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Earlier we posted part I of this two part Q&A with legal technology veteran Tom Lee where we discussed the history and future of document management and he ended byjoking that I was giving him too many difficult questions. So in part II I lightened things up a bit but still managed to slip in some tough questions.
Q: OK Tom, a bit of light relief now, what Football Team do you support?
Tom: CHELSEA FC – I have been a Chelsea fan since I was eight years old.
My Grandfather, Father and several of my uncles were regulars to Upton Park to watch home matches at West Ham United. This was in the heady days of Geoff Hurst, Johnny Sissons, Martin Peters and of course, the great Bobby Moore. Come to think of it, almost everyone in my family supported West Ham United as most lived within walking distance of the ground.
The first game I remember seeing was West Ham v Burnley which I didn’t like very much. However, the second was West Ham v Chelsea and right there, the bug bit! I was never a regular supporter i.e. watch every game, I was more a follower because at 3.00pm every Saturday I was playing also.
Believe it or not, I still play a bit for Marbella Vets and I am quite proud to say, I am still one of their younger players. Although, these days it takes me about fifteen minutes to warm up, I play for around twenty minutes, my knees give way, and it’s straight to the shower!
Q: How have UK firms reacted to the idea of SaaS and cloud computing?
Tom: If you had asked me that question just eighteen months ago my answer would have been radically different. However, with the advent of BT’s 21CN backbone giving far greater bandwidth and QoS to business this undoubtedly has increased the uptake of software being provided to the desktop as a service.
I think that UK firms are beginning to adopt the SaaS model for a number of very good reasons. Firstly, over the past year or so, we have witnessed smaller companies from a plethora of industries embrace the cloud model. Indeed, we have quite a number of clients that are totally in the cloud i.e. they don’t even have a Network Server! All software is delivered as a service from within the cloud. I can also include my company, Quintec International where we run our CRM, Accounting, Document Management, Email, Telephony and Time Recording software, all in the cloud!
More recently, the adoption of SaaS for larger companies has been quite phenomenal compared with just a year ago when the take-up could only be described as sluggish! I can honestly say that I have only witnessed one such radical transformation in I.T. which compares with the move towards SaaS. This was back in the 1978/9 when almost every company moved away from the Mainframe environment onto semi intelligent distributive processing by adopting the WANG range of mini computers, among others! I think we are witnessing a similar event here – it’s a mass migration, and just like the events of the late seventies, definitely one for the history books!
Of course, people out there would expect me to say that Cloud is the best thing since sliced bread, as I am in the business of providing Cloud based services and software! OK, my comments may drum up a little business but I don’t think so! This is far more reaching than that, I don’t know of a single I.T. Director or Head of I.T. who is not planning to a move to the cloud in some way shape or form over the next year!
I can still see large companies maintaining some of their legacy back-office systems such as accounting, practice management and you could throw Human Resources into that for the next few years but for front-end processing where your users have to work in a multitude of environments, there use of CRM, document management, document production & manipulation these seem to be moving faster than I had anticipated.
I have to add at this juncture that there is a vast reduction in the cost of ownership for SaaS adopters. We have recently carried out analysis at several large companies where we halved the cost of ownership over conventional software. These savings are further reduced when you include the cost of both Disaster Recovery and Online Backup; the additional savings in this area are considerable!
Q: If you were to start a law firm today, what technology would you start with?
Tom: Put simply, I would never start a law firm! Far too complicated for me!
We started our company with the idea that we will never own a Network server. Quintec International is now totally in the cloud and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I must confess the day we moved into our new offices a little over a year ago I was still a little skeptical because I had used client/server technology for so long and had relied on it, I was comfortable!
After one year, I can say that I have had no down-time whatsoever and the services delivered over the internet are fast, intuitive, and I can work from anywhere in the world, and believe me, I have found myself in some rather unusual places. I even work from my place in Spain way up in the mountains where the internet service is notoriously bad. I also work on my documents on the train up to London on my iPhone so I don’t have to lug a heavy laptop around town.
Besides, if our guys are recommending our software products to clients surely they need to be using it themselves… don’t they?
