law firm representative explaining what led them to choose the cloud, and how they went about it. But once the conch got in the hands of NetDocuments and iManage, the gloves started coming off. As I recall, NetDocuments started it by knocking iManage’s security infrastructure in the cloud. They then went after iManage’s enterprise search product IUS (now called “Insight”) for it’s complexity. They traded barbs for a while, but it seems iManage was blindsided by the assault. NetDocuments also managed to squeeze in another mention of their Microsoft integration announcement for good measure. There was definitely a silent awkwardness that set in among the standing-room-only crowd. Afterwards, there were questions buzzing around the Exhibit Hall about who had been in this session and what exactly happened.

Besides good theater, what this session showed me is how there is definitely a rivalry between these two major players in the market, and that can only lead to further development of new features and technologies as these vendors try to best each other and expand their market shares. This leads me nicely to my last key takeaway.

The New iManage

Back in July when iManage announced its split from HP, I wrote an article listing reasons for my optimism about the big news. After attending the iManage breakfast on Monday, the “WorkSite 9, Office 2016 and Office 365: Which Way to Go?” session led by Shawn Misquitta on Tuesday, I am more convinced than ever about the positive direction iManage will be going now that it is released from the HP bureaucracy. The preview/demo of the “White Rabbit” project showed a forward-thinking vision about how lawyers and legal professionals can interact with their documents and cases in a streamlined away across their desktop, tablet and mobile devices. Beyond that, iManage is first out of the gate with support for Office 2016 when it is released on September 22nd. We know iManage is the market leader for the Am Law 200. So how does it continue to grow? How does it avoid losing customers to NetDocuments? It needs to innovate, and now iManage has the freedom to do just that.

The post Takeaways from ILTACON 2015: ECM Edition appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been almost a year since ILTACON 2015 in Las Vegas. After that conference, I wrote an article with my three main takeaways. These were: Matter Center is Not Dead, the Cloud DMS Wars, and the New iManage. How have these panned out over the course of the past 12 months? I think it is safe to say that “Matter Center” as it was announced originally at ILTA in 2014 is in fact dead, but its spirit lives on through GitHub and the ISVs that have taken the source code and improved upon it. The Cloud DMS Wars are still alive and well. NetDocuments continues to grow their market share at a breakneck pace, recently announcing that they’ve caught a big fish with Orrick choosing to migrate to their platform. Firing back, iManage recently announced record-high cloud adoption and previewed what’s to come in their next major release — iManage 10.

So with all that happening so far in 2016, August arrives and the time has come to see what announcements are made this year at ILTA. Here are a few things I am looking forward to learning more about:

NetDocuments and Microsoft: What’s next?

The big strategic partnership between NetDocuments and Microsoft Office 365 was announced last year, and we are now finally starting to see some of the fruits of this partnership. I’m excited to hear about what is to come. Single-sign on with Office 365 credentials directly? Possible integration with Azure RMS? Integration with OneNote 365 and the Calendar/Tasks that come with SharePoint 365? There is a NetDocuments Solution Spotlight session (#SS19) on Wednesday, August 31st at 11am.

iManage 10 and the Next Generation of Work Product Management

At the ConnectLive 2016 summit, iManage previewed the latest iteration of the White Rabbit interface and new features coming with iManage 10 — scheduled for release this Winter. They also produced a neat video showing how the New Professional can work on-the-go with iManage 10 in the future. It shows much improved Windows integration, which seemed to suggest the ability to save OneNote files into iManage, and also allow for document co-authoring. These are things I hope to see and learn more about at ILTACON. There is an iManage roadmap session (#ILTA120) on Wednesday, August 31st at 1:30pm.

Matter Center: The Next Generation

Within the realm of the legal technology world, I think the most interest about Microsoft over the past couple of years has centered around Matter Center. This year, while Microsoft still appears to be pushing Matter Center as a concept, it is not Microsoft that is pushing Matter Center as a product. That task will be reserved for ISVs who have taken the code and ran with it. Epona appears to be leading the charge with their DMSforLegal product, fully compatible with Office 365, which incorporates some of the Matter Center web interfaces with Epona’s proven Office client add-ins. I’ll be looking to see if any other vendors out there have something ready for market. I don’t see any ILTA sessions posted, but I hope to see what is out there in the exhibit hall.

Information Rights Management: For Real This Time?

I thought 2015 was going to be the year of Information Rights Management in legal. I had a whole post about it. I guess I was slightly ahead of the times. Silly me. This year, we’ve seen some promising advances. Citrix ShareFile now offers IRM (provided by Seclore) as part of it’s standard platform. Litera is also working on an IRM product that integrates with Azure RMS. I look forward to talking to firms about whether or not they see the need for this technology (I personally think there is a serious need for it), and how these products can provide a safe and easy way to always keep control over the firm’s content when it leaves the walls of the organization. There is a session discussing IRM and DMS systems (#ILTA165) on Thursday, September 1st at 2:45pm. I will also be co-leading a Solution Spotlight session with Seclore (#SS21) on Wednesday, August 31st at 1:30pm.

I hope to see you at ILTACON in Washington, DC! I will be at the Kraft Kennedy booths (500 and 502). Come and find me, and I’ll be glad to talk about these topics or any other ECM technology that you may be interested in.

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Another ILTACON has come and gone. Another chance to see what’s new and emerging in legal technology. Another chance to see how law firms are tackling the challenges before them. Another chance to catch up with old industry friends and to embarrass yourself singing Karaoke in front of them. Good times, for sure.

In my ILTACON 2016 preview, I mentioned I was interested in seeing what NetDocuments and Microsoft were up to, what iManage had up its sleeve, what exactly Matter Center is now, and how ready the industry is for digital rights management. In walking the exhibit hall floor, meeting with vendors, and attending sessions, I learned quite a lot and wanted to share some of my takeaways for 2016 and beyond:

NetDocuments and Microsoft, Continued…

Just prior to the opening of ILTA, NetDocuments furthered its Office 365 integration, announcing support for Microsoft Flow, an automated workflow module. With this integration, workflows can be set up to, for example, send text messages or email attorneys if certain content is saved into NetDocuments. As soon as users are disabled in Office 365/ Azure AD, their credentials will likewise be removed from NetDocuments. This is just the tip of the iceberg of automated management and processes within NetDocuments.

On another front, I was excited to hear what was in the works regarding document security. I don’t think I can say much now, but this is something that may come to fruition by next year, and will likely incorporate future integrations with Office 365. Finally, both at our booth and in sessions, I kept hearing a lot of interest in NetDocuments and the strides they’ve made with overall security certifications.

The Next iManage

Last year, it was all about “The New iManage” after the HP split. Well, now it’s the Next iManage. iManage 9.4 was announced, and more previews of iManage 10 were presented. New modern interfaces, compatible with practically any form-factor and device, as well as many new features and ways to consume the content relevant to your day-t0-day work. Beyond that, iManage told me they’ve heavily invested in new technology for their iManage Cloud datacenters (more than just the solid-state devices you may have heard about). These investments and improvements should be announced in a bit more detail toward the end of the year, and should allay concerns about how the iManage Cloud scales as more firms migrate their content there.

Matter Center and other Alternative DMSs?

On Tuesday, August 30th, I attended the ILTA Session “Alternative Document Management Systems.” The Twitter hashtag was #ILTA056, if you wanted to see my tweets from the session. I was intrigued by what firms were choosing as alternatives to the market leaders. There were two firms using SharePoint (one with MacroView, and the other with Epona DMSforLegal), a firm using MetaJure, MatterSphere, and Clio.

None of those are particularly surprising. For years, I’ve been interested in figuring out how SharePoint could be leveraged as a DMS for law firms, and it’s great to see US firms starting to go there. The Epona DMSforLegal looks to be the way to go in this area. The client user interface is incredibly slick, and Epona completed the Matter Center code for a nice web interface as well. MetaJure was mentioned, but the whole “Smart DMS” mantra, where documents can live anywhere (including workstation C drives) and are automatically tagged, scares me a bit. But it seemed to offer some real benefits to the firm using it. MatterSphere and Clio were also highlighted, and seem to fit in the “Jack-of-all-trade” bucket.

What struck me as odd was the inclusion of Worldox as an alternative. Now, it may be an alternative for a 1,000 user global law firm, but it most definitely not an “alternative” for the small to mid-size market. Worldox has been a staple in this market segment for more than 20 years, and is rather prevalent across our managed services clients at Kraft Kennedy.

Cool New Technologies

Perhaps the most crowded session I attended was What’s New and Cool in Legal Technology (Twitter hashtag: #ILTA067). It had an all-star cast of panelists, including Jeffrey Brandt (current CIO at a law firm, Editor for Law Technology Daily Digest), Ben Weinberger (former CIO, currently at Prosperoware), and Dean Leung (former CIO, currently at iManage). The session started out with general complaints about vendors who don’t support modern browsers, don’t integrate with Office 365, and still require old technologies like Java. But then, the conversation shifted to what is happening now and what is coming down the road.

