In today's special "best friends" issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a document comparison, security, and review tool that integrates with Word, an Outlook add-on that makes it easy to schedule meetings, and a voicemail-to-text service that integrates with any cell phone or smartphone. Don't miss the next issue.
Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:
Microsoft Office's Best Friend
By Dennis Kennedy
Your documents have rich and interesting lives with fascinating stories to tell. Documents are created, revised, shared, printed, filed, archived, etc. Some of these stories you want told and others you don't.
As a result, management of documents throughout the entire lifecycle has become an important priority. The new Workshare Professional 5 delivers an integrated approach to document lifecycle management, providing control and reducing risks of information leaks during document review and other document usage without changing the tools you use today (i.e., Word, Outlook, your document management system, extranet, etc.).
In short, Workshare has significantly beefed up its comparison, security, and document review functionality. Regarding document comparison, accuracy is critical, especially when you work with complex tables, intricate paragraph numbering, or complex formatting. Workshare Professional's improved document comparison engine should be able to handle anything you throw at it.
Among the notable new features is a tabbed view within documents similar to the tabs in modern Web browsers. With its "One-to-Many" technology you can now compare multiple document versions inside this tabbed view, which makes it easy to accept or reject changes across all document versions in one place.
As you work on documents, Workshare Professional maintains the entire history of all changes and proposed changes. You now have the ability to eliminate the risk that inadvertent formatting changes, new styles, template changes, or file corruption will, for lack of a better word, screw up your documents.
Workshare Professional also provides a platform for managing collaboration and review of documents. You can exchange documents by email or SharePoint extranets and never have to worry about juggling multiple document versions or losing track of the master. Workshare Professional manages all of the review copies and ensures that you always work on the correct master document, whether it is stored in a document management system, a network drive or a local file system.
Once you finalize a document, Workshare Professional goes beyond metadata management with "content risk discovery and remediation" prior to PDF conversion. It then helps you safely publish your document in a secure PDF format without the need for additional software. With the ability to create and impose business policies for PDF creation and distribution you can now enforce PDF security across your firm. You can also create PDFs from any application, not just Office.
This latest iteration of Workshare Professional is not only compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 and earlier versions, it actually integrates into the Office 2007 Ribbon and task panes. Another nice touch is its support for SharePoint Server 2007's collaborative workspaces and Live Meeting for "real-time collaboration."
Workshare Professional also comes with out of the box integration options for document management systems. Metadata links allow you to leverage your document management system to track matters across documents when sent for review from and to anywhere. It even retains a full audit trail of review and sharing activities. Learn more about Workshare Professional 5.
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