So my answer to your question, if I were to start a law firm what technology would I use? I would have to say Software as a Service delivered from the Cloud.
Danny: I’d like to thank Tom for the insightful and excellent discussion.
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments marketing department. If you’d like to be featured in a NetDocuments Q&A, send a tweet to @NetDocuments or an email to djohnson@netdocuments.com.
October 14th, 2010
Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, cloudsourcing, document management, England, grandkids, Microsoft|
Category: Cloud Computing, collaboration, document management, Email Management, legal technology, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Technology
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This week in our ongoing Q&A series, we are joined by Tom Lee of Quintec International. Quintec is a leading cloud based technology company based in the UK that is aimed primarily at the Legal, Insurance and Finance markets.
Q: First off Tom, tell our readers a bit about you and your company?
Tom: Great. I have been in I.T. for over 33 years and have witnessed many changes in technology from the early Mainframes to Super- Mini’s, Client/Server and now to the Cloud! At Quintec, we provide our clients with business advice, consultancy, software, training and technical support. These services are delivered by an experienced team of consultants, a rapid support team and a plethora of technical guys who never seem to stop working! I wished I had their energy!
Q: And I’m sure they wish they had your experience. After 33 years I bet you’ve seen some interesting things in I.T. Tell me the scariest moment of your career?
Tom: That’s easy, because I still have nightmares about it!
My first job in I.T. was way back in the mid-seventies and I worked in a large Computer Operations department as a Trainee Computer Operator. This was when computer rooms were as big as football pitches and I remember this one was vast with bank after bank of disk drives, seven gigantic line printers with bursters & collators attached, card readers, and these new whizzy things called diskette drives with floppy diskettes that were 8inches wide!
I had only been working for the company a matter of weeks. There were four of us on shift one night and stupidly we decided to play football just to pass the time with a ball ingeniously crafted from paper and Sellotape. Sounds silly doesn’t it, but back then it really helped pass the time through the night while all the batch processing was going on.
Well, this one night I was in goal and I threw the ball out to a colleague a little too hard I guess. The ball hit a wall, bounced over a wall divider and somehow hit the main power supply lever! The whole room plunged into darkness and all four IBM Mainframes powered down simultaneously! Obviously this could not happen nowadays but back then, believe me IT DID!
Needless to say, this caused utter chaos and the following morning over one thousand users couldn’t logon to their terminals until about 11.30am because of me. I don’t think I have ever felt as guilty before or since! The culprit was never found and the story rarely discussed until just five years ago at a company reunion when my old boss who had recently retired, finally found out ‘from a so-called friend’ that it was me! He said that if he had of found out who was responsible he had orders to sack them on the spot!
Well what doesn’t get us fired, only makes us stronger right?
Q: I hear some people in the UK call you the “Granddaddy of document management.” How did you get this name?
Tom: It first started in a pub in London when I was relaxing with a few friends one evening after work. A few that were present that night were I.T. Directors of law firms who were messing around as one does after a few beers, and it just was something that was said in jest, I think! Then, with a couple of snippets that have been published in the press over the years, it just stuck! I guess part of it is that I’m just getting old and also that I have been involved in the release and distribution of each of the main document management systems during the past twenty years, namely SoftSolutions, DOCS Open and iManage.
In my opinion, the real granddaddies of document management are the “old boys” from the SoftSolutions outfit who released the first ever enterprise-wide DMS way back in the late 1980’s. They were the real inventors and pioneers who first spotted a gap in the market.
Incidentally Dan, you work for these guys! You should feel very proud to be working for a company of such pedigree with a long history, and with people of such repute.
In my private life I am still not a granddad yet, but I don’t think it’s going to be much longer!
Q: Well that is a great segway into my next questions. How has document management technology changed over the past 10-20 years?
Tom: WOW Dan! Give me some easy questions like what’s my favorite football team and stuff! At my age I can’t remember some of the things that happened last week let alone over the past 20 years!
Well, if you are asking me to go back that long, my view is that it was all about storing, searching and retrieving documents back then, and in my opinion, to a large extent it’s still the same today.
