The panel started off with the David Spade Blackberry Intervention video.
Everyone agreed that we have attorneys like this who need an intervention. But is it a technology problem or a business process problem?
The emphasis is on records management of which email management is a part. One panelists played an internal video showing the dangers of not having good records management for physical records or electronic records.
One firm had a 90 day email retention problem. The email needs to be filed into the email repository within 90 days or it gets deleted. The key is to have the business policy of email retention and then have the technology enforce the policy. Archiving email just defers the problem. They started by deleting emails more than 2 years old, then one year old and then tighter and tighter. The panelist created a legacy email library in iManage. The library is only available to records and not to attorneys. Just in case there was a legitimate need to pull back one of those emails. Those emails are then subject to a ten year retention. They uses Out IM from DocAuto to move the email. The key to success was treating it as a business problem, not as a technology problem. The risk management focus was the strongest selling point.
The other panelist is stuck with the firm not being able to come up with a document retention policy. Then the email overload is a technology problem. They had migrated from a Lotus Notes to an Exchange/Outlook environment. One person had 90,000 messages in his Notes inbox and another with a 20GB inbox in Notes. Those crushed Exchange and Outlook. The push was to move emails out of the inbox and into client/matter folders. Those folders are intended to be a precursor to an email management process. The email system was a de facto document management system. His attorneys also wanted to have all their emails available when portable.
One battle that both panelists had is the push back from attorneys and management that "disk space is cheap!"
One panelist automatically archived email that was over 90 old. They also archived any email over a certain size limit. The archiving allowed them to manage the mailbox size and deal with the technology problems. He found that the firm disclaimers and 230 circular disclaimers ended up taking up a lot of space. He also noticed that the flow of emails is still increasing.
One issue that both panelists mentioned was not just the file size, but the item count in the main outlook boxes. Outlook has a problem when there is more than 5,000 items in a top level folder. The calendar is a particular problem. [I am a diligent filer and got caught with having too many items in my calendar.]
The panel then addressed the benefits to the attorneys. One reason is to make it easier to find the email. The huge inboxes cause slow performance and increases the likelihood to bring the system down. An audience member brought up the collaboration benefit of sharing email. It seems you need a carrot and stick to get email filing. Some will respond to the fear and some will respond to the benefits.
Showing posts with label LITLS 08. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LITLS 08. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Enterprise Search - A Pragmatic View
These are my notes from a panel on enterprise search. One panelist pointed out that enterprise search may be reaching too far. They will not be able to get every silo. You should just try to get most of the silos.
The first question was "make it like Google." The first response was to have a simple interface that delivered relevant results. Relevancy is the hardest part. We do not have the magic special sauce that makes PageRank work so well for Google. One panelist also said that people are looking for Amazon.com. They want an ability to manipulate the search results to filter down to useful content. Another panelist showed the importance of putting the filters on the left-hand side. People are so use to Google putting advertisements on the right-hand side that they ignored the filters if they were on the right.
One issue is how to deliver relevancy or whether to include relevancy. What are the keys to relevancy.
What about the relationship between the document management system and the enterprise search? Most of the knowledge lives in the document management system and email. One panelist pointed out that those two sources are largely limited to work product.
What a bout taxonomy? Knowledge management has been focused on taxonomy. Does enterprise search reduce the need for a taxonomy? The panel all felt that taxonomy was very important to make enterprise search work. [I disagree. You want metadata to filter results. You do not necessarily need a rigid taxonomy.]
There was a lot of discussion about enterprise search inadvertently revealing documents that should not be public. One firm mentioned that they shut the enterprise search down after the a few weeks to give a cooling down period. During the cooling down period, people could put security on documents. Previously they had "security by obscurity." One firm had a policy to report information that is available through the search that should be secure. Another firm did not include administrative documents as part of the initial roll-out of the enterprise search.
The panel thought that any enterprise search is better than no enterprise search. They do produce different results and have some different capabilities. But they all seem to produce much better results than not having one. Some notes are focusing on multi-threading. You do not want people to have to wait in line for their search to run. Another point to focus on the index size. Some indexes are almost as big as the underlying content repositories.
What to include in the enterprise search? The panel responded:
There was some challenge to the request for "The Google." Several audience members think the results need more bells and whistles to work. [I struggle with the question of whether the search tool needs to be more complicated or whether we need to store the information in a better way that simplifies the search.]
