As you’ve surely noticed, technology isn’t just changing the functions of your employee’s jobs, it’s blurring the lines of work and life altogether by giving them a choice over how and where they work. We’ve all seen the stats, for example:
There are over 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide.
294 billion email messages per day.
In just 9 months, 1 billion iPhone apps have been downloaded.
Every minute, another 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
There are 55 million tweets per day.
25 million iPads have been sold to date.
Today, work styles have become as unique as your people and your technology should reflect that. But you have choices, option #1 is to continue with the status quo. Option #2 is to embrace change and leverage the web and new technology to allow employees to be flexible enough to react to their clients needs in the most optimal way possible.
If you go with option 1, click here, if you like option 2, continue reading…
I’m guessing your employees probably have their iPad sitting in the briefcase just waiting to use it for more than Facebook and Photo Booth. You’ve also probably got multiple devices with separate information that has to be uploaded and downloaded to share across those devices and with others but want a centralized repository for all of their documents that is secure and accessible form anywhere.
We are witnessing this everyday at NetDocuments, from both large and small customers who want their document work available wherever they are—at work, at home, at the client’s site, and the local café.
An office manager of a law firm using NetDocuments recently stated, “A lot of our attorneys are now able to work from anywhere, when they are at home or at the office.” Another attorney stated, “Now that I’m with NetDocuments, I don’t have to worry about [servers and backups]. That is the best thing about it. You’ve got multiple redundant backups built in so I don’t have to worry about backing up, saving, backing up, saving and then keep worrying about if it is still working or not.”
Welcome to the cloud connected business person. At NetDocuments, our vision for that worker is one that can work anywhere. Her document work is backed up and protected from disaster…even that hard drive crash. Document sharing with the office and her clients is simple with no hassles. The ability to check in and out documents and create versions when necessary manages the sharing of documents with others easier. Knowing that her documents are physically stored in redundant datacenters brings the peace of mind and security infrastructure one needs when choosing the right cloud vendor and technology partner to work with.
The world is on the web…your employees are on the web…your firms will be someday…welcome to someday.
If you’re heading out to Orlando next week for the ALA Conference, make sure to come swing by and say hi to the NetDocuments folks at booth #311 . Aside from the normal booth stuff, we’ll be giving away an iPad.
A number of our partners and customers will be speaking at the conference including Rajiv Mukerji, of Smart Solutions, who is speaking on cloud computing for law firms on Tuesday, May 24th at 12:15 PM. For those of you not attending the conference, you can follow the #ALAConf hashtag and the @NetDocuments Twitter stream for real time updates. Other notable Twitteratti to be sure to follow include @RL_Wood, @MonnicaWofford and @Vic_Maurer.
THE ALA Conference is taking place May 22-25 in Orlando, Florida.
Post Written by @DannymJohnson of the NetDocuments Marketing Team
In the past year, NetDocuments’ Partner Program has exploded from a small group of consulting firms to a global network of over 90 Partners worldwide.
Our Partners range in size from single consultants, offering a best-of-breed document management solution, to full-scale firms with multiple offices and hundreds of employees offering the end to end solution of selling, consulting, implementing and deploying the service.
So whether it’s a simple lead referral, or the complete solution, the Program has proven effective for driving two-way business via value-adding consulting firms.
Here is what some of our partners have had to say:
“We are very excited to add the NetDocuments Document Management in the cloud solution to our product offering base. The benefits of a feature rich document management, available anywhere, anytime, combined with built-in business continuity services and backup will be of great benefit to many of our law firm clients.” - Steven J. Best, Esq., Partner, Affinity Consulting Group LLC
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“This past year we’ve seen increased interest and demand for Cloud-based systems solutions from both small and large companies. NetDocuments has been offering online document management for over a decade and we are excited to see that the market for this and other Cloud-based services has matured. Many companies have plans to migrate existing systems to this feature rich platform. In the document management space, NetDocuments is the only competition for traditional systems. We expect our certified status will be win-win-win for our clients, NetDocuments and TechZen.” – Ed Arovas, President & CTO, TechZen
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“The move to the cloud many times means limiting your functionality. Not so with NetDocuments; this is why our team of experts at 7 Second System chose to partner with them.” – Kelly Jones, Co-Founder, 7 Second System, Inc.
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“Knowledge Partners had been looking for a solution for small to medium sized organisations where a great ROI still applies to a smaller number of uses. The NetDocuments ECM solution delivered as a SaaS (Software as as Service) or Cloud model fits this market requirement perfectly. Not only does NetDocuments have all features you would expect from an ECM, the lower total cost of ownership (TOC) makes it a compelling business proposition! Practically any organisation large or small looking to better manage, store, organise and share its electronic content can do so more cost effectively now than any time in the past.
