In more ILTA 2013 news, Workshare today announced the launch of Workshare Professional 8, providing current subscribers of Workshare Professional with secure file transfer capabilities, helping users reduce the number of unauthorized, consumer-grade systems being used by staff.
Anthony Foy, CEO at Workshare said: “Legal firms face significant security issues when sending confidential files to recipients outside of their organization. On top of that, mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends mean that data policy mandates are harder to enforce, putting enormous pressure on legal IT.”
Workshare Professional 8 includes the following enhancements:
• Simplifies comparison and extends supported files to non-text-based PDFs by integrating OCR functionality in the desktop solution
• Offers new interactive protect features to simplify metadata cleaning, avoid email pop-ups, and eliminate Outlook add-in issues
• Saves redlines and finished documents as PDF/A, a mandatory archiving system to support in US Court filings
• Integrates comparison functionality with NetDocuments, completing a wide range of ECM/DMS vendor integrations, including SharePoint, iManage, and OpenText.
COMMENT: Workshare are a little coy about mentioning the “D” word in their formal announcement but at the heart of the new secure file transfer functionality is the provision of a house-trained, behind-the-firewall alternative to Dropbox. Pro 8 is the first version of Workshare to fully integrate the technologies offered by SkyDox and as such is probably the most exciting update to Workshare for several years.
The file transfer has all the ease of use of Dropbox but with the robust security law firms require – in fact users now have greater control over the files they share than with the traditional email + attachment approach. Plus add in the enhanced metadata cleaning and the support for mobile working on iPad, iPhone, Android and web-based clients and you have a system that reflects the way lawyers work today, with the same functionality now available on mobile devices as on the desktop.
