iManage outlines the road ahead at ConnectLive 2016

27
May
2016

Jonathan Watson

‘What a difference a year can make,’ said iManage CEO Neil Araujo as he kicked off the company’s ‘ConnectLive’ event in London. The two-day user conference brought together CIOs and IT professionals, technical architects, administrators and many others.

His point was that the iManage of May 2016 is very different to the iManage of May 2015. Since then, of course, the iManage leadership team has completed a buyout from Hewlett Packard (HP) for the purchase of the complete iManage business.

One enjoyable side effect of this, according to Araujo, is that he can now talk about the company ‘without any prefix or suffix… it’s just iManage’. And the initial signs are promising: in just 100 days, he said, the firm added 110 new clients. The team wants to make iManage a system that is ‘demanded by users, rather than mandated by the IT department’.

An essential part of this is iManage Work 9.3, which the company released at the end of 2015. Araujo said this was the biggest refresh in eight years, which perhaps coincidentally takes us back to the time just before iManage was acquired by Autonomy (subsequently acquired by HP)

Dan Carmel, chief marketing officer at iManage, said the company’s offering was targeted at new professionals, who expect to be able to access all the documents they need at any time and in any place. IT has to be highly impressive to win these people over, because ‘when you bring them new technology, they evaluate it against what they already know and use,’ he said. 

Those present were treated to a short video in which they experienced a typical day in the life of a new professional using iManage, circa December 2016. Intriguingly, the new professional, Kelly, sat down to a relaxing dinner at the end of her day with none other than Dan Carmel himself!

They also heard from chief technology officer Mohit Mutreja; Dean Leung, the newly hired chief customer success officer; and Rafiq Mohammadi, the iManage co-founder and chief scientist who heads the newly launched R&D organisation iManage Labs.

Elsewhere at the conference, sessions focused on issues like secure collaboration and information governance. Stuart Chapman, IT applications manager at law firm Osborne Clarke, described how his firm had benefited from implementing solutions from DocsCorp. He said that when the firm rolled out the document comparison tool compareDocs to an initial 800 users, there was only one complaint – not bad for an implementation of new IT!

In the information governance session, iManage director of product management Ian Raine provided a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing law firms and the technology specialists who help them meet those challenges. He identified cyber attacks, increasing regulatory demands and increasing client demands as the key aspects of the current information governance landscape.

According to Raine, law firms need to be extra vigilant as hackers see them (along with other professional service firms) as the soft underbelly of corporate confidentiality. ‘They believe law firms represent the back door to confidential corporate data,’ he said.

Raine said iManage plans to release the next version of Records Manager (6.4) in the third quarter of 2016. Innovations will include improved visibility of matter attributes, the ability to change media type and to disable a matter to prevent the creation of a new file part. The firm’s information governance roadmap for 2016/17 focuses on three key elements: monitoring for unusual activity, creating a register of outside counsel obligations and managing content in other repositories.

Shawn Misquitta, senior director of product management at iManage, provided a glimpse of what’s coming in iManage Share. One important element will be the introduction of ‘bring your own key’ (BYO key), which allows people to use their own encryption software and manage their own encryption keys. This should be available in summer 2016.

BYO Key gives users ultimate control of their own keys and the ability to produce their own master key by relying on their own internal hardware security modules (HSM). The master key is transmitted to the HSM within the cloud. Data is secured because the master key lies in the enterprise's HSM and not the cloud service provider's.

Other new features on the way in the second half of this year include a fully responsive user interface, simplified navigation, facet-based control navigation and intuitive search. In 2017, the company plans to introduce preview enhancements and online version comparison to make it easier to manage documents amended both by the lawyer and by the client.

Tikit used ConnectLive 2016 to announce a strategic partnership with DocSolid, the pioneer of ‘Paper2Digital’ technology. Tikit launched the company’s KwikTag Legal solution, which seeks to reduce costs and spark productivity in law firms by removing paper filing, retrieval, processing and storage burdens. It integrates images with document management, records management and business software.

Prosperoware used the event to unveil the latest release of its information governance software, Milan InfoGov 3.6. New features include multi-layered group management to enable matters to be locked down to matter team, client, industry team or practice group. Risk teams can delegate approval and access as they decide.