Global News
iManage has announced its strategic vision and product roadmap for delivering the next generation of Matter Centric Collaboration (MCC): Work Product Management. The company says iManage Work Product Management will deliver a ‘completely revamped, intuitive user experience that removes friction between different devices and applications and enables professionals to perform their daily tasks in a more streamlined fashion’.
These new capabilities will be introduced to users progressively over the next 24 months, and delivered so that existing customers can adopt them with minimal training and disruption.
According to iManage, complicated file trees will be replaced with a search-driven interface that rapidly filters large results and efficiently cuts through organizational confusion. New analytic and search driven intelligence will also provide professionals with deeper insights into what is happening in a client’s world, or around a particular engagement, to make them more effective in serving clients from any location, at any time.
A further improvement is the introduction of deeper integration with key authoring editing and review technologies such as metadata scrubbing, document comparison, ethical walls, time and billing, and much more.
iManage also claims the new platform will remove the need for traditional software training sessions, making the onboarding, training and upgrade process as intuitive as consumer apps. Over the coming months, users can expect capabilities such as new feature introduction integrated within the application, with introductory wizards, in-line help, and ultimately a standard library hosted training videos, which organizations will be able to adopt or extend to their own needs.
iManage has announced significant enhancements to its core products: iManage Work (document and email management), iManage Share (secure file sharing), iManage Insight (enterprise search and analytics) and iManage Govern (records and information governance). Available in the upcoming Winter 2015 release, slated for November 2015, these enhancements are focused on improving users’ experience with core product functionality across all products, improving user productivity and increasing users’ satisfaction.
Specifically, iManage concentrated this first set of product improvements on modernizing the user interface for iManage Work, specifically FileSite and DeskSite, improving email management suggestions and WorkSite Communication Server performance, and enriching matter centric collaboration (MCC) task flows with improved search, streamlining application integration and more.
Upgrades to iManage Share include the ability to create co-branded virtual worksites, matter-specific dashboards to improve visibility and governance, and easy integration with Microsoft Outlook contacts as well as support for sub-folders for complex matters.
Recent enhancements to iManage Insight include enhanced preview, result sorting and document rendition, new personalized search settings, search hit highlighting and new WYSIWYG administration tools, designed to reduce the friction and cost in upgrading to new versions of iManage Insight.
New features in iManage Govern include search and reporting enhancements, enhanced barcode operations, and many other user requested enhancements. Upcoming features include retention and disposition workflows and external warehouse integration.
The iManage leadership team has named leading UK law firm Shepherd and Wedderburn the EMEA winner of its 2015 Award for Excellence in Work Product Management for the firm’s successful migration of more than 2.5 million documents to the iManage Work solution (formerly HP WorkSite). This award is designed to recognize professional services firms who demonstrate excellence in the implementation, use and results achieved using work product management solutions.
With over 500 partners and staff and offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Aberdeen, Shepherd and Wedderburn delivers comprehensive multi-jurisdictional legal advice across all business sectors as well as offering a range of private client and wealth management services.
iManage partner Ascertus Limited handled the migration, which involved documentation concerning approximately 15,000 live matters. The firm will also integrate iManage with third party solutions such as ethical wall and financial systems with work product management.
“iManage is intuitive and user-friendly, and it enables lawyers at the firm to be more productive,” said Hamish Patrick, a partner at Shepherd and Wedderburn. “Everything is integrated, so people don’t have to click in and out of multiple windows to do their work or to search for information on open matters. Automatically filing documents direct from Outlook is a huge plus — it’s much faster and simpler than manually transferring information from email to the DMS.”
iManage says its private cloud service has grown above expectations over the past 12 months, with the number of customers taking advantage of work product management in the cloud increasing by more than 150 per cent year-over-year.
A growing number of new and existing iManage clients have opted to move their work product management installations to the cloud, such ash Hinshaw & Culbertson, which is moving over 1000 professionals from on-premise implementation.
“We, like many firms, are re-imagining our infrastructure in light of the evolution of technology over the past several years,” said the firm’s CIO Jim Devereaux. “We are moving to the iManage cloud to eliminate the cost of expensive hardware upgrades, consolidate data centers, and improve disaster recovery. We expect this move to allow us to update our applications more frequently and allow our staff to focus on higher-level value activities working with attorneys instead of updating infrastructure. It’s an added plus that these improvements will come with no impact on our user base, who will continue using this solid solution as they have been for years, but in a modern, robust hybrid cloud.”
Copyright © 2023 Legal IT Professionals. All Rights Reserved.
We offer organizers of legal IT seminars, events and conferences a unique marketing and promotion opportunity. Legal IT Professionals has been selected official media partner for many events.