Back then, law firms and other document centric organizations were busy migrating away from their old DP/WP mini computers and onto the new client/server technology. This all seemed great at the time but many didn’t realize that built into the very fabric of the WP software on these super-mini computers was a primitive form of document management. Although there is no resemblance to what is available today, this held very basic profile information for each document and secretaries and typists alike had learned to rely on this as they could easily identify and retrieve documents.
Once on client/server architecture, companies found that this basic document management was lost and saving documents into folders, sub folder and sub-sub-sub folders (this always confused me) was sometimes a disaster as many versions of a document could exist so retrieving the required documents could be somewhat time-consuming and the process very confusing. I think you could use the metaphor, three steps forward and one step back, in this case. Perhaps, Microsoft and WordPerfect, the two main protagonists at the time should have included a document management option within their word processors for singleware applications. It’s a good job for me they didn’t!
Anyhow, this left the door wide open for the pioneers of this technology. Two such document management systems were released to answer to the problem. The first was SoftSolutions, in its early years quickly became the dominant player. A short time after followed the PC DOCS offering known as DOCS Open, which is better known nowadays as Open Text DM5. I believe some firms are still using a hybrid of this product to this very day.
SoftSolutions were bought out in 1994 by WordPerfect and then in quick succession by the Novell Corporation, and their DM software incorporated into their Novell GroupWise offering, I guess the rest has been written into the history books!!!
Both products were ground breaking in their day, the first being built upon the proprietary but very fast ‘FLAME’ database whilst DOCS Open did just what it said on the tin, it was ‘Open’, and could run on most of the SQL databases of the day, namely Microsoft’s SQL, SYBASE and ORACLE!
Over the years Microsoft has threatened from time-to-time to include some form of document management capability to control and manage their singleware applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc., but none of these ever came to fruition!
These day’s firms need to be quite sophisticated, they need the ability to liaise and collaborate with their clients and colleagues, to store records as well as emails in the same repository and more recently be able to store certain telephone conversations when the need arises.
Sometimes, I think that certain DM suppliers have forgotten the first rule of DM and that is to speedily search and retrieve documents! To me, it’s still the most important function provided by a DM! For example, I recently was in at a customer site and she showed me a ‘simple search’ using an industry leading DM system across 1,800 users and 40 offices worldwide! To be honest, I could have easily made a cup of coffee in the time the search results were returned! Surely, this is a drastic waste of time and resources!
Thanks Tom! That’s incredible insight and discussion.
This was just a portion of my very insightful interview with Tom Lee so check back on Thursday as part II of this Q&A will be posted.
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments marketing department. If you’d like to be featured in a NetDocuments Q&A, send a tweet to @NetDocuments or an email to djohnson@netdocuments.com.
October 12th, 2010
Tags: Cloud Computing, document management, England, grandpa, legal technology, LegalTech, Quintec, SaaS, Technology|
Category: business continuity, Cloud Computing, collaboration, document, document management, Financial Services Technology, legal technology, SaaS
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The Applied ICT A2-level Project Management class at Haslingden High School, located in Manchester, England, needed a better way to collaborate on projects in order to fulfill a requirement to learn project management techniques and work together from school and from home.
Wise Systems and Solutions put them in contact with Matt Duncan of NetDocuments who granted the class a NetDocuments basic account to enable them to complete their project.
After completion of their semester, they sent us the following report:
Objective 1: To meet the requirements of the specification for students to use project management tools and techniques appropriate to team working.
- “We were able to utilise and report the use of standard ways of working.”
- “The majority of students worked really well with the principle of copying their team’s inbox folder in on all project related emails.”
Objective 2: To provide a practical solution for storing files to allow collaboration between team members at school and from home.
- The students entered their final year of ICT studies knowing that there are a number of issues associated with working on the school network that hamper productivity. Such as only having limited user rights; down time because of viruses; USB sticks banned; and no connection of own laptops.
- As a group we were very appreciative of a better solution than emailing attachments backwards and forwards between home and school.
- A few students were a bit alarmed when the files they uploaded to NetDocuments were “moved” not “copied”. They obviously didn’t read the dialogue box when it appeared! The higher achieving students quickly came to trust that the file in the NetDocuments repository was the only version required.
