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By Joseph Craven
Joseph Craven is the Director of Information Systems for the general practice firm, Carroll, Burdick & McDonough L.L.P., based in San Francisco, California. His e-mail address is jcraven@cbmlaw.com.
The firm of Carroll, Burdick & McDonough L.L.P. has over 75 attorneys spread out in four different cities throughout California. With such a large practice, our attorneys were in desperate need of a document management software with the capability of providing real-time access to documents while talking to the firm's clients. The current document management system, Docs Open, was not working to everyone's satisfaction. It was too slow and was not meeting expectations with regard to speed of document access due largely to the fact of the overhead of their client access to SQL integration and separate full-text engine. Slow access and instability were not acceptable to the firm or the firm's clients.
The firm began looking at other options, including iManage and WORLDOX. The firm was impressed with the tightly integrated viewer, fast full-text and simultaneous field search capabilities of WORLDOX. When the firm began exploring deeper into the WORLDOX document management software, nothing else compared to the simplicity, performance, features, and exceptional customer service WORLDOX had to offer.
Carroll, Burdick & McDonough L.L.P., with the assistance of WORLDOX integrator, Baker & Associates, installed WORLDOX 96 to a pilot group in the first quarter of 1999. The conversion and user feedback was so positive that the firm decided to fully deploy WORLDOX firm wide during the second quarter of 1999. The firm upgraded to WORLDOX 8 with its release in the third quarter of 1999. WORLDOX 8 addressed all of the firm's security concerns with a powerful new security model that was easy to implement and manage.
My staff and I performed the firm-wide deployment coinciding with the release of WORLDOX 8, relying entirely on the documentation provided by WORLDOX. Not one single phone call had to be placed to the technical support at WORLDOX. The program was simple to install, and the WAN performance greatly exceeded our expectations, as well as my past personal experiences with SQL-based products. We did not have to incorporate a single change to WORLDOX, as we used the built-in customizing features of the product to make it look and work the way our user group was accustomed to.
Training on WORLDOX was simple and required minimal instruction for our attorneys and staff. Training and documentation were provided by Halpern & Associates, and the WORLDOX portion of the training was approximately forty-five minutes. The same amount of time is spent training new employees.
Our firm recently converted from Windows 95 with Word Perfect 6.1 to NT 4.0 Workstation and Office 2000 and WORLDOX performed exceptionally with both systems. My initial concern over the lack of SQL has turned out to be an asset in the long run. WORLDOX integrates well with almost all programs, has a strong API, and works with any network. The software and system independence of WORLDOX greatly simplifies our network management. For example, the firm is planning an upgrade of our SQL from 6.5 to 7.0 and we do not have to worry about WORLDOX. It will continue to work without intervention.
The firm has now fully deployed WORLDOX 2000, as an early beta-test group for WORLDOX. The product has been nearly rock-solid on our NT workstations. Due to our involvement with the beta program, I've spoken to some of the technical support people at WORLDOX and they are very knowledgeable and customer oriented, unlike some of their competitors. The firm also recently installed WORLDOX/WEB to give the firm's attorneys remote access to the firm's documents, and our user group has been extremely enthusiastic about the results they are seeing. Another feature the firm recently adopted was the DropZone Feature. This feature was developed by WORLDOX to create profiles for documents, e-mail messages and most other "information objects" with drag-and-drop ease and simplicity. Any information object profiled with WORLDOX DropZone instantly becomes part of your WORLDOX document repository, and can be searched with the same powerful WORLDOX search capability. A feature similar to this was available by iManage, and caught my attention. I happened to mention this in passing to WORLDOX technical support, and within three weeks, WORLDOX delivered the DropZone feature, which "dropped right in" without any integration. It works well and does not require complex integration with anyone's particular software or email client. All subsequent upgrades and updates have been easy to install. The addition of WORLDOX/WEB and the DropZone Feature continue to extend the capabilities of WORLDOX. It is comforting to know that WORLDOX is continually working to release new features and upgrades as the needs arise.
Our IS department has been developing a web based case management system for collaborative use between our firm and the firm's clients. We have selected and have integrated Zylab's ZyWeb for document imaging, eRoom for content management and WORLDOX/WEB for document management. One of the issues for us with eRoom and other collaborative systems is that each has its own rudimentary document management system. They are all less capable than WORLDOX and duplicate a subset of the features and, in addition, create a situation of multiple document repositories. WORLDOX/WEB enabled us to easily integrate and provide secure web based document management for our new case management system. The major benefit is that we have a singular fast and reliable document management system, where the firm and its clients can securely manage their documents.
WORLDOX is used by all of the firm's attorneys and staff in all offices. It is used as an information management system for all electronic documents, and as an electronic case file to store and rapidly retrieve all kinds of electronic information, including OCR'd text files.
WORLDOX has enabled the firm to effectively, and securely, manage its electronic document management libraries. It is simple, fast, and so fault tolerant that it requires a minimum of support from our IS department, allowing us to utilize our scarce resources on other applications and systems.
WORLDOX has become completely integrated with all of our firm's internal processes, and is here to stay. The best feature of WORLDOX is the company itself. The people at WORLDOX respond quickly to the firm's needs and they are second to none.
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