In de markt voor Document Management oplossingen - ook wel ECM - Enterprise Content Management genoemd - blijft iManage Worksite van Autonomy (/Interwoven) in Nederland aan populariteit winnen. Worksite is één van de meest geprezen document management systemen (DMS) binnen de advocatuur/professional services. In Nederland zijn vooral twee bedrijven actief als implementatie partner van Worksite: I.R.I.S. Nederland (voorheen Morningstar Systems) en Epona. Beide bedrijven hebben de afgelopen tijd weer een aantal iManage Worksite opdrachten weten binnen te halen:

• Poelmann van den Broek advocaten schaft iManage WorkSite aan - I.R.I.S.
• Ook Trip Advocaten & Notarissen investeert in de toekomst met iManage WorkSite - I.R.I.S.
• Boekel de Nerée kiest voor Worksite en Epona - Epona
• Van Benthem & Keulen maakt de stap naar digitale dossiervorming met Autonomy iManage - Epona

Morningstar Systems is per 1 januari 2010 verder gegaan als I.R.I.S. Nederland. Het zal interessant zijn om te zien wat voor een invloed de producten van I.R.I.S. (bijvoorbeeld DocCenter en Docshare) - aangezien deze producten qua functionaliteit een grote overlap met Worksite vertonen - zullen hebben op de werkzaamheden van I.R.I.S. Nederland.

Beide partijen (Epona en I.R.I.S./Morningstar) staan goed aangeschreven.

Now that Windows 7 is widely available on newly purchased systems, migrating your law firm professionals to this new Microsoft OS, becomes an interesting option. Windows XP is still the most used operating system in most firms - as most firms decided to skip the troubled Vista. Partial migration - only upgrading some of your users, for example those whose PC's you replace - is nowadays a more accepted option. It used to be that firms preferred to have all users on the exact same installation as this usually had some cost/efficiency benefits in terms of maintenance and support. These days, a temporary migration period where in the course of for example one year you migrate your users to a new OS, should - when your support and maintenance strategies are flexible enough - not cause too many pains.

Before you decide to migrate - make sure you have thoroughly tested all your existing software for compatibility with Windows 7. It surprises me how slow most companies are with providing information on Windows 7 compatibility. Most product specifications and software requirement overviews on websites do not mention the existence of the new Windows version at all. To add to the complexity: Windows 7 comes in both a 64-bit and a 32-bit version. Which version should you install?

The short answer is that you should go with Windows 7 64-bit unless you’re running a system well into its antiquity where driver support is going to become an issue.

Check out the Windows 7 Compatibility Center to search for compatible software and hardware. Unfortunately, mostly consumer software is listed on this site. If software is written for 32-bit Windows then it will most likely install as a x86 (32-bit) program under your 64-bit Windows.

The most worrisome will be the more obscure hardware that does not have driver updates available or the occasional lawyer that is wondering why his/her old Palm PDA software does not work anymore. Within the next six months, most major hardware and software manufacturers should have made their current products all Windows 7 compatible. For older hardware (or software) there will probably be ways to circumvent the problems. I was worried for example that some the Smart Card readers that are commonly used in the Netherlands would not be supported yet. That worry seems to have been unneccessary.

In the next few weeks I will be doing more hardware and software tests with Windows 7 as I am trying to introduce the OS at a Dutch law firm (remaining on Windows XP for most users). If anything important comes up, I will post that here. Preliminary findings so far show the VPN program (OpenVPN) and the Anti-Virus software (McAfee) both need updating (both free of charge).

Before I start, "Corporate Intranet" in this article refers to the internal (corporate) website (that is usually named "the intranet" in a firm). In a more general (and correct) sense the term intranet refers to "a private computer network that uses Internet protocols, network connectivity to securely share part of an organization's information or operations with its employees". Sometimes other terms are used to describe something similar to an intranet, for example: "enterprise portal" or "intraweb".

A corporate intranet is always a 'custom' built website/application. No matter what framework, portal server or intranet engine you have running, you will always have to customize the intranet to meet your company's needs. The first step in building/shaping your intranet: identify the needs/goals. What is the purpose of the intranet? What would you like it to do? What problems are you trying to solve with it? These are all common questions that are relevant to any project, yet they are more than often left unanswered.

"Corporate intranets facilitate communication and access to information" according to an old (but still relevant) (student) source on corporate (library) intranets. Intranets should be central to a firms' information management: sharing, creating and processing information can all be done on the intranet. Because of this central role of the intranet - the application should be able to "talk" to the other application within a firm. An intranet application can therefore soon get extremely complex. That complexity usually already starts with the wishes and goals of a firm. My advise: try to keep it simple in the beginning and build on from there.

Intranet Wish-list

To find all the items on your intranet wish-list, you can ask yourself the question: "what tasks will a (typical) employee hope to accomplish with the use of the intranet?".
Possible answers:

• Look up the phone number of the Marketing Manager
• Request to take some time off
• Read the latest company news
• Register for the company's yearly Social Event
• Read the company's health insurance benefits
• Enroll in a training
• Match the name of a new colleague with a picture
• Find Knowhow on a certain subject

From that list we can already deduct a couple of intranet functions:

• Employee Directory with Pictures
• Human Resources Services (form processing)
• Company News
• (Event/Training) Registration (form processing)
• Company Information (HR, Policies)
• Knowledge sharing

And with some more thinking we could add a few more things to that:

• Questionnaires
• Document Management
• Company Calendar
• Social functions (employee profiles)
• Company Pictures (for example event pictures)
• Financial and Marketing information (for management)

We should however be careful here to not let this list grow endlessly. As I said earlier: try and start simple in the beginning. The most basic way of starting with your corporate intranet is to only offer information on it (like a regular website). Minimally your intranet should have company news and Human Resources information - those are usually the most requested information on an intranet. In a future article I will discuss organizing your intranet further and look what is sometimes called: Intranet 2.0 (after the web 2.0 trend)

See also: Adaptive Path: Organizing Your Global Corporate Intranet