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For This Major Law Firm, SQL Is Second Best!
In 1998, a large United States law firm piloted both a leading SQL-based system and WORLDOX side by side. As a result of the comparison, they chose WORLDOX. Not only was WORLDOX far less troublesome and resource-intensive to administer, it performed better in such critical areas as reliability, integration with applications, and searching. Searching was especially important because of the firm’s SoftSolutions heritage, according to the firm’s document management administrator. "The SQL-based document management system couldn’t do Boolean searches on profiles, and WORLDOX could," the administrator says. "That was a big selling point, because we hadn’t used full text indexing with SoftSolutions, and our people were used to being able to reliably search for document profiles no matter what the word order." For example, one user might profile a document as Letter of Acceptance, while another user might profile it as Acceptance Letter. WORLDOX will find the profile either way. "I put the two systems side-by-side and tested them, and I realized that WORLDOX was getting hits where the other system wasn’t." Coping with change The firm has 4 offices and its practice embraces a wide variety of federal, state, and local matters, with clients ranging from major financial institutions, insurers, and worldwide corporations to small businesses and individuals. At the time of the pilots, the firm was striving not only to find a replacement for SoftSolutions, but to unify its other office systems as well. A merger had brought together the firm’s two large city offices with a separate office in another city. The offices in one city had been running a Banyan network, while the other city had been running Novell. The Banyan site used Banyan’s BeyondMail for e-mail, while the other office used GroupWise 4. Even word processing was a melange, with WordPerfect 6.1, Word 95, WordPerfect 8.0 in use. The firm successfully migrated to NT for all networking and Outlook 98 for e-mail, but juggling these changes while trying out new document management systems wasn’t easy, the firm’s document management administrator recalls: "It was like dominos — one domino would fall and hit the next, and the next. My document management had to fit strategically within those dominos falling." Complexity causes concern The firm’s first try at a replacement document management system was a two-tier version of a leading SQL-based product, installed as a pilot at one office by a local consultant. Problems soon developed, including frequent crashes and the loss of edited documents. The document management administrator and director of information technology investigated and found that part of the problem could be blamed on an incomplete installation, lacking in attention to detail. But it was more than that: the administrator, taking accredited classes in the new system, learned it hadn’t been fully debugged and that extensive workarounds would be needed for routine tasks. Nor did the developer intend to perfect the two-tier system – instead, it planned on rolling out an even more complex and unproven three-tier system as a replacement. Realizing that the firm needed an alternative, the IT director contacted World Software and asked for a demonstration. Perhaps the most impressive part of that initial demo, according to both the director and the document management administrator, was how quickly WORLDOX was installed: roughly 30 minutes to load copies on the network and two workstations, with full functionality. Simplicity to the rescue Shortly thereafter, World Software reseller Frank Jones worked with the administrator to install a true pilot, in which about 15 users and 4,000 Word 95 documents that had never seen document management before were put on WORLDOX in the space of a day. The success of this pilot prompted the firm’s Practice Automation Committee to dispense with the SQL-based system and give WORLDOX an even larger pilot at the second office: 70 users and 76,000 documents. In this expanded setting, WORLDOX again proved itself reliable, richly featured, and easy to use. How did it go? "Within two weeks people were very, very fond of the product," according to the document management administrator. The final step was to roll out WORLDOX to the entire office in May of 1999. Even this, for 220 users and 756,000 documents, took only three consecutive weekends. WORLDOX 8.0 is now administered from the firm’s main office using WORLDOX Domains to remotely update the firm’s other offices. In December 1999, a third office was added to the system via a Virtual Private Network over the Internet – another example of WORLDOX’s adaptability to an enterprise environment. The VPN connection for WORLDOX was easy to set up and behaves as if it were nearly invisible, the DMA says. Other firms considering the move to a new document management system should examine the advantages offered by WORLDOX:
For the IT director, the experience with the SQL-based system was reminiscent of his experience with a similar system while working at a previous firm. "You hear often that you need a SQL-based product to do document management. But what you discover is that SQL is very complicated, you need a high-priced SQL administrator, and you really don’t get any benefit from it. What’s the point of having this complicated system when in fact you can have a very simple system that does exactly the same stuff, for a lot less money?" Firm snapshot:
The firm-wide software
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