- I had initially informed students that we would not have full functionality because we were working on Office 2000, but in practice we did not seem to experience any restrictions.
- The following quote is from student KF at the end of the unit: “NetDocuments is a good system, as it has the vast amount of facilities that make it ideal for uploading work from anywhere. However, I think the downside is what we found in unit 8. Firstly the [confusion about] lack of compatibility with older versions of office namely 2000 and also the [delay surrounding] integration with networks such as the one at school. If this worked fine within school, it would be a big asset”
Conclusion: I am extremely pleased with my students’ development using NetDocuments. I am proud that they will go on to university or employment with this experience and understanding of the principles of online document management.
NetDocuments would like to thank Haslingden High School for their innovative approach to teaching and project building.
August 16th, 2010
Tags: collaboration, England, High School, Manchester, Technology, UK|
Category: broadband, collaboration, document management, paperless, SaaS, Technology
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This week I discussed the current trends in UK legal technology with Jason Plant, who is an IT manager at a large UK law firm and also writes a popular legal technology blog titled No Option for Law Firm!.
Q: Thanks for your time and sharing your knowledge with us Jason. First off, what do you see as the most important current trends in legal technology in the UK?
A: I posted on my blog what I thought were the top 5 legal technologies in 2010 at the start of the year. I stand by them although I probably would reorder them a little to give the following as the top three.
I think Office 2010 and Windows 7 will be big in that a lot of UK firms stuck with Windows XP and Office 2003. Not the most important trend in terms of changing the face of legal IT, but a crucial change.
The biggest new trends I would say are mobile and instant messaging rather than any specific legal IT application, I think Legal is finally joining the mainstream in technology and I think these two areas are ideally suited to lawyers.
It will be fun to watch how the three items you mentioned work together, specifically with Office 2010 web apps enabling more mobility for lawyers.
Q: Do UK law firms have different technology needs than American firms? If so, in what ways?
A: I don’t think so, I think the needs are pretty much the same, the US does seem to have more lawyers interested in technology (perhaps more comfortable with it too?) and so perhaps adopts it faster. There are also some technologies that maybe get wider use in the US due to legal requirements, nature of work or culture (e.g. eDiscovery I suspect is more widely used in the US).
Q: How does the Patriot Act affect UK law firms adoption of SaaS? What can US SaaS providers do to gain acceptance in the UK?
A: US providers are going to have to understand the legal requirements of UK firms and their clients more, then help meet these requirements.
We at NetDocuments agree that UK firms should have UK-based hosting, which is why we are planning to implement a UK-based data center later this year.
Q: I like to tell people that SaaS has leveled the technology playing field between small and large firms. Working in large law, would you agree with this statement?
A: Difficult one this. In a business sense I don’t see it making too much of a difference. Certainly for a small firm it reduces the cost of implementing services, but then economies of scale probably help the large firms keep the costs low too.
However for small firms it probably gives them access to technology they wouldn’t have previously had access to. So in that sense it levels the playing field of technology availability to the lawyers. Whether they can then use that technology to get more clients, bill more or reduce costs through business process change is another matter!
Very good analysis.
Q: If you were to start a law firm from scratch, which technologies would you start with?
A: I’d be boring and look at the basics and ensure that was as easy as possible, Apple App Store easy! So that would be document production, finance apps and communications. Ensuring lawyers can produce and receive documents easily then store them in an organized electronic file with ease. Communicate from anywhere with ease and be contacted easily with the most appropriate tool (i.e. try to cut down on the volume of email!). Then underpin the whole organization with a finance system that can do the operational and provide information for the strategic.
Get these basics right and you’ve more time for the lawyers to spend bringing the money in and understand where to focus to get that money! Oh and no I don’t think there is any vendor (legal or not) that has all the above spot on yet!
Q: On a lighter note, what is your favorite (British) football team?
A: I’m a Manchester United fan and was a season ticket holder for many years at Old Trafford until 2005. Since then I have joined 2000+ other Manchester United fans and formed our own football club, FC United of Manchester who currently play their football in the Northern Premier League Premier division.
