Doug Cornelius .com

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:

• 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 has some improvements to email management. It has a suggestive email filing, like the blackberry has, to help you pick the appropriate location for the email.

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.

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.

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:

• 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

As Davenport and Prusak state in Working Knowledge: “People rarely give away valuable possessions, including knowledge, without expecting something in return.”

First generation knowledge systems expected people to contribute to them because it was for the collective good. Everyone had the benefit of this good work product, organized in the central taxonomy of the firm.

Many companies offered incentives, like gift cards, for contributing to the system. If you have to give away a prize to motivate people to contribute, then perhaps they do not seen enough value in contributing. What in it for me? Sure, you get the Starbucks giftcard. And you get some smug satisfaction for contributing into the central knowledge system vault.

The failure of these first generation knowledge management systems was that the central knowledge system does give the user a significantly better way to manage their personal knowledge. It is outside of their normal workflow and outside of the places they normally look for knowledge and advice. The contribution helps others find the contributor’s work product, but it does not make it easier for the contributor to find and manage their own work product.

Knowledge management solutions will work better if they are focused on improving the normal workflow and better capturing that information. The user is more likely to use a new tool if it is easy to use and provides more functionality than what they currently use. As Dion Hincliffe pointed out, the new tool needs to be many times more useful than the current tool for people to use the new tool.

A case in point is a document management system. The system needs to provide much more functionality than the user would get from saving the documents to their local computer. Our Interwoven document management system offers version control, better searching, automatic backup, and many other features you do not get on you desktop. In exchange, as part of the knowledge market the rest of the firm gets the ability to find and reuse those documents.

I have been a basher of Interwoven for years, ever since we deployed it (when it was called iManage) almost a decade ago. It has always been good at managing documents and retrieving your documents. It shortcomings was in finding other people’s documents. Especially when you were not sure if the document existed. Interwoven is taking a big step to curing that problem.

We are pretty far down the path of deploying version 8.3 of their Worksite product. The big change is the new Vivisimo Velocity search engine. So far it is giving us blazingly fast search results.

They have also delivered a new way to search: Express Search.

Interwoven is giving us “The Google” for documents. It is one simple box that combines several of the metadata fields into one cohesive fast search. It combines the full text search with the document name and other metadata fields to one unified fast search. The results come back fast and based on relevancy rather than a grid sorting on a field.

Did I mention fast?

I can run a simple search. Add other terms one at a time to narrow results and delete terms to back out the search. All with results coming back at the snap of my fingers.

Having the results come back based on relevancy is fantastic. Getting two hundred documents back based on the last edit date is not giving you a meaningful search result.

The Express Search is especially compelling when you compare it side by side with the traditional Interwoven search.

We are still running some testing and deciding on some global settings. But we hope to have it deployed by the end of the month.

Interwoven presented a webinar on enterprise search focusing on their Interwoven Universal Search product using the Vivisimo Velocity search engine. Interwoven wants to be the exclusive provider of enterprise search to the professional services area.

Gerald Reid CIO of Milbank Tweed Hadley and McCLoy LLP was the presenter. Milbank has over 600 lawyers and over 1000 employees in ten offices.

In 1999 Milbank tried saving emails into their matter management system. It turned out that the search for emails would be too slow to work. In 2001 they brought in AltaVista (remember them) to implement a search engine for their document management system. Attorneys quickly saw the value of the system. The search engine combined the full text search and metadata for the document. This was particularly valuable because it enabled you to easily search across the multiple document libraries. It was easy to search your local library, but hard to search outside other libraries. The attorneys loved it. Gerald got love notes. How often does IT get love notes praising a new tool?

Then, AltaVista went out of business. Milbank kept the product running, but did so naked, with no further vendor support. At this point they were running DocsOpen and Hummingbird. They ran a bake-off between FAST and Hummingbird’s Search Server. FAST took days to index the documents and had an index bigger than the document library. The Hummingbird product never quite met the performance of AltaVista.

They moved on to test Autonomy, Recommind and Vivisomo. They presented each of the three with a 700,000 document library. Autonomy took 6 weeks to index. Recommind and Vivisimo took two days. Autonomy also split big documents into multiple pieces. Recommind had performance issues. Recommind did not multi-thread (each search runs in order so you need to wait for the search in front of you to finish).

Vivisimo’s initial search results were not as relevant. But with a few minutes of tweaking, the results were just as good as Reccomind. They do have multi-thread processing. The semantic clustering was a bonus feature.

His word of advice is that enterprise search is a killer-app. If you do not have enterprise search, any one of these products will provide extraordinary results. Since Milbank already had an enterprise search, they were a little picky.

Advantages of Vivisimo:

* searches all versions of a document many just search the latest version
* searches email attachments
* Snippets. You can see a piece of relevant text in the search results.
* Clustering. They group similar results. See Clusty.com
* Stemming. Deals with plurals and tense.
* Thesaurus. They have a legal specific thesaurus. And have some for other industries.

