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Document Management

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by beboo

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Hey, all.

I was just wondering what everyone here does for document management. Currently, I have several shares on our file server, one for each legal department and a public share. Under each department share, each attorney has their own folder in which they usually contain folders for each of their clients. Problem is that if a few attorneys are working together on a client, each attorney has a copy of a brief in their own folder which is causing duplicates and even causing problems as to "which one is newer."

Anyway, my question is what does everyone use to manage documents? I briefly looked into M$ SharePoint and got confused so I thought I'd see if anyone else has any ideas. What I was thinking i would like would be a program where each client is a "project" or something and under that, you can store files, emails, attachments, etc and be allowed to give other people access to it but everyone is working in the same "project" not their own personal folder.

Any ideas? Thanks so much for your input!

8 replies

by retro77

Once you ahve SharePoint installed and working, its great for document management. People can check out a file and even save revisions. Another feature is you can create different 'sites' that may be seperated by project or job function. The Accounting dept could have a 'site' and house all of their accounting docs. Also its easy to give permissions to.

Network shares work too. You have to get the people out of the mindset that they need to save a copy for themselves. They need to leave it in a central location for everyone.

Under those folders, create a common folder that shared documents go in. You can also ACL it more granularly as well.

by beboo

... read up on setting up a SharePoint server? I still have a Longhorn beta server running which came with SharePoint 2007 but I just couldn't figure it out. Do you know of any sites that would offer a good tutorial on at least getting me started? Thanks!

by dr dij

is kind of limited in what it does. It may be all you need tho. aiim.org has good free info on ecm in articles, and local meetings / seminars at times.

I took online course with mindleaders.com (subscription site) to figureout features of sharepoint. I think the ieee (computer.org) or ACM.org course lists probably include sharepoint courses, and these are free with membership.

by mike.bray

Hi...we have just released a legal module that tackles exactly what you describe. Our applications creates business objects that become the anchor for association. There is no need for a database and all your information remains where it is today.

If you are still looking to address this problem, please contact me at mike.bray@novabrain.com and I will send you the product overview as its not yet on our site.

by av .

Interwoven used to be called Imanage. It is a robust solution for document management in a law firm. It can be customized according to your needs. You have the ability to work in a matter-centric environment that pretty much is what you've described as a project.

Interwoven offers solid security, collaboration and a great search engine. Sharepoint does not have all the capabilities of Interwoven.

I have also worked with PC DOCS/Hummingbird DM from OpenText, but would not recommend their product.

AV

by rar

This is from a reasonably competent user. Our law firm is rolling out Interwoven FileSite as an "upgrade" from iManage. iManage was barely usable. FileSite abandons the good and stable features that existed in iManage in favor of useless "integration" with Outlook. The result is a number of our lawyers and staff now just don't use the DMS at all.

FileSite is difficult to configure so that anyone over the age of 40 can see it. This is because it relies heavily on the Navigation Pane in Outlook 2003, where fonts cannot be readily changed.

It is slow and requires hardware upgrades.

The "matter-centric" "feature" is a ridiculous sales concept that just makes it darn near impossible to save a newly created document without click click clicking. Legal secretaries are touch typists and they don't want to browse through layers of menus just to save a document. All the idiots have to do is add fields to allow the user to type in the mother and child folder fields. Why anyone would have rolled this product out (let alone bought it!!) without this feature suggests that the developers (and the buyers) do not understand what the users need.

Searching the database is equally and needlessly time-consuming.

If you want to be a hero to your users, give them something that does not move, does not change positions, has easy to use fields that a touch typist can tab through and fill out without touching the darn mouse.

If you want to be a goat, roll out this turkey without asking the people who use it everyday.

by dr dij

thanks for the revu.

also aiim.org probably has articles, revus on various ecm's. they concentrate on this, erm, bpm..

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