Making the Move to WorkSite 8.3 and Laying the Groundwork for 8.5

Continuing my live-blogging from International Legal Technology Association's Annual Conference. . . .

This was a sparsely attended session (it was during lunch time) from Chris RuBert, Director Customer Care of Interwoven giving a Worksite 8.3 Field Update and Shawn on preparing for Worksite 8.5.



Technote 62008-2619 provides planning guidelines. For every 5 million documents in Worksite, you need a 4 CPU/Core server with 8-16 GB RAM. Within the guidelines, you want to be able to process 1 search per CPU/Core per second with an average search response times of 3 to 5 seconds. Investing in hardware will yield a return. More processors get you faster indexing and more searches per second. More RAM gets you faster searches. 64 bit is the recommended platform, with better performance and greater stability.  The Indexer should not be on a virtual machine. The concern is the IO bottleneck on VM platforms when under load. It is a resource intensive application.

The 8.3 upgrade is a little easier than past upgrades.  Get your hardware and point it at the production data.  You can identify potential content issues in the test and test real user searches against a live index since you are setting up a parallel system. You hit the switch to move from verity to velocity.

Indexing performance tuning guide is available on the Interwoven Support Site (72008-2659). You do need to get the virus and backup software out of the way of the Indexer.

Wildcard searching has changed. A custom dictionary is recommended. Wildcard searching requires 3 characters. Searches with dashes is a problem, but can be configured in syntax. Leading wildcards should only be used when needed. (We have noticed this to a be a problem. This is a big change in functionality.) The old setting automatically inserted leading and ending wildcards. With the velocity search engine, you want to disable the leading wildcard. The trailing wildcard is addressed with stemming. This is why you need to build the dictionary.

The current problem is that the indexer either indexes all versions or just the latest version. If you index all versions, then all versions come back in the search results (This is terrible see: Interwoven Express Search and Worksite 8.3 Update - Back to Wow!! ) The service pack will just show the lateste version that meets the search criteria.

Version 8.5 is trying to enhance the offline experience, email management, searching, MCC and multi-language support.

They are looking to have seamless online/offline switching. They want to handle a network failure allowing wired to wireless switch. They also want to have better synchronization and have it in the background. You can pause, see the progress and manually stop it (if you have a bad connection). Of course they want better performance. They are using a new SQL express client database and event driven architecture.

When you deploy Offsite, there may be a big initial synchronization which will put a big load on the server. You want to phase the rollout.

Offsite is going to be tied into email management.  You can continue filing email when you are not on the network.

Version 8.5 will allow multi-byte languages (like the Asian languages) in description, comments, to, from, cc and bcc.  Version 9 will be fully unicode.

Version 8.5 will also index workspaces, including the metadata and descriptions. It will enforce filing locations so that documents must be in a folder in a workspace. It will introduce a search for workspace in the save document window, giving the workspace in the window. It also will not show the contents of the folder anymore. Showing the documents takes time to render. There is a button to show the documents. Seeing the documents helps you to see if you are saving the document in the correct place. Since version 8.5 will be indexing workspace, you need to make sure you have the recommended hardware.

Version 8.5 will allow server-side email filing. This will result in a big time saving. Currently any email filing takes at least a second per email. This is because the filing is happening on the machine. (It is fast on outlook/exchange because it is happening on the server.) Now the email movement will be a server-based transaction. The heavy lifting happens on the Interwoven Communication Server. They will using the email icon in Outlook to indicate that the email has been sent for filing and then again when it is actually filed.

There is also a new filing toolbar. When you highlight the email, it will offer a list of suggested workspaces. (Just like the Blackberry file email suggestion.) There is also an option to (i) file, (ii) file and delete from Outlook and (iii) file, print and delete from Outlook. The toolbar has an button to save the attachment into Worksite.

There is also an Outlook folder sync function. You can set up a link from your email folder to a Worksite folder. The user can focus on the organization and not have to focus on finding and filing. It will also work from any email access: Outlook Web access or Blackberry. A benefit of using a convenience copy in Outlook/Exchange is you can still use flags and follow up indicators.

You can also do delegate filing. If the secretary is filing the email, author will be the attorney not the secretary.

One issue is the physical location of the Exchange servers and DM servers. Since you do have server filing, you can put a load on the WAN.

The upgrade from 8.3 to 8.5 will require a re-indexing of the document collection.