Knowledge Partners has found dealing with NetDocuments to be easy, professional and helpful. Other vendors would do well if they managed to reach the standards delivered by NetDocuments. Knowledge Partners is excited about delivering NetDocuments to the Australian market with a strengthening sales pipeline.” – Carl Lindemann, CEO, Knowledge Partners
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“Eastern Legal Systems believes that the large-scale deployment of broadband internet access in smaller law firms we are seeing today will, over time, introduce fundamental changes in the way information is managed by attorneys. While ‘apps in the cloud’ are slowly starting to gain traction, we believe that “data in the cloud” managed via familiar desktop apps, is a much more viable approach to sharing – and securing -information within a legal practice. NetDocuments is spot-on in embracing this approach with their document management service. Developing a reseller channel from among legal technology consultants should accelerate adoption rates among those smaller law practices most in need of this approach. Eastern Legal Systems is proud to be part of the campaign to deliver this versatile technology to the small law firm.” – Jack Schaller, Director of Sales, Eastern Legal Systems
For more information regarding the partner program, send an an email or a tweet (@MarriottMurdock) to Marriott Murdock, NetDocuments Partner Program Manager.
Thousands of lawyers, accountants, financial advisors and more use NetDocuments everyday to securely manage and share their content from the cloud. Salesforce CRM users are another fast growing constituency among NetDocuments users.
In fact, NetDocuments is the most popular all-time document management system among Salesforce users.
Since 2006, when NetDocuments first released its AppExchange integration, the rich customizable platform of Salesforce and NetDocuments has allowed the applications to be tightly integrated for all types of customers, including enterprise-level organizations such as Extra Space® Storage, as well as hundreds of financial service advisory, consulting and legal firms.
After four and half years, Salesforce’s AppExchange currently lists NetDocuments in its rankings:
#1 Most Popular – (All-Time), paid document or content management, (4th overall when including free apps. All of which are feature add-ons and not true document mgmt).
2nd Highest-Rated App for document or content management service (2nd to a fax- only service).
Check out our AppExchange listing to read the comments and ratings by typical customers, such as the customer who stated, “[NetDocuments] provides our organization with the capabilities we need, with the security we require, at a price we are able to afford.”
Another customer commented on AppExchange that “I was looking for a SaaS service that would integrate with Salesforce. NetDocs was the only one I could find that would work properly for our needs. It’s also HIPAA compliant.”
Extra Space Storage’s business revolves around earth-based self storage units, but that doesn’t keep it from using the cloud to make its business go.
With 2,200 employees spread out at self-storage locations around the country it uses NetDocuments to manage and share all of its documents within Salesforce.com in a simple and user-friendly way.
It adds over 5,000 documents a week that are instantly made available to the corporate office in Salt Lake City as well as the majority of employees that are working in their local communities.
NetDocuments gets around – LegalTech NY and LegalTech India, 2011
With the announcement of prestigious law firm, Foley & Lardner, switching from iManage to NetDocuments, our new user interface, and the growing Partner Program, the road was paved for a great Legal Tech conference in both New York and New Delhi.
Happening at virtually the same time, Smart Solutions, one of NetDocuments’ Global Channel Partners, represented us at LegalTech India while we managed in New York; the result? Two amazing shows, with lots of exposure, highlighting our recent developments, high-profile clients, and international reach. Here are the thoughts from those who were there…
New York, New York
“LegalTech NY was buzzing with activity this year, thanks in no small part to recent news that the 1,000 lawyer law firm Foley & Lardner is switching from iManage to NetDocuments. Most of those we spoke with agreed that this is the biggest development in the legal content management space in years. Firms of all sizes wanted to see firsthand what is compelling one of the most competent and reputable law firm technology teams (Foley & Lardner’s IT team) to embrace NetDocuments.” - Matt Duncan, Senior Account Manager, NetDocuments
“Each year we get more interest and requests for demonstrations because speakers and panelist mention NetDocuments as ‘the leader in SaaS/Cloud content management’. We surprise many first-time viewers of NetDocuments with our rich feature set and end-user simplicity. People are always surprised that we have been providing SaaS content management for over 12 years; reminding people, we were SaaS before SaaS was cool.” - Keith Schneider, Senior Account Manager, NetDocuments
Keith also enjoyed interacting with our current customers: “It was great to have several current customers come to the booth excited to see the soon-to-be-released new user interface. After a quick demo, all walked away with smiles on their face and statements of ‘can’t wait for the release’ and ‘thanks for never standing still’. Additionally, increased partner enthusiasm and completed service integrations and affiliate sales partnerships have solidified our Partner Program presence. I can’t wait for next year’s event!”
View from New Delhi
Around the globe, Monish Madden and Kuldeep Singh of Collaborative Technology Solutions, a division of Smart Solutions, were gearing up for LegalTech India 2011 held in New Delhi. The Director of Collaborative Technology Solutions, Rajiv Mukerji, had this to say:
“The Collaborative Technology Solutions division of Smart Solutions, Inc. will consolidate its position as the leading solutions specialist in the Indian and Asian legal cloud computing space by its presence at “Legal Tech India 2011″ The objective of the conference is to emphasize growing the vast avenues prevalent for technology in the legal arena and how legal systems can evolve to a simpler, systematic and a cost effective modus operandi. The conference aims to bring together expertise, competence and technology in managing all the components of legal affairs.”
