[This post is from a session devoted solely to a presentation by a vendor. The session was jammed. This session included a discussion of Interwoven's new search features, which I addressed in a previous post along with a disclaimer about the benefits I've received from Interwoven. This is a good place for Interwoven's press release about its ILTA appearances and related news.]
Neil Araujo provided an overview of Interwoven's business.
Their core focus is in three business areas: professional services; capital markets (e.g., derivatives handling), and web content management.
Numbers
Legal services is the biggest business of Interwoven (professional services is 40% of their business). They crossed $200 million mark in revenue in 2006, with 14% revenue growth (their growth is double that rate in the legal market). They have 3900 customers (including 1200 law firms) and 780 employees in 6 countries. The ECM industry grew at 6%. Worksite is 50% of their total business.
68 of the "Global 100" are Worksite customers.
66 of Amlaw 100 (subscription required).
50 of top UK 100 firms.
They want to move beyond document management to email and records management, including compliance.
User Support
Kevin Hicks is doing a "Field Update" for 2007. He leads the field services organization (maintenance and support).
They are sharing a lot of information with ILTA; there are monthly review meetings and a two-way feedback loop (ILTA staff go to Interwoven on issues that bubble up on the listserves and they will develop FAQs or solutions ). They are also doing technical webinars. They want to establish best practices for DMS implementation, a step beyond just addressing technical issues.
The field organization is in three groups, Technical Support, Customer Care (which could help users with MCC), and Field Enablement Services.
The Enablement group will review a client firm's proposed design (as with MCC setups) to validate or to check for yellow or red flags.
Interwoven has a Matter Centric Best Practice Guide, as well as a similar best practice guide around IRM, and are planning to develop Universal Search and Offsite best practice guides. They have a toolkit to aid help desks in helping figure out "check-in document" problems. They'll also have an enhanced performance checklist and a "Worksite Health Check Methodology."
They are investing in better on-line support, including a web support interface list of defects, listing when they have been released, forthcoming, or in planning, an integrated enhancement database, and customer-specific notifications. They will be sending out their short term and long term goals weekly or biweekly.
They will be implementing Universal Search internally on their support website.
Interwoven is considering adding blogging and issues-based content. (If they want to create an interactive atmosphere they might consider setting up a wiki or something more like Cisco's contract system rather than a blog.)
They are investigating online access to support cases. This turns out to be trickier than they expected. They are also developing personalized web support experience, tracked with login.
[Collaborative Software Break---It looks like there are a lot of places that customers have to go to find out what's new coming out of Interwoven. Are there existing message boards on Interwoven? I am glad they are investing wikis and blogs; perhaps Interwoven should also set up an inside-the-firewall locked-down feed reader that brings in RSS feeds from the different Interwoven support web sites and resources that customers have access to. They should work with the customers to customize the feeds based on the products and versions that customer has. ]
The focus in user support used to be on new content and making it perfect. But they now say that people are more interested in troubleshooting simple issues.
Business Drivers At Law Firms
Neil said that three issues have repeatedly come up in his discussions with firm management and CIOs.
Battle for talent
The number one reason associates leave is work flexibility. How can an associate be effective working in part from home or on the train? How do you meet users expectations that are now shaped by their experience on the Web?
Client expectations
Clients want global service teams.
Risk management
How can you implement a legal hold? How can you enforce a commitment to a client to retain records for a certain period of time? Ediscovery is expensive because our information is all over the place.
New Search
Interwoven partnered with Freshfields to select a new search engine. They tested engines side-by-side with Freshfields documents. Freshfields used to take 7 weeks to index 7 million documents. It took a little more than 2 days, using "good beefy hardware."
The new search will not hit the DMS' SQL database for search; it will go after the full-text index instead. It will have a mirroring capacity. They enabled quick access to Worksite search through a double press of the "Control" key.
There are many different ways people save and store email. The utopian goal is as close to one-click filing as possible. Should it know where to file it? The new method has a "send and file" email button as well as a simple "send" button. Sent emails have a new piece of metadata in the subject line that suggests without requiring where an email needs to be filed. Return emails are flagged but it does not alert the user that an email with that MCC folder has come in.
Interwoven also has a new blackberry mobility client.
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