The document environment for Milbank’s deployment consisted of:

* 3.5 million documents
* 8.2 million saved documents
* 5.7 million email attachments

The initial indexing of documents took 2 days and emails and attachments took about 7 days. He thought the time could be decreased if you used better hardware than they did.

He had a few surprises, but mostly in the searching philosophy on how results should be returned. They are deploying to a pilot group of secretaries and attorneys this month.

I found it interesting that they do not use Interwoven as their document management system. They use DocsOpen.

They allow the individual to decide whether to show snippets or not.

He ran a complicated search that returned 31 documents from documents around the world, with the results coming back almost instantly.

He ran a generic search for: Chase citibank citigroup. 3,100 documents from around the world came back quickly, clustered into “proposal”, “credit agreement”, “Goldman Sachs”, and a few other clusters. He quickly filtered those results on metadata such as author.

It was an impressive display. I had been skeptical of how the clustering would work with a set of legal documents. Let’s face it, legal documents generally do not have a diverse vocabulary to distinguish among them. But the clustering worked well.

They are planning to add their internal portal to be indexed and searched by the product. They also want to index the finance system to add other metadata from that system onto the documents.

Interwoven also announced that DLA Piper has selected Universal Search. [Correction: The US Branch of DLA Piper has selected Universal Search]

Some representatives of Interwoven gave my group a look at the new searching tools that are coming out in their 8.3 release in December. These upcoming changes look like they will transform their document management system into a powerful knowledge management tool.

We use Interwoven Worksite as our document management system, with the Desksite client application and Filesite Outlook integration. We are lawyers. We write lots of agreements, memos and briefs. So, the document management system has always been our largest knowledge repository.

It has worked well to store and manage the document, but it has never worked well at retrieving the knowledge from the system. As I mentioned in earlier posts, a document management system typically is great on the management side and less on the knowledge side. The key role of the document management system is controlling the drafting of documents. It makes it easier to identify particular documents, fetch them back from the system, and edit them. A document management system works great to recall particular sets of documents back from the system using profiled metadata, like client and matter designations.

The document management system usually comes up short in searching for a precedent or research. Interwoven is particularly hampered because the search engine in the product seemed to be underpowered for the multi-million number of documents in our system. The other problem was the scattering of information across the profile fields for a document. For example, I am looking for a purchase and sale agreement used by ABC Corp. to buy the Blackacre Shopping Center. The key terms in the search “purchase and sale agreement”, “ABC Corp.” and “Blackacre Shopping Center” may be in any number of metadata fields: the client name field, the matter name field, the document name field or the full text of the document itself. You would have to run multiple searches to deal with the multiple combinations of which fields may contain the search criteria.

Interwoven is planning to improve its performance in these types of searches with its new 8.3 release. The big change is adding in the Vivisimo Velocity search engine under the hood. This appears to give searches in the system a big boost in speed and responsiveness. This 8.3 release is separate from the Universal Search web-based product but uses some of the same hardware and indexing technology.

The first great change is Interwoven’s goal to give the user a single textbox to search. (Just like Google.) In giving the user one box to search, Interwoven combines that across all (or at least many) of the metadata fields. This new version should allow you to find my earlier example of the “purchase and sale agreement used by ABC Corp. to buy the Blackacre Shopping Center” just by typing into a single search box. The search will query the various metadata fields instead of the user having to guess which field may contain the information you need.

The next great change is that search results now come back based on relevancy, which is a huge boost to the usability of Interwoven for a research type of search. In its current version, Interwoven presents documents in a grid, sorted by one of the columns: title, last edit, date, document number, etc. That is useless when you are trying to find information on a subject. You want the deepest treatment presented first on the list, not the documents starting with the letter “A.”

We have been pouring our documents into the document management system for decades. We have been looking for better ways to better pull that information out and utilize it. This new release may finally allow us to release that.

• Beth Chiase, National Director of Loss Prevention of Foley & Lardner LLP
• John J. Kruse, Director of Records & Conflicts Administration of Calwalder, Wickersham & Taft LLP
• Ann M. Ostrander, Senior Loss Prevention Manager of Kirkland & Ellis
• Keith Lipman, Senior Manager, Legal Solutions & Product Manager of Interwoven, Inc.

At Kirkland, the DMS is the repository for records. The DMS for electronic records and the RM system for physical records are the only place that client records should reside. They have developed a taxonomy, practice of law, for both physical records and electronic records. They have instituted a proactive security policy in the DMS. On a confidential matter, document access is restricted to a limited group. This is an issue with overnight word processing. They do not have permission.

Why have document types?

