iManage Work is a document management solution formerly known as HP Worksite. iManage was divested from Hewlett-Packard in 2015 and is now an independent company, headquartered in Chicago.
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NetDocuments
Score 10.0 out of 10
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NetDocuments is a document management solution from the company of the same name in Lehi, Utah.
iManage is well suited to managing the large volume of documents and emails that are created on a daily basis. Lawyers can get dozens if not hundreds of e-mails a day, and we need something to do with them. Deleting them is often not practical, because you may require the information a year from now. Leaving them in Outlook is also impractical, because a large Inbox will slow Outlook down. Outlook has an archiving feature, but this doesn't really help for collaboration (and your colleagues are likely out of luck if you end up unavailable due to emergency). iManage is less well suited to small organizations (ex: sole practitioners and small firms) because it is does require a significant investment in implementing and maintaining the software. iManage Work is well suited for large law firms, because it is great for collaboration, including between different offices.
NetDocuments positioned itself to work in the legal industry, and it has done a very good job. It's kept pace with the challenges presented by the law and it's grown in its offerings. Any organization that must balance mobility and security would benefit from the use of NetDocuments as a platform.
File Organization. Netdocuments is a great tool to neatly organize your virtual files and separate them by workspaces (matters). Each workspace contains folders (document types) that can be customized according to users' needs and preference.
Searching your data base. All the documents and emails saved in Netdocuments are searchable. The search feature works great.
Cloud based document management system. Simply put, Netdocuments can be accessed from ANY web-enabled device. This is becoming more and more important in the age of satellite offices, working on-the-go, and telecommuting.
Disaster preparedness. Should something happen to your office, your documents are safe, secure and accessible.
Seamless integration with Microsoft Applications. Netdocuments provides users with Microsoft applications integrations that can be easily installed on each individual machine.
Support. There is an extensive on-line help library which provides incredibly helpful articles with step-by-step instructions. If you cannot find solution on-line, telephone support is staffed by courteous and knowledgeable people.
Security. This is especially important for a law firm. A designated administrator can put in force workspace, folder, document, or profile-based security.
The system can be fairly buggy. I have issues with freezing, and a lack of responsiveness each time I use it ( although not for long and does not prevent me from getting what I need to be done, it's just annoying).
It has a slightly larger learning curve to use than other more simplistic records managers
In my opinion, VERY Expensive. You can not find documents without OCR. OCR doubles your storage cost as they save the OCRd document as a second version.
In my experience, very annoying latency, even when trying to preview documents. As a result, folks in my office often try to save locally as opposed to storing in the cloud.
I orginally signed up for NDMax. However, it would only process one document at a time. I am not a transactional firm, so, in my opinion, this was essentially worthless.
It has been what our firm has always used, and overall everyone seems to be pleased with it. It is user friendly and intuitive and it doesn't appear we have any intention of changing what we use for our purposes.
To me iManage is very intuitive and user friendly. The switch from the application vs the Outlook extension was an adjustment, but it was one I made pretty easily once it happened.
The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.
NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.
We had an issue a few years ago where a plug-in of some sort which allowed the viewing of PDFs got updated and then whenever some people previewed PDFs in iManage then Outlook would crash. My outlook crashed over 20 times in a single day once. It was a pretty bad time. I know one of our information technology professionals in another office worked non-stop with iManage to get it resolved, and it seemed like they did take the issue pretty seriously.
I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.
MS SharePoint requires a lot of time to integrate and efforts are expensive compared to iManage product. iManage is quick setup and well integrates with existing on-premise environments and integrates well with major iDP systems for authentications and manage RBAC systems for permissions via API calls.
WatchDox and WorldDox both provided what looked like similar features but too much of the technical requirements fall on the customer and they, at the time of my evaluation, were not true cloud products. They were client \ server-based product hosted in the cloud. If you do not know the difference, research until you do. iManger is a viable alternative if you are just not able to get the internet speed you need for NetDocuments. But heads up it is not the Swiss Army knife for security features like NetDocuments.
Since our policy is that all client documents are saved into iManage, we have been able to keep an email retention policy for Exchange to 90days to delete. This has saved us significant resources in both Exchange management and hardware to support excessive email storage for archived databases or extremely large databases.
The ability to search documents quickly by text inside the documents allows to review previously created contracts and use similar language that is well suited to a new project over again without having to spend time manually opening and searching ourselves. The software does it for us.
We used to store old files at an offsite storage facility for a monthly fee. We have implemented a new procedure, where we now scan these old paper files into our iManage system, making them text searchable PDFs. Since the software has such robust searching capabilities, this makes the documents much more accessible when needed than requesting an offsite storage delivