The Workshare Blog

Workshare Protect Server 2.2 Now Available

chia.ling — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:39:00 GMT

We have officially released a new version of Workshare's metadata cleaning server. New features and improvements to Workshare Protect Server include improved support for PDF metadata cleaning and supporting environments that have enabled Exchange Server Journaling and environments that have deployed Autonomy iManage Email Management module.

A server side metadata solution is more important than ever. Apple's own numbers show there are over 55 million iPads being used with email being the first or second most used app even with over 500,000 apps in the iTunes appstore for users to choose. This highlights how email is still very much the core of our business workflow and one of the most common ways for us to share documents. With instant on access and everywhere access, the risk of sending documents with hidden information (metadata) is greatly increased with the consumerization of tablets and mobile devices.

Learn more about how to protect your organizations documents with Workshare Protect Server here.

Technolawyer Reviews Workshare's Latest PDF Solution

David Brennan — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:36:00 GMT

Be sure to check out this week's product review at Technolawyer.

Workshare PDF Professional Plus 2.0: Read Our Exclusive Report
By Neil Squillante

"When a new technology emerges, lawyers first debate the need for it. Once deemed essential, they debate the best product. When the products become increasingly complex and diverse, they seek a a simple legal-specific variant — and a low price never hurts. The last stage of this cycle is now playing out with PDF software since the PDF format has become essential for client records, court filings, document productions, and much more...."

Jump over to Technolawyer for the complete review and find out what Neil thinks is the "Killer Feature".

iPad Giveaway at Insight 2012 in London

Jes Breslaw — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:37:00 GMT

Insight 2012, London’s International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) event, is underway!

Stop by stand #39 and learn all about Workshare's latest legal/IT advancements, including cloud/iPad document comparison, track changes, file synchronization and managed file transfers. While you’re visiting, spin a wheel for a chance to win one of 200 prizes including 2 iPads, 8 iPods, 20 iTunes vouchers and 170 magnetic white boards.

We hope you’ll be so impressed by our document comparison and document collaboration solutions that you’ll want to spread the word! If so, we have good news: a tweet will earn you an extra chance to win!

Insight 2012 attendees: just tweet the following from your Twitter account to earn an extra spin:

I'm checking out #LegalIT cloud solutions from @Workshare & entering to win an iPad at #insight12

Because we’re all about convenience, we'll make it easy for you: you can click here to send your tweet.

To redeem your extra spin, come see us at Stand #39.

About Insight 2012

Held at Central Hall Westminster in London, England on May 8-9, Insight 2012 provides education and networking opportunities for legal professionals in Europe. Sessions cover a wide variety of topics including IT, social media, SharePoint, security, apps and much more. As a proud sponsor of ILTA, Workshare is committed to providing technology solutions for attorneys, law firms and legal IT professionals. We look forward to speaking with you at Insight 2012.

Workshare Shows How to Ensure Metadata Security Beyond the Desktop

Louie Matta — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:30:00 GMT

The mobile world is no longer a private party for early adopters. Have you looked around on the train to see all the commuters staring at their cell phones? Everyone is communicating in multiple ways. But while you’re learning how to manage files and images coming into and going out of your iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry or other mobile device, you could be leaking all kinds of sensitive and confidential information.

We all work remotely, but that doesn’t mean there is some magical security dome over us as we ride the train or slog through traffic. Those email attachments you so casually send back and forth contain metadata (data about data) that could seriously mess up your day. So join us for a free Workshare webinar on how to protect that metadata, including hidden data, while you’re away from your desk.

Attend this free webinar to learn:

• How to stop metadata from being sent inadvertently from your tablets, mobile devices and web mail
• How to protect your ultraportable laptop without impacting your limited hard drive space
• Why your current desktop metadata software may not be enough

And the details are:

Discover the Unknown Metadata Risks for Tablets and Mobile Devices
Date: Thursday, April 26th
Time 9:00 AM – 10 AM PDT, (12:00 PM EDT)

Workshare PDF Upgrade: Integrations for Autonomy Worksite and SharePoint

David Brennan — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:57:00 GMT

Today we announced version 2.0 of Workshare PDF Professional Plus. The latest release includes new integrations for Autonomy iManage Worksite and Microsoft SharePoint 2010. This allows users to easily open, combine files into a PDF portfolio and save PDF files directly in the document repository.

It also allows legal professionals to easily create ebriefs and PDF/A documents, prepare documents for court and electronic filings.

Other new features in version 2.0 include:

Powerful redact capabilities and the ability to add redact codes to meet regulatory requirements (e.g. FOIA)
Ability to shrink files on demand
Ability to combine multiple files from within the main product
New favorites, History and Revert to last Save
Ability to index a PDF for improved search

Check out what's in the latest release here.

Discover How to Easily Integrate Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook

Louie Matta — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:07:00 GMT

Join Workshare for a live webinar on Thursday, March 29th, and see the latest release of Workshare Point, now delivering search results from your SharePoint document libraries 24% faster!

Attend this webinar to learn how to:

• Access SharePoint files while remaining in Office and Outlook
• Enhance your email and document management
• Save time with FAST search and suggestive filing
• Drive SharePoint adoption among your users

Discover How to Easily Integrate Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook

Date: Thursday, March 29th
Time: 8:30 AM – 9:15 AM PT (11:30 AM EST)

Join us online!

Workshare Updates Intuitive SharePoint interface for Microsoft Office users

Matthew Brown — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:20:00 GMT

The performance improvements with the latest release of Workshare Point are significant. Users are experiencing:

24% faster when searching a SharePoint document library, even when it contains thousands of documents.
The time it takes to open a document located on SharePoint has also been reduced by up to 45%.
Saving documents directly into SharePoint is up to 35% faster.

One customer recently shared his experience with Workshare Point:
"Although Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook are powerful solutions, users sometimes have trouble quickly locating the documents and emails they need. Workshare Point solves this problem for us by reducing the time we spend searching for and accessing information and allows them to use their time more efficiently,” said Robert J. Waldsmith at ASW.

Given the overwhelming desire of most employees to work within the familiar structure of Outlook and other Microsoft Office applications, SharePoint adoption has been slow and difficult. Because Workshare Point integrates SharePoint and Office, users can easily:

Drag and drop email attachments into SharePoint
Preview email messages stored in SharePoint from within Outlook
File emails on Send with one click
Select multiple emails to file or delete
Track and manage incoming email more efficiently with suggestive filing

In addition to SharePoint 2010, Workshare Point also works with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and supports users that want to connect to a SharePoint Online as part of Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 offering. Using Workshare Point to access SharePoint Online is especially well suited for smaller organizations or departments seeking secure cloud-based collaboration from their familiar work environment.

Learn more about the latest release of Workshare Point.

New Document Collaboration Training Tutorials For Workshare Professional 7

David Brennan — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:07:00 GMT

How often do you add new software and not really understand what’s under the hood? Check out the latest easy-listening training videos on our website and make learning Workshare applications fun…or at least not dreadful.

We created the following training videos to demonstrate the new features of Professional 7, but we’ll bet you’ll learn things even if you have been using the software already. And these are great for introducing new users to the software.

This Workshare Professional overview steps you through all the components and helps you understand how easy, yet powerful, this collaboration software really is.
Workshare Compare provides detailed comparisons and goes beyond Microsoft Word redline capabilities. This video walks you through the newest comparison features.
Workshare Protect is an integrated metadata management tool. Watch this video to see how you can protect your documents while removing hidden metadata.
Installation and configuration don’t need to be difficult. Watch this short video and see how we have improved the configuration manager to make it easier for you to deploy and manage Workshare Professional 7.

Visit the Workshare Learning Center and discover a wealth of product documentation and learning materials.

Ch ch ch ch changes..

ryan_jude — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:23:00 GMT

The latest update Workshare Professional 7 FP1 contains some improvements and new features in how we work with Word track changes. To understand why we have made these it may be useful to look at the history of how track changes and document comparison has evolved.

How it all began

Before the advent of email lawyers started with hard copy travelling drafts and everyone understood the manual process of reviewing these. When email was introduced and changed the world we live in, the process became more complex. Microsoft Word took over legal industry word processing from Word Perfect and with it came the concept of track changes – the ability to record a history of changes within the document and enable the reviewer to accept/reject them.

In the early days of electronic document review, Word track changes was seen by most law firms as a risk. (Judging by the recent discussion in www.theorangerag.com, many still do!) The first problem was that track changes was inaccurate, unreliable and produced unstable documents. In addition, there were several highly publicised stories describing occasions when track changes had been left unintentionally in a document, causing embarrassment for the author and company concerned. Another problem arose where some lawyers used the track change document as a master version rather than saving it each time through the document lifecycle.

How did Workshare help?

Workshare Professional (Deltaview back in the day) allowed the lawyer to deliver a highly accurate Redline document and, in later versions, clean documents of hidden metadata including the history of track changes.

Pretty much all law firms adopted the policy that lawyers would always work with a clean modified document and that any Redline document should only be used as a reference showing the changes between the modified document and the previous draft.

So what’s changed?

This worked adequately for many years but in recent times the demand for track changes has shifted. Instead of providing a modified clean document and a Redline reference document, some law firms and their clients prefer to work with track change documents as the new version so that they can easily accept and reject changes.

When the Redline document was for reference only, law firms were happy as they wanted the most accurate comparison possible. However, if they wanted to use the exported Redline as an editable document, elements like Table of Contents could become corrupt. This is because during a comparison, in order to compare their contents, field codes are replaced with manual text (flattening) thus breaking the links when the document goes through a conversion process.

So how do you balance the needs of some law firms to retain accurate Redline documents using third party document comparison tools and provide output of track changes without corruption?

The solution

In our latest release pack, there is an option that allows you to keep the field code links intact during comparison. It won’t show you the exact differences in fields using the addition/deletion/changed colour indicators but it does flag that there is a change. Of course, if you don’t plan on using the exported Redline as an editable document you can choose to have it work as it always has done. You will need to decide what best practice is for your firm, but here are our own recommendations:

If you are not using the Workshare Review module, and use the Redline document or Word track changes purely for reference, we advise that the document is saved as a PDF to ensure that it is not inadvertently amended by a recipient.
If you require a client or other 3rd party to review a document that has been changed and they don’t have Workshare’s document comparison solution, you could send it as a Word track changes document. If they decide to make further changes on receipt of the updated document run a comparison against your original document and then make changes following the first step.

List of Workshare/track changes functionality

Compare track change documents
Save Redline document as Word track changes
Email Redline document as Word track changes
Toggle field flattening
Detect and clean document of track changes from Word or Outlook

Ryan Soosayraj is Workshare’s Product Manager for desktop solutions.
With thanks to Kim Walton, Professional Services Development Manager at SNR Denton UK LLP for her assistenace

Doing Demos Down Under

Louie Matta — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:39:00 GMT

We’re down under this week at the Australia SharePoint Conference in beautiful Melbourne. Stop by booth #5 and get the latest demo on Workshare Point, our answer to easily managing your SharePoint documents through Microsoft Outlook. Our interface is really slick and makes SharePoint a true DMS that your professionals will actually want to use, solving that adoption issue so many firms face.

Also at our booth – Professional 7, Workshare’s powerful document collaboration software, and PDF Professional+, a feature-rich, but very low-cost PDF solution.

We’ll be here Tuesday and Wednesday, the 20^th and 21^st. Catch some of the great breakout sessions and then swing by for a demo. If you’re feeling lucky, you might win the latest, greatest iPad that we’re raffling off.

Workshare Compare Helps FMC Accurately Compare Complex Documents

Matthew Brown — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:24:00 GMT

Many knowledge workers find themselves needing to compare different versions of a document from time to time. Most initially use the Compare feature in Microsoft Word, which can handle a simple side-by-side comparison of two basic Word documents.

But what happens when you need more than that? This was the challenge confronting Canadian law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP (FMC). The firm’s lawyers handle major commercial transactions involving lengthy, complex legal documents with lots of “nonstandard” text elements, such as embedded cells, charts, diagrams and images. Microsoft Word’s Compare feature isn’t designed to handle those.

FMC’s lawyers also needed to compare PDF documents as well as Word documents, and they needed to compare more than two versions at a time. Word’s Compare feature isn’t designed to address those needs, either.

After evaluating a competitive product, FMC’s IT Practice Support Manager selected Workshare Compare as the firm’s document comparison solution. Workshare Compare is now being rolled out to 1400 users in 6 FMC offices. One of the customer’s key selection criteria—aside from Workshare Compare’s advanced capabilities—was our highly intuitive user interface, which significantly reduced the firm’s training time and costs.

To read the full FMC case study, click here.

KMWorld Names Workshare One of "100 Companies That Matter"

David Brennan — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 04:30:00 GMT

KMWorld recently announced its annual list of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management, and we're honored that Workshare once again made the list!

KMWorld, which provides extensive coverage of content management, document management, and knowledge management, enlisted a panel of judges to "identify companies that were providing true solutions to real and profound problems and challenges."

We're proud that KMWorld continues to view Workshare as one of a hundred companies with "unwavering commitment" to our customers. At Workshare, we know that fast and accurate document management and collaboration software is important to business professionals in a wide range of industries. That's why our latest SharePoint, PDF management and document collaboration solutions are intended to keep you productive and efficient across your entire organization.

Put your shoes on – manage your hidden metadata

Tony Molina — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:47:00 GMT

In the past, I’ve had a dream that I’m back in grade school. I’m taking notes, regular day, when suddenly it occurs to me that I’m not wearing any shoes. I don’t know how I got to school barefoot, but I do know one thing – I do NOT want to draw any attention to myself. Anxiety ridden, my heart begins to pound in my ears, and slowly someone turns to me to ask for a pencil, and then …

Phew! I’m glad I woke up from that dream. Did I have a childhood run-in with a pair of Pro-Keds? Am I bemoaning the fact that I never got those suede Pumas? Is this a prelude to a breakdown? Or in psycho-babble speak, is it a metaphor that exposes the dreamer’s perceived faults or feelings of vulnerability?

Perhaps it is about feeling vulnerable. Maybe that slight (hehe) paranoia is what made me an effective network administrator and later a successful infrastructure manager. I was always looking for constant improvement, and I didn’t want to leave redundancy, security, or performance to chance. The last thing that I wanted to hear was ‘this [fill in the blank] was your fault.’

I bring this up because many today operate their networks with a great sense of pride and ability, yet fail to protect themselves against a potentially dangerous risk – allowing documents with hidden metadata to leave the safe confines of their networks via email. It’s not a threat that’s in your face, and that’s the danger.

There are very well documented examples of hidden metadata leakage costing companies big money. These include Google, Barclays, and AT&T who have all been exposed to embarrassment, liability and tangible (read -> expensive) costs because of hidden metadata. And they may not have considered the dangers of hidden metadata – until it was too late of course, hind-sight and all.

Many professional organizations, particularly law firms, are cognizant of the risks of hidden metadata and employ hidden metadata cleaning tools at their desktop. There are various vendors who provide levels of protection against this type of vulnerability (I have a favorite, as you can imagine), and many firms have trained their staff and attorneys to clean clean clean those documents before they click Send.

Feeling less vulnerable? The advent of mobile devices in production environments (Forrester estimates, by the year 2015, 82 million US consumers - one-third of US - will have a tablet) opens up another egress point to protect against hidden metadata leakage. Email is being sent from web mail, smart phones and tablets, and yet the tools developed to prevent this risk are developed primarily for the desktop.

Of course, Workshare is quite aware of the importance of protecting those mobile devices, and thus introduced our Protect Server solution in March of 2010. This technology was specifically developed to prevent unwanted metadata leakage across an organization including mobile devices. As long as those devices send emails via the company email system, Workshare’s Protect Server can inspect all external-bound emails, determine if it contains a supported document type (Microsoft Office documents, PDF, Open Doc, etc), clean the attachment, and then send the message on its merry way.

The worst thing about vulnerabilities is not being able to clearly identify one. As far as vulnerabilities are concerned, you may come to realize that managing hidden metadata in documents sent via email is low hanging fruit. You know that all outbound documents have hidden metadata, and now you know that you need a desktop and server side solution to cover your vulnerabilities. Give us a visit and find out more on how you can lessen your risk by managing your metadata.

And put your shoes on.

Join us at SPTechCon 2012 in San Francisco, Feb. 28 and 29

Louie Matta — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Join us today and tomorrow at SPTechCon 2012 in San Francisco! We'll be demonstrating Workshare Point which integrates seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint to give you access to your documents from the tools you already use. Without leaving Outlook, you can search for, edit and file documents directly into your DMS. You can even view and send attachments without switching between applications. It can't get much easier than that.

The exhibit hall is open from 11 am to 7 pm today and 10 am to 2 pm Wednesday. The show runs through tomorrow, February 29. We hope to see you there!

Law Technology News Looks at Document Comparison Beyond Microsoft

David Brennan — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:49:00 GMT

The question is common, why would I need a document comparison solution beyond the Track Change feature in Microsoft Word?

The most recent explanation comes from Sean Doherty at Law Technology News who took a comprehensive look at the features that go above and beyond Microsoft. You can read his article online and view a comparison grid of features from a few different products.

And if you'd like to learn a little more check out this guide from Workshare University:

Go Beyond the Basic Features of Microsoft Office 2010

Learn how Workshare's document solutions can provide increased accuracy, productivity, and security on top of Microsoft® Word 2010.

> Download Now