The success of NetDocuments in all parts of the world is further demonstrating our belief that the cloud is the most powerful and efficient way to share and collaborate and will continue to change the way people work. Tell us your thoughts on the cloud at @NetDocuments.
Post written by @MarriottMurdock, NetDocuments Partner Program Manager
Nothing in life is certain, except death, taxes, and the T3 Technology Conference being the the go-to spot for financial services technology.
David Drucker and Joel Bruckenstein are the brainchildren behind the T3 conference and will be taking their talents to Weston, FL for the 2011 event being held February 16-19. This is the sixth year that the duo has been running the conference and they are extremely excited to see what new innovations will be discussed during this year’s show.
“We are introducing several new and exciting sessions that reflect changes in the marketplace,” Drucker said in an interview on MSNBC. T3 recently announced the topics that will be covered which include social document management, cloud computing and mobile technology.
“T3 is one of the most valuable practice management focused conferences I’ve attended. The conference schedule allows ample time to network with colleagues and vendors in order to share experiences and best practices, while providing a diverse range of technology focused educational sessions. I highly recommend that any advisor who is considering integrating new technology into his or her business attend T3. Not only will it spark new ideas, but it will save you hours of research required to obtain this same information otherwise.”
Socialicious
Sharing and connecting on social media has become an integral part of any large gathering, and it will be no different at T3. The first place to go for all T3 related news is the conference blog. There are also numerous Twitter handles that are must follows including Joel Bruckenstein, David Drucker and T3Fan. The Twitter hashtag for the event is #T32011.
Tools for Today
Attending T3 is like grabbing a chip from your friend’s nachos and three other chips are stuck to it. No, you’re not abusing your friends kindness, just getting an unexpected freebie. With so much knowledge being shared at T3, attendees will surely get more than they bargained for. Here are a few of the can’t miss sessions:
What’s New in Document Management Software – We’re obviously interested in this panel discussion on Friday at 12:45pm.
Cloud Computing – Another very close to home topic. This session will be lead by Joel Bruckenstein on Saturday at 2:15pm.
Cloud Lounge
NetDocuments is a sponsor of the show and once again we will be bringing the Cloud Lounge to T3. The Cloud Lounge can be found at booth #213 where Marc Duncan, Marriott Murdock and the NetDocuments team will be posted up.
“I love the T3 show as it gives me a great opportunity to interact face to face with all of our wonderful customers and partners.” Marc said. “I also love to introduce the incredible power of NetDocuments to a whole new set of financial services professionals…..can’t wait!”
You may not attend technology conferences very often, but when you do, I’d suggest T3.
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments marketing team
In his newsletter discussing the issue, Charles Christian pointed out recent developments in the traditionally conservative legal market as a signal that the dog days of server farms and boxed software are all but over.
“Are the days of traditional document management systems and traditional DMS vendors coming to a close? For example, over the last two months the cloud-based document management specialists NetDocuments have signed up eight new (legal) user sites, (six law firms and two offices of general counsel) and while some of the smaller sites are new to the concept of a dedicated DMS, the latest wins also include Open Text swapouts at Van Cott Bagley Cornwall & McCarthy in Salt Lake City and Lynn Tillotson Pinkler & Cox LLP in Dallas.”
At NetDocuments, we have experience in server based document management as our founders started SoftSolutions in the late 80s. Though the legacy model has served the business community well over the past 30 years delivering an enormous amount of innovation and developments, like the Seattle SuperSonics, Simon Cowell’s feedback, and my holiday mustache, all good things must come to an end.
The way consumers use technology has fundamentally changed over the past decade making them more social, mobile and empowered. Though businesses are behind the consumer, if the the legal market is any type of lagging indicator, businesses are catching up and doing it quickly. To continue the discussion, send us a tweet at @NetDocuments or visit our Facebook page.
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments Marketing Team.
The All New NetDocuments – Rich Functionality. Enhanced Design.
In the spring of 2011, NetDocuments users will get a new user experience. Without sacrificing any of our industry leading functionality and reliability, we have redesigned the user interface to improve navigation and simplify the management of documents in the cloud.
The Makeover Process
This is the most significant update in the 12 years since NetDocuments opened it’s doors and paved the SaaS document management highway. “We pulled together a highly qualified team of experts to enhance the NetDocuments user interface and to address areas that would greatly improve the user experience, while at the same time creating an attractive design that is more pleasurable to use. By using familiar design patterns and a more structured framework, the interface should require less investment in setup and also be easier to gain proficiency,” said VP of Marketing, Leonard Johnson.
[Click the image below to see more screen shots]
Cloud Content Management
To learn more, check out our video and slideshow full of screenshots. These contain all the information you need to quench your desire to know everything there is about the new design. We’d love to hear your feedback and questions regarding the user experience of NetDocuments on Twitter at @netdocuments. You can also drop an email to sales@netdocuments.com
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments Marketing Team. He can be reached on Twitter at @dannymjohnson.
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.