How do you prove value of enterprise search? One answer is that is an infrastructure thing, more than an ROI thing.
The panel offered their top advice on choosing and implementing and enterprise search tool:
The first question was "make it like Google." The first response was to have a simple interface that delivered relevant results. Relevancy is the hardest part. We do not have the magic special sauce that makes PageRank work so well for Google. One panelist also said that people are looking for Amazon.com. They want an ability to manipulate the search results to filter down to useful content. Another panelist showed the importance of putting the filters on the left-hand side. People are so use to Google putting advertisements on the right-hand side that they ignored the filters if they were on the right.
One issue is how to deliver relevancy or whether to include relevancy. What are the keys to relevancy.
What about the relationship between the document management system and the enterprise search? Most of the knowledge lives in the document management system and email. One panelist pointed out that those two sources are largely limited to work product.
What a bout taxonomy? Knowledge management has been focused on taxonomy. Does enterprise search reduce the need for a taxonomy? The panel all felt that taxonomy was very important to make enterprise search work. [I disagree. You want metadata to filter results. You do not necessarily need a rigid taxonomy.]
There was a lot of discussion about enterprise search inadvertently revealing documents that should not be public. One firm mentioned that they shut the enterprise search down after the a few weeks to give a cooling down period. During the cooling down period, people could put security on documents. Previously they had "security by obscurity." One firm had a policy to report information that is available through the search that should be secure. Another firm did not include administrative documents as part of the initial roll-out of the enterprise search.
The panel thought that any enterprise search is better than no enterprise search. They do produce different results and have some different capabilities. But they all seem to produce much better results than not having one. Some notes are focusing on multi-threading. You do not want people to have to wait in line for their search to run. Another point to focus on the index size. Some indexes are almost as big as the underlying content repositories.
What to include in the enterprise search? The panel responded:
- Lotus Notes, resume collections, CRM, intranet, KM methodology system
- Lotus Notes, Elite billing information, CRM, records, DMS, website
There was some challenge to the request for "The Google." Several audience members think the results need more bells and whistles to work. [I struggle with the question of whether the search tool needs to be more complicated or whether we need to store the information in a better way that simplifies the search.]
How do you prove value of enterprise search? One answer is that is an infrastructure thing, more than an ROI thing.
The panel offered their top advice on choosing and implementing and enterprise search tool:
- Define the sources to search
- Focus on security recognition
- Understand who is searching for what, in what business context
- Tune-ability of the tool
- Focus on crafting the user interface
- Put it into the toolbar of other applications; bring the ability to search to them
Where is Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?
Michael Idinopulos, the Vice President of Professional Services at Social Text presented on "Where is Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?" for the afternoon session at the Legal IT Leadership Summit. Michael is also the author of the Transparent Office.
Michael helped bring McKipedia to McKinsey. It was an internal wiki to help organize information. He found that there were many wikis already being used in the organization. They were using for project management and similar projects. At the same time as launching McKipedia, he also launched "collaboration spaces" on the side. There was no structure, no sponsorship and no notification across the organization. At first McKipedia was very popular, but died down. Collaboration spaces took off.
Internal wikipedia is not the killer use case. People do not want to edit an encyclopedia. In-the-flow works better than above-the-flow. The tools work better when they are employed to help someone do their daily task, not as an extra job responsibility. Culture is not a prerequisite; it is a journey. You can start in ways that are less about change and less foreign to people.
Michael challenged traditional knowledge management as asking people to capture information outside of their daily job. Traditional knowledge management requires you to take extra steps to do things for the benefit of the firm.
Good enterprise collaboration tools should be part of the daily work. We want to introduce tools that make it easier for the individuals to do their jobs better and more efficiently.
The tools require the mindset of "ask for forgiveness" not "ask for permission."
One collaboration tool has sales representatives email questions to a wiki and then all responses come back to the wiki. [Maybe it would be good to remove all distribution lists from email. You have to go to a web page to email a group. The email message and responses would also be stored in a webpage as a discussion forum.]