The longer the list, the more likely people will pick miscellaneous. It is very beneficial to drive document retention against different document types. As you are developing your list, a primary driver is how long you are going to keep the document in the system. (Maybe you should delete fax cover sheets quickly.) It may make more sense to drive the retention by practice area.

How have they approached document types and folder in Matter Centricity of Interwoven?

Cadwalader has 12 different types of folder lists, depending on the practice group. They have had to go back and revise half of those lists. They tried to maintain the one-to-one of folder name to document type. As the lists were revised they broke away from that on-to-one structure. They now have 18 different types of folder lists.

At Kirkland, they have twenty different document types. Different practice areas, have different lists of folders. Different areas of laws have different folder types. They have an “other” folder that allows the user to pick a different document type.

Foley did not create different folders lists for practice areas. They thought there was too much cross practice area work on most matters. Foley has five folders for each matter: email, work in progress, executed documents, temporary, and correspondence. The user needs to add a document type. That is all they have input. The client and matter information are added by saving the document into the folder. The folder structure is based on status of the document. In retrospect, John would have gone with a similar strategy as Foley.

Cadwalader found that emails and documents were getting mixed in folders. John found that emails were being added to document folders because of the attachment.

Cadwalader and Foley want to get as much email out of Outlook and into Interwoven.

John raised the issue of emails that cover multiple matters. Where do you put it? They decided to have a personal workspace for partners to store emails like this. Associates do not get a personal email folder.

To get buy-in, they pitch the cost savings and compliance requirements. They can easily address litigation holds.

All three panelists chose LegalKey, mostly because of the conflicts checking capabilities of the software. They seem underwhelmed by the records management functionality of LegalKey. If they were looking now, they would have separate systems. When they purchase LegalKey, records was a hanger-on.

The panel agreed that document types did not translate to the knowledge management system. They found that attorneys were not searching on document types and the document types were not impacting search results.

An audience member suggested that document retention should be based on matter, not documents. They determine retention based on the matter. She thought it was unduly complicated to introduce the document level retention.

I saw a preview of two new search tools from Interwoven. I think they will dramatically improve the ability of users to pull relevant information from their document management system.

[Disclaimer: Shortly after their presentation, Interwoven brought me and dozens of others to EPCOT for dinner, followed by a private desert reception overlooking the fireworks.]

The first tool is their WorkSite Miner tool. It is an improved search tool built into the Interwoven application. The results are returned in their typical results grid. But, you can group the results based on any column of information. This feature looks like it operates similar to the grouping function in Outlook. You grab the column heading with your mouse and drag it into the table header. You can pull additional column headings to have multiple layers of grouping.

In connection with this tool, they also made a simple search box available. This new search box operates outside the application and can be pulled up at any time using desktop commands.

The second tool is their new Universal Search. This is a new enterprise search tool powered by Vivisimo’s Velocity search tool. The Universal Search has faceting searching that allows you to focus a broad search using the document metadata. You can filter documents by a particular client, document type, or whatever else you force your users to profile on a document when they save it into Interwoven.

It also has the semantic clustering of topics in the documents from Vivisimo (To see how this works, try some searches on Clusty.com, which is powered by Vivisimo.)

The Universal Search can be set up to index other datasources, such as your intranet, CRM or other information repository. Also, when you search, you can limit your search to a particular repository. Out of the box, it will have connectors for SharePoint, some CRM systems and email systems.

I really liked their approach to limit the date range. They show a histogram with a graphical representation of the number of results on each particular date. You can use a simple slider to limit the date range and visually see the volume of documents being included or excluded. This looks much easier to deal with as compared to using a pop-up calendar to limit and supplies much more information to the user.

The Universal Search will also have an alert feature. When new items would be returned by the search, it will show the new additions to the results set.

Universal Search is targeted for release at the end of September 2007.

InterWoven wanted to take two approaches, one with Interwoven as the platform and the second to expose Interwoven through SharePoint. Their exposure through SharePoint is through Worksite for SharePoint.

They provide a lengthy list of webparts:

• Checked out documents
• Worklist
• My Favorites
• My Matters
• Matter Worklist
• My Worksite
• Search for documents
• Search for Workspaces
• Saved search
• Expose workspace folders
• User administration
• Independent folder (assemble a collection documents outside of Worksite – avoids refiling issues, cross library issues)

The webparts have full desktop functionality (or nearly full), including check out, email and add to my shortcuts. Through an ActiveX control, you can have tight integration and open the document and application. You can also change the views of your document list. They also make it easy to remove or disable the menus, so you can dumb down the display.

You can show single pane or double pane views.

The webparts are based on AJAX so it happens fast. (We have some hacks to publish Interwoven folders on our Sharepoint 2003. Ours run slower and are clunkier than these new webparts.)

Also they are going to allow the ability to attach a worksite document to a SharePoint list item. This functionality will be in the next version of the product coming out in 2008 Q1

These are a great set of tools with great flexibility.