HighQ used its 2018 forum in London yesterday to unveil several major product updates, including the launch of its much-anticipated AI Hub. ‘HighQ 5.0’ is due to launch later this year.
In Collaborate 4.4, the latest version of the firm’s cloud collaboration platform, there are six key new features, said HighQ chief product and strategy officer Stuart Barr. One of these is the AI Hub, which enables the seamless management of multiple AI engines with the HighQ platform.
‘This means you don’t need to go and log into an AI platform such as Kira, import documents from HighQ and then push documents back out to HighQ,’ Barr said. 'You can configure everything from within the HighQ interface.’
Users can configure their instance of HighQ to connect to their instance of an AI platform, and they can configure HighQ’s sites to push all the files that are uploaded there out to the relevant AI engine for analysis. That analysis then comes back. ‘The output, or the data extracted from the documents, is stored in the AI Hub, not in their systems,’ said Barr. ‘That means it is usable in our iSheets module and our data visualisation module—and all this happens automatically.’
One of the most notable features of the AI Hub is that it integrates with multiple AI engines. ‘At launch, it’s using the HighQ and the Kira engines, but we’re already talking to a number of other vendors—some of them have contacted me today, having seen the announcement—about how we can integrate with their platforms as well,’ Barr said.
HighQ has also made improvements to its data visualisation engine. Customers can now run calculations on the underlying data before they visualise it. The classic example of that is financial data, which the user might want to total for a particular month, or for a particular matter. They can now do those calculations on the fly, creating dashboards with graphic visualisations of various types of information, such as a breakdown of which people have been recording time against a particular matter.
‘This makes the tool much more powerful because you can take much more complex, disaggregated datasets and in real time do those calculations to sum up values, or average values, or even do a simple count of how often a particular thing occurs in your data,’ Barr said. ‘You can also visualise AI Hub data and task data.’
Another innovation for Collaborate 4.4 is Microsoft Office 365 integration with real time document editing using Office Online. This enables simultaneous editing for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office documents. 'All you need is an Office 365 account and a web browser,’ said Barr. ‘You can then open an existing document stored in HighQ, open it in Word online, be simultaneously editing it with multiple other people, and once you’ve all finished editing you close it down and it is saved as a new version in the system. You can also create a new document.’
HighQ introduced DocuSign integration to Collaborate in 2017, and has improved it this year. The key changes are that users can now send multiple documents to multiple recipients to be signed, and they can tag the documents to choose exactly where they should be signed, using the integrated DocuSign interface.
HighQ executives were keen to highlight the tasks timeline view, which enables customers easily to get an overview of start dates and end dates for tasks. They can be viewed overlaid on top of each other, like a Gantt chart. ‘This is very useful for project management, as you can see if you are going to be overloaded at a particular point in time, or if someone has too much on, or if multiple deadlines are going to clash,’ said Barr.
HighQ also used the forum to unveil two key updates to Publisher, its digital publishing and content marketing platform. One is the introduction of a new integration between the Publisher forms. Product director Ben Wightwick, in his presentation, showed how to fill in a form in Publisher which was then integrated into Collaborate and saved as an iSheet record which could then kick off workflows and other processes.
The second key addition for Publisher is the new People Directory, which can be added to intranets and websites to help clients connect with legal talent or employees to find co-workers through a variety of criteria.
Looking further ahead, both Barr and Wightwick were keen to talk about the integration of Collaborate and Publisher (those names will eventually be dropped) in ‘HighQ 5.0’. This is coming before the end of the year. It will be a unified HighQ platform which combines the two platforms and among other things will unify databases, user profiles and search.
The other major features for HighQ version 5 include process automation and a workflow engine. ‘This has the potential to be the most powerful aspect of the platform that we deliver this year,’ said Barr. There was a demo of this in the last session of the day. It will allow users to create ‘triggers’ and ‘actions’ in the system, a trigger being a set of conditions that say things like ‘if someone uploads a file to this particular folder, then the action is automatically to create a task and assign it to this person’. Or if someone uploads an iSheet record, and they change a particular value or status, then it might automatically create an event, or generate a document and send it for signature.
When this arrives, don’t be surprised to see HighQ users doing high fives. Gimme five!
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