There is no need to create a new culture. The 2.0 tools can be used to improve the existing interactions within a single business unit to achieve operational improvement. Then you can expand this create new interactions within the business unit to achieve business innovation. You can expand it across multiple business unit
Collaboration requires a purpose. Why do you have a wiki? Is it to easier share information is to communicate within a team.
You should learn by doing. It is cheap and easy to experiment. You should focus on smaller groups rather than the enterprise as a whole. Focus on empowering the particular office, or practice or team. You should focus on smaller groups to allow them to work in a way that works for them. But you do want to think globally and get the tools to share a common platform. (obviously Michael thinks SocialText offers a great platform.)
Michael helped bring McKipedia to McKinsey. It was an internal wiki to help organize information. He found that there were many wikis already being used in the organization. They were using for project management and similar projects. At the same time as launching McKipedia, he also launched "collaboration spaces" on the side. There was no structure, no sponsorship and no notification across the organization. At first McKipedia was very popular, but died down. Collaboration spaces took off.
Internal wikipedia is not the killer use case. People do not want to edit an encyclopedia. In-the-flow works better than above-the-flow. The tools work better when they are employed to help someone do their daily task, not as an extra job responsibility. Culture is not a prerequisite; it is a journey. You can start in ways that are less about change and less foreign to people.
Michael challenged traditional knowledge management as asking people to capture information outside of their daily job. Traditional knowledge management requires you to take extra steps to do things for the benefit of the firm.
Good enterprise collaboration tools should be part of the daily work. We want to introduce tools that make it easier for the individuals to do their jobs better and more efficiently.
The tools require the mindset of "ask for forgiveness" not "ask for permission."
One collaboration tool has sales representatives email questions to a wiki and then all responses come back to the wiki. [Maybe it would be good to remove all distribution lists from email. You have to go to a web page to email a group. The email message and responses would also be stored in a webpage as a discussion forum.]
There is no need to create a new culture. The 2.0 tools can be used to improve the existing interactions within a single business unit to achieve operational improvement. Then you can expand this create new interactions within the business unit to achieve business innovation. You can expand it across multiple business unit
Collaboration requires a purpose. Why do you have a wiki? Is it to easier share information is to communicate within a team.
You should learn by doing. It is cheap and easy to experiment. You should focus on smaller groups rather than the enterprise as a whole. Focus on empowering the particular office, or practice or team. You should focus on smaller groups to allow them to work in a way that works for them. But you do want to think globally and get the tools to share a common platform. (obviously Michael thinks SocialText offers a great platform.)
Serving Multiple Generations Presentation at the Legal IT Leadership Summit
This morning's keynote session is "Serving Multiple Generations - The Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for IT." Andrew McAfee is the presenter with myself and Jason Lichter as co-panelists. The session is planned to be released in a wiki later this month.
Andy got into this space three or four years ago when he first heard about web 2.o. At first he was skeptical. He finds companies are very innovative and that they are even better at talking about how innovative they are.
Andy was going watch wikipedia and see it an example of the implosion of the web 2.0 movement. Much to his surprise, it did not. I fact, he found the entries to be incredibly useful and informative. His next thought was how this could useful inside an organization as opposed to the world-wide web.
His definition: "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers." This is not an incremental change, these are novel technologies and approaches. They offer more than incremental improvement in areas of innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, collective intelligence, search and discovery.
There are a few underlying trends that are key to the nature of the change. Social software is new way to look at these. There is the network effects and Metcalfe's Law. There are free and easy platforms for communication. There is a lack of up-front structure. There are mechanisms that exist to let structures to emerge, so you can find the information you are looking for.
He distinguished between channel technologies and platforms. Email is a channel communication. It is point to point, invisible to others and cant' be consulted or harvested. Websites are a type of platform; it is universal, visible and consult-able. The problem with the platforms is that you need to know technology and have security rights. Now there are free and easy platforms that remove the expertise and cost associated with the website.
Andy told the story of Wikipedia and Nupedia. He then moved on to del.icio.us and showed us his del.icio.us tags. He compared the del.icio.us tags to the taxonomy of the early days of Yahoo. He pointed out the del.icio.us tag page that shows the most popular tags and which you share.
In talking about clusters and tags it highlighted the powers of the next version of Universal Search and Vivisimo's semantic clustering.
Andy moved onto the business benefits of Enterprise 2.0. He focused on his Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye. He moved on to the story of the cost savings at Intrawest based in internal blogs: Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking.