A solid five minutes was spent talking about Digital Rights Management as the next frontier of security. It’s important to ensure you have control over content even after it leaves the edge of your network, and even after the recipient downloads it. It was nice to hear this topic mentioned, as it’s something that Kraft Kennedy has been looking into for several years. Both Seclore and Litera have product offerings in this space. Seclore’s product has been established for a few years now in the non-Legal vertical. Litera’s IRM is a new offering to its large legal portfolio of products.

Bonus Thought: Bacon is Delicious

I realize this isn’t news to anyone, but my goodness, is bacon delicious. During the Exhibit Hall Opening Reception on Monday night, one of the food stations was simply two slices of candied bacon in a clear cup. Genius.

All in all, it was a whirlwind week full of sessions, meetings, and demonstrations of the Microsoft HoloLens at our exhibit hall booth. It should be an exciting winter with new product version releases. Before you know it, we’ll be booking our flights to Vegas for ILTACON 2017.

The post Takeaways from ILTACON 2016: ECM Edition appeared first on Kraft Kennedy.

It’s now been almost 18 months since iManage split from HP and took charge of its own direction. In that time, they’ve modernized the look and feel of the iManage 9.3 clients in ways that they hadn’t done in the previous five or six years under the Autonomy and HP bureaucracies. The freedom is there now for iManage to innovate and take it to the next level to meet the needs of professionals who are becoming more mobile and particular about their devices. Two recent announcements from the company show that it is paying attention to these demands.

“White Rabbit” is Here

With the release of iManage Work Server 9.4, iManage unveils the new HTML5 responsive interface, which was for years considered vapor-ware by many in the legal technology arena. But it’s real, and it’s impressive. The sleek interface is currently accessible via a web browser pointed to the iManage Work Server. (Just a note though–this is licensed free on desktop workstations for all users licensed for FileSite or DeskSite. For access from a mobile device, separate web or mobile accesses are required.) Once connected, lawyers can access their content from four categories on the main banner – Documents, Emails, Matters, and Clients.

imanagenavigation

These categories provide easy ways to access different kinds of content. In the past, it was difficult to focus on a particular client (it is called, after all, Matter Centricity, not Client Centricity). The Clients category will allow attorneys and paralegals to see recent content in a client-centric view. Each category then has it’s own faceted filters to easily slice/dice the content to make the view more relevant.

In the example to the right, we see the filters available for documents. The content can be categorized based on the type of activity performed, the dates of those activities, as well as the file format extension. Multiple selections can be made to broaden the resulting document list as well.

Once a document is selected, the document detail page is displayed. In this pane, a live preview of the document is rendered in the browser. Particular actions can be performed, such as emailing a copy or a link, or downloading/checking out the document locally. But perhaps the coolest new tool is the Document Activity Timeline. This view pulls information from the Document History area of the database, and displays it in a way that is more useful than ever before. Rather than simply seeing a list of activity, the attorney can see a visual representation of when a particular document was edited, viewed, emailed, or printed. Not only that, they can see who performed these actions, and have control over the period of time the activity covers. The Activity Timeline can also be user-centric, which would show all activities done on a per-user basis, or version-centric, showing all activity performed on each version throughout the lifecycle of the document.

Think of WorkSite Server 9.4 as a preview of what the iManage 10 client interface will look like. In preview demos of the iManage 10 client, these responsive HTML5 views will be available from within the Office 2016 environment. While working in Word 2016, the attorney can open a pane and see the edit history of the current document.

Document Co-Authoring

Just this week, iManage announced that it will soon release what it calls an iManage Work Co-Authoring Add-on for 9.3.1. Now, I had seen a brief demo/presentation of this functionality in a preview of iManage 10. But today’s news is welcome, in that current 9.x customers could potentially take advantage of this before planning their upgrades to the 10.x platform.

According to the announcement, “Documents are shared in the firm’s secured OneDrive for Business environment and can seamlessly be brought back into the iManage repository.” So this appears to require that OneDrive for Business be activated and available in the environment. This can be OneDrive on-premises or via Office 365.

The funny thing is, I’ve been wondering for 7 years (!!) when iManage would support co-authoring after it was first announced as part of Office 2010. Well, that day will soon be here. Giddy-up.