Wow! Very cool. I lived in England for three years and I’m all in for Chelsea!
Q: Have you forgiven the English goalie for blowing that save against the US in the world cup?
A: Yes of course. I thought the game against the US was going to be tight as a lot of the US squad play in England and so understand how English teams play, so I wasn’t too surprised with the result. Now forgiving the referee for the goal that never was against Germany is a different matter…….
That’s why I’m a proponent for instant replay.
I’d like to thank Jason Plant for his time and sharing with us the knowledge he has gained from his vast experience dealing with legal technology.
If you’d like to be featured in a technology Q&A, send a tweet to either myself at @dannymjohnson, or to@NetDocuments.
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments sales and marketing team.
July 14th, 2010
Tags: England, legal technology, Mobile Technology, No Option for Law Firm, SaaS, twitter, UK, World Cup|
Category: Cloud Computing, document management, legal, legal technology, SaaS, Technology
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OREM, UTAH – June 2nd, 2010. NetDocuments, the leading global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content management provider, today announced that Quintec International  has become a primary UK Business Solutions Partner and Authorised Training Centre.
Since its inception, Quintec International has worked with law firms, corporate legal departments, government, insurance and financial institutions providing specialist consultancy in multi-layered collaborative environments, including document and content management systems, and advanced network monitoring, control and security software.
“Our decision to partner with NetDocuments was simple,” said Tom Lee, Managing Director for Quintec International. “Our clients are now demanding a far more sophisticated and cost effective content management solution where their entire collection of documents, emails and records can be stored in the ‘cloud’ with instant search/retrieve capability. They also require access to their documents via any internet-ready device in customisable work spaces, with the ability to seamlessly share information online with clients, all stored within a safe, secure and encrypted environment.”
Being in the cloud provides significant cost savings for document centric organisations. Since documents are stored online in redundant data centres there is no longer a need for costly offsite data backup and disaster recovery arrangements. Additionally, the NetDocuments service requires little or no administration compared with other conventional DM systems as only one instance of the service is ever in existence, ensuring all users remain on the current version with no expensive upgrades to entire installations.
The NetDocuments SaaS model services hundreds of law firms of all sizes. After twelve years in operation, it has the sophistication of powerful discovery-type searching, two-factor authentication, ethical wall security, email and digital records management and built-in business continuity for any national or international law firm.
Lee continues, “I have been aware of NetDocuments maturing as a service for a number of years now and have seen it quickly become a market leader, winning over a large and prolific customer base from other document management systems. Its ease of use is both intuitive and striking! Installation takes only a fraction of the time and with our imminent plans to commission UK based Data Centres, ensuring documents remain under British jurisdiction, NetDocuments suddenly becomes a definite contender right across all industry sectors!”
“With our rapidly growing customer base, NetDocuments has decided to expand its professional services resource by partnering with prestigious organisations such as Quintec International,” said Ken Duncan, CEO at NetDocuments. “We worked very closely with Quintec as far back as 1991, when they were instrumental in helping us launch our previous SoftSolutions document management system in the UK. I very much look forward to working with Quintec once again to capture market share in the UK. It’s just the best news for our existing users in Europe.”
“We are very excited by the prospect of working with NetDocuments” said Roy Harris, Marketing Director and co-founder of Quintec International. “NetDocuments is a totally scalable service suitable for a single user environment through to an organisation of many thousands and we have received a number of interesting enquiries from firms of all sizes across the UK. NetDocuments already boasts a rapidly growing user population here in the UK and it will be our job to build on this success!”
About Quintec International
Quintec International Limited specialises in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment. We provide Cloud based Document Management, Document Comparison, Precedent Management, Collaborative Environments and high-end Network Security Systems. Our best practices team provide business and technology advice to a variety of industry sectors, additionally supply I.T. services at a multitude of levels ranging from senior management though to project management, installation and maintaining our products for and on behalf of our valued customers.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
June 2nd, 2010
Tags: Channel Partner, England, Europe, reseller, UK|
Category: business continuity, community, legal technology, SaaS, Technology
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