He moved on to adoption challenges. The biggest is overweighting the advantages of the incumbent and the under-weighting the new. Something new needs to be ten times better for people to shift to the new. Dion Hinchcliffe mentioned this on his Introduction to Social Computing at the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Andy got into this space three or four years ago when he first heard about web 2.o. At first he was skeptical. He finds companies are very innovative and that they are even better at talking about how innovative they are.
Andy was going watch wikipedia and see it an example of the implosion of the web 2.0 movement. Much to his surprise, it did not. I fact, he found the entries to be incredibly useful and informative. His next thought was how this could useful inside an organization as opposed to the world-wide web.
His definition: "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers." This is not an incremental change, these are novel technologies and approaches. They offer more than incremental improvement in areas of innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, collective intelligence, search and discovery.
There are a few underlying trends that are key to the nature of the change. Social software is new way to look at these. There is the network effects and Metcalfe's Law. There are free and easy platforms for communication. There is a lack of up-front structure. There are mechanisms that exist to let structures to emerge, so you can find the information you are looking for.
He distinguished between channel technologies and platforms. Email is a channel communication. It is point to point, invisible to others and cant' be consulted or harvested. Websites are a type of platform; it is universal, visible and consult-able. The problem with the platforms is that you need to know technology and have security rights. Now there are free and easy platforms that remove the expertise and cost associated with the website.
Andy told the story of Wikipedia and Nupedia. He then moved on to del.icio.us and showed us his del.icio.us tags. He compared the del.icio.us tags to the taxonomy of the early days of Yahoo. He pointed out the del.icio.us tag page that shows the most popular tags and which you share.
In talking about clusters and tags it highlighted the powers of the next version of Universal Search and Vivisimo's semantic clustering.
Andy moved onto the business benefits of Enterprise 2.0. He focused on his Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye. He moved on to the story of the cost savings at Intrawest based in internal blogs: Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking.
He moved on to adoption challenges. The biggest is overweighting the advantages of the incumbent and the under-weighting the new. Something new needs to be ten times better for people to shift to the new. Dion Hinchcliffe mentioned this on his Introduction to Social Computing at the 2007 Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Interwoven Trends and Practices in Worksite Deployments
Rizwan Khan talked about change management, in particular in moving to matter centricity. Moving from DocsOpen to iManage was a change in the technology not a change in process. Matter Centricity is a dramatic change in process and user behavior. Attorneys are willing to share files but not as willing to share structure. People want to organize documents in a way that makes sense to them.
Simplicity is key. The change is going to be severe, so make it easier for the attorneys and legal staff. Only push out a few folders at first. One firm said that the have selection process at matter opening to pick the folder structure. Another firm said that they allowed the attorneys to create their own folder structure.
Communication and training is key. Communication up front is key to clarify the business need and convey those needs to the firm-wide audience. You need multiple trainings. People will remember some features and not others. They will have questions.
Rizwan showed an eLearning tool for the Interwoven products. Unfortunately, I could not find it on their website. (Hmm! Why not?)
Rizwan pointed out how the Universal Search can used to deal with centralization, or lack there of. The Universal Search can pull from the disparate systems. Centralization benefits the IT staff, but provides little benefit to the attorneys.
(Universal Search would be very useful tool for mergers. Just point the search at the two firms DMS systems. You can work on merging the systems later.)
One plan for Universal Search is to also incorporate external repositories.
The indexing and search results is much faster in 8.3. A repository of 9 million documents took 30 days in 8.2 and 5 days in 8.3. The search results are much faster in 8.3 (I found this to be very true in our testing.) There were some charts that the user experience for tolerating delays is about 5 seconds. Anything longer than that rapidly becomes unacceptable.
Simplicity is key. The change is going to be severe, so make it easier for the attorneys and legal staff. Only push out a few folders at first. One firm said that the have selection process at matter opening to pick the folder structure. Another firm said that they allowed the attorneys to create their own folder structure.
Communication and training is key. Communication up front is key to clarify the business need and convey those needs to the firm-wide audience. You need multiple trainings. People will remember some features and not others. They will have questions.
Rizwan showed an eLearning tool for the Interwoven products. Unfortunately, I could not find it on their website. (Hmm! Why not?)
Rizwan pointed out how the Universal Search can used to deal with centralization, or lack there of. The Universal Search can pull from the disparate systems. Centralization benefits the IT staff, but provides little benefit to the attorneys.
(Universal Search would be very useful tool for mergers. Just point the search at the two firms DMS systems. You can work on merging the systems later.)
One plan for Universal Search is to also incorporate external repositories.
The indexing and search results is much faster in 8.3. A repository of 9 million documents took 30 days in 8.2 and 5 days in 8.3. The search results are much faster in 8.3 (I found this to be very true in our testing.) There were some charts that the user experience for tolerating delays is about 5 seconds. Anything longer than that rapidly becomes unacceptable.
Interwoven Case Study on WorkSite 8.3
I was asked to speak about The Firm's Worksite 8.3 implementation. Kevin Hicks from Interwoven was able to supply the technical side of information. My main focus of presentation was on the user interface and user experience.
Everyone asks us for Google. "Why can't we just have Google search our documents?" Larry and Sergei are billionaires because they figured out the special sauce for searching and ranking webpages. What our people are asking for is a simple interface that returns documents in a meaningful way. Instead, with Interwoven we give a lot of fields to search in very database look with documents returned in a flat result list.
Before throwing Interwoven under the bus, there are four types of searches and Interwoven does two of them very well. The four types are fetch, recall, research and precedent. Interwoven excels at the fetch and recall search. These are by far the most common searches run at most firms.
It is the research and precedent that deliver the knowledge management value by allowing attorneys to find and reuse relevant content.
Until Worksite 8.3 and Express Search, they did poorly at research. Interwoven Express Search now delivers on research. Nobody does a precedent search. That is one of goals for enterprise search.
A deeper discussion of the four types of search.
With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. This is core document management activity.
With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for.
The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases.
With a precedent, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words "Florida" "retail shopping center" and "buyer favorable" may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information.
Everyone asks us for Google. "Why can't we just have Google search our documents?" Larry and Sergei are billionaires because they figured out the special sauce for searching and ranking webpages. What our people are asking for is a simple interface that returns documents in a meaningful way. Instead, with Interwoven we give a lot of fields to search in very database look with documents returned in a flat result list.
Before throwing Interwoven under the bus, there are four types of searches and Interwoven does two of them very well. The four types are fetch, recall, research and precedent. Interwoven excels at the fetch and recall search. These are by far the most common searches run at most firms.
It is the research and precedent that deliver the knowledge management value by allowing attorneys to find and reuse relevant content.
Until Worksite 8.3 and Express Search, they did poorly at research. Interwoven Express Search now delivers on research. Nobody does a precedent search. That is one of goals for enterprise search.
A deeper discussion of the four types of search.
With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. This is core document management activity.
With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for.
The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases.
With a precedent, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words "Florida" "retail shopping center" and "buyer favorable" may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information.
Interwoven New Features Demo
Four firms have Worksite 8.3 in production, four will be live in 30 days, 8 firms live within 90 days.
Interwoven presented areas of improvement:
Worksite 8.5 will have greatly improved offline access. They have a new, ground-up offline mode. It will have background synchronization and on-demand synchronization.
Rafiq also talked up records management. (I am not familiar with the records management piece.)
Worksite 8.5 will offer some access through the browser so they can expand access through more mobile devices. Certainly some email management through the blackberry will be a plus. I have not seen much demand for documents through the blackberry.
First up on the demo was Worksite Mobility 8.3. It is a mini-browser based access to Interwoven WorkSite. One key thing that caught me attention is that you can access the email in Worksite and forward and deal with the email. This actually could be a big improvement over current functionality. Right now I have a hard time accessing email filed in my email folders. This will be a big plus for encouraging people to file into WorkSite. You can find the email from your blackberry. Good stuff!!
Worksite 8.5 will have server side filing of email instead of client side filing of email. Right now if you file a lot of emails, it can bog down Outlook and your computer while it processes the emails by moving them from Outlook into WorkSite and profiling them in WorkSite.
You will be able to link a mailbox sub-folder with a WorkSite folder. You can take an email folder, click a button to link it to a worksite folder and synch the two folders. After moving an email into the outlook folder, they will be filed into WorkSite. A copy stays in the folder as a convenience copy. It is not clear if the purge and filing works in these folders. It is an interesting direction, but will depend on execution.
Offsite 8.5 allows you take matter workspaces or individual folders with you. You can pick the container. The synchronization takes place in the background. I have a lot of questions about how the documents are affected if multiple people access the documents and edit them in different places. If I have it offline and edit the document and someone is online and edits the documents, what happens and which version wins first. In the current version of WorkSite, only one person can access a document at a time. This offline mode seems to indicate that multiple people can edit the document, not knowing that other people are also editing the document. The audience had many questions and concerns about this feature. The Interwoven folks did not have a clear message or understanding of some of the issues and concerns.
Worksite 8.5 will bring improvements to Express Search. In the result set for Express Search, a mouseover will reveal more profile information about the document. They added intelli-type and recently used terms in the search. F2 will pull up the pop-up field for particular fields.
Next up was exploring some of the features of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 and how it may fit into WorkSite and Universal Search. This introduces things like ratings, tagging and annotations. [I previously expressed my excitement about this feature:Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration and The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search. No, I do not think lawyers will immediately jump on to these features. But from the knowledge management perspective, it will provide a great tool for highlighting the better content in the document management system. Even if only a few attorneys use these features it will have an enormous impact on the system and the return on documents. The ability to tag and annotate documents will be available in the underlying tools like MS Word. You also should be able to generate the usual 2.0 features like tag clouds. I am still excited about this feature and am looking forward to it coming out. You can also generate some reports with top tags and top taggers. These tags are one of the ways I see that we can get the document management system to be more effective on a precedent search.
Next up was the records management features. We do not use this and I do not particularly understand it. I admit that I am big ignorant on the needs of records management. I just want to be able find my stuff.
WorkSite 8.5 is scheduled for release in fourth quarter of 2008. Universal Search 6.0 with the social features is also scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2008. Hopefully, I will get them in my Christmas stocking.
Rafiq also mentioned Project Meritage which is the next generation of WorkSite. It would still be compatible with 8.5 clients. It will be compatible with Unicode, will improve compatibility, allow for consolidations and consolidate records, documents and images in a single server.
Interwoven presented areas of improvement:
- Email filing is still complex and requires desktop computing power
- Only support blackberries and no other mobile devices
- Offline mode is antiquated
- Records management user interface needs to be improved
- Have not exploited Vivisimo's search capabilities
- Application integration is cumbersome and the use of macros is tough
Worksite 8.5 will have greatly improved offline access. They have a new, ground-up offline mode. It will have background synchronization and on-demand synchronization.
Rafiq also talked up records management. (I am not familiar with the records management piece.)
Worksite 8.5 will offer some access through the browser so they can expand access through more mobile devices. Certainly some email management through the blackberry will be a plus. I have not seen much demand for documents through the blackberry.
First up on the demo was Worksite Mobility 8.3. It is a mini-browser based access to Interwoven WorkSite. One key thing that caught me attention is that you can access the email in Worksite and forward and deal with the email. This actually could be a big improvement over current functionality. Right now I have a hard time accessing email filed in my email folders. This will be a big plus for encouraging people to file into WorkSite. You can find the email from your blackberry. Good stuff!!
Worksite 8.5 will have server side filing of email instead of client side filing of email. Right now if you file a lot of emails, it can bog down Outlook and your computer while it processes the emails by moving them from Outlook into WorkSite and profiling them in WorkSite.
You will be able to link a mailbox sub-folder with a WorkSite folder. You can take an email folder, click a button to link it to a worksite folder and synch the two folders. After moving an email into the outlook folder, they will be filed into WorkSite. A copy stays in the folder as a convenience copy. It is not clear if the purge and filing works in these folders. It is an interesting direction, but will depend on execution.
Offsite 8.5 allows you take matter workspaces or individual folders with you. You can pick the container. The synchronization takes place in the background. I have a lot of questions about how the documents are affected if multiple people access the documents and edit them in different places. If I have it offline and edit the document and someone is online and edits the documents, what happens and which version wins first. In the current version of WorkSite, only one person can access a document at a time. This offline mode seems to indicate that multiple people can edit the document, not knowing that other people are also editing the document. The audience had many questions and concerns about this feature. The Interwoven folks did not have a clear message or understanding of some of the issues and concerns.
Worksite 8.5 will bring improvements to Express Search. In the result set for Express Search, a mouseover will reveal more profile information about the document. They added intelli-type and recently used terms in the search. F2 will pull up the pop-up field for particular fields.
Next up was exploring some of the features of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 and how it may fit into WorkSite and Universal Search. This introduces things like ratings, tagging and annotations. [I previously expressed my excitement about this feature:Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration and The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search. No, I do not think lawyers will immediately jump on to these features. But from the knowledge management perspective, it will provide a great tool for highlighting the better content in the document management system. Even if only a few attorneys use these features it will have an enormous impact on the system and the return on documents. The ability to tag and annotate documents will be available in the underlying tools like MS Word. You also should be able to generate the usual 2.0 features like tag clouds. I am still excited about this feature and am looking forward to it coming out. You can also generate some reports with top tags and top taggers. These tags are one of the ways I see that we can get the document management system to be more effective on a precedent search.
Next up was the records management features. We do not use this and I do not particularly understand it. I admit that I am big ignorant on the needs of records management. I just want to be able find my stuff.
WorkSite 8.5 is scheduled for release in fourth quarter of 2008. Universal Search 6.0 with the social features is also scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2008. Hopefully, I will get them in my Christmas stocking.
Rafiq also mentioned Project Meritage which is the next generation of WorkSite. It would still be compatible with 8.5 clients. It will be compatible with Unicode, will improve compatibility, allow for consolidations and consolidate records, documents and images in a single server.
Interwoven Roadmap, Strategy & Vision for 2008 and Beyond
Rafiq Mohammadi the CTO of Interwoven was the presenter for this session.
Three drivers for professional service firms: risks, client expectations and battle for talent. Interwoven wants to position itself as a productivity tool.
The strategy is to provide a complete solution to organize, find and govern information. Rafiq acknowledged that find or search was a weakness of their product, but the 8.3 release now turns it into one of their strengths.
The want to meet the ease of use expectations of Google. They are moving to a simple user interface, available in many devices. They also want to embed access to the Interwoven product in many platforms instead of having to go to a free-standing, separate program.
They also realize they need to scale up to handle many more documents. If they are going to be a repository for email, they realize that the number of emails will greatly exceed the number of documents. [Law firms are not ready to tackle Luis Suarez's reduction in email.]
Interwoven wants to focus on opening the platform to integrate with other applications and be able to support new applications without difficult development.
They gave a demo of email filing and management, in particular the send and file functions. Send and file really requires their matter centric environment to work. The presentation had two buttons with "send" and "send and file." With send and file, a screen pops up and asks for the client matter designation. Unfortunately, the file screen that pops up is terrible. It does give you the option to pull down a list of recent matters, the ability to just put in client matter numbers or send only. One nice feature is that a reply email has a "luggage tag" that designates where the original message came from. When you file the email, that tagged matter comes up automatically.
The email integration also allows you to keep courtesy copies in their inbox with a flag designating that the email has been filed in WorkSite. There is a button that purges all of the filed emails out of your inbox. (It is not clear if the purge only works on the inbox, or also in other email folders in exchange.)
One problem that pops up is that if the recipient is also on email management client, there will be competing "luggage tags" for the emails and the email chain. (ouch!)
They moved on to Interwoven Express Search. It is a floating toolbar that pops up with a simple "Google-ish" search box. It also returns results based on relevancy. There is also a query builder that you can pop-up to do an more advanced search by limiting the search results to particular fields.
The problem with the query builder is that they introduce some new terminology. We are used to limiting based on particular document types, Adobe, Word, PowerPoint, etc. They lump Office documents into one category. They also introduce the concept of "my stuff" and I am not sure what the definition of my stuff is. One problem we are having with 8.3 is that it does not seem to work well for searching for a document when you have the document ID.
Lastly, is onto Universal Search, powered by Vivisimo. This a great move forward on Interwoven's approach. I am a big fan of Vivisimo's approach of semantic clustering of results, along with the more straight-forward clustering of results based on hard-coded taxonomy. I have found the semantic clustering to be somewhat hit or miss. If the documents are rich in words you can get some interesting clusters. Otherwise the clusters can look very odd.
I very excited to see some graphical representations of some of the taxonomy. So you can see that a particular person is the author of most of the documents in the results. That starts exposing expertise.
Three drivers for professional service firms: risks, client expectations and battle for talent. Interwoven wants to position itself as a productivity tool.
The strategy is to provide a complete solution to organize, find and govern information. Rafiq acknowledged that find or search was a weakness of their product, but the 8.3 release now turns it into one of their strengths.
The want to meet the ease of use expectations of Google. They are moving to a simple user interface, available in many devices. They also want to embed access to the Interwoven product in many platforms instead of having to go to a free-standing, separate program.
They also realize they need to scale up to handle many more documents. If they are going to be a repository for email, they realize that the number of emails will greatly exceed the number of documents. [Law firms are not ready to tackle Luis Suarez's reduction in email.]
Interwoven wants to focus on opening the platform to integrate with other applications and be able to support new applications without difficult development.
They gave a demo of email filing and management, in particular the send and file functions. Send and file really requires their matter centric environment to work. The presentation had two buttons with "send" and "send and file." With send and file, a screen pops up and asks for the client matter designation. Unfortunately, the file screen that pops up is terrible. It does give you the option to pull down a list of recent matters, the ability to just put in client matter numbers or send only. One nice feature is that a reply email has a "luggage tag" that designates where the original message came from. When you file the email, that tagged matter comes up automatically.
The email integration also allows you to keep courtesy copies in their inbox with a flag designating that the email has been filed in WorkSite. There is a button that purges all of the filed emails out of your inbox. (It is not clear if the purge only works on the inbox, or also in other email folders in exchange.)
One problem that pops up is that if the recipient is also on email management client, there will be competing "luggage tags" for the emails and the email chain. (ouch!)
They moved on to Interwoven Express Search. It is a floating toolbar that pops up with a simple "Google-ish" search box. It also returns results based on relevancy. There is also a query builder that you can pop-up to do an more advanced search by limiting the search results to particular fields.
The problem with the query builder is that they introduce some new terminology. We are used to limiting based on particular document types, Adobe, Word, PowerPoint, etc. They lump Office documents into one category. They also introduce the concept of "my stuff" and I am not sure what the definition of my stuff is. One problem we are having with 8.3 is that it does not seem to work well for searching for a document when you have the document ID.
Lastly, is onto Universal Search, powered by Vivisimo. This a great move forward on Interwoven's approach. I am a big fan of Vivisimo's approach of semantic clustering of results, along with the more straight-forward clustering of results based on hard-coded taxonomy. I have found the semantic clustering to be somewhat hit or miss. If the documents are rich in words you can get some interesting clusters. Otherwise the clusters can look very odd.
I very excited to see some graphical representations of some of the taxonomy. So you can see that a particular person is the author of most of the documents in the results. That starts exposing expertise.
Interwowen - State of the Company
Joe Cowan, the CEO of Interwoven started off the Legal IT Leadership Summit talking of the state of the company.
The company is very strong financially. Joe presented great revenue numbers, great profits and other items of a solid financial position.
Seventy-one percent of the Global 100 firms are customers of Interwoven.
Interwoven's strategic vision:
The company is very strong financially. Joe presented great revenue numbers, great profits and other items of a solid financial position.
Seventy-one percent of the Global 100 firms are customers of Interwoven.
Interwoven's strategic vision:
- Best of breed in their markets - They want to be the best at what they do.
- Innovative leader - Listening and thinking outside the box
- Strategic partner
- Very focused businesses
Interwoven Legal ITLeadership Summit 2008
I spending Monday and Tuesday in Georgia at the seventh Legal IT Leadership Summit sponsored by Interwoven. We are staying at the wonderful Ritz Carlton Reynolds Plantation.
Today, I am presenting on a customer case study on "Deploying WorkSite 8.3." Tuesday, I am on a panel with Andrew McAfee and Jason Lichter on "Serving Multiple Generations - The Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for IT".
I will trying blogging my notes for the other sessions.
Today, I am presenting on a customer case study on "Deploying WorkSite 8.3." Tuesday, I am on a panel with Andrew McAfee and Jason Lichter on "Serving Multiple Generations - The Role of Web 2.0 and Strategies for IT".
I will trying blogging my notes for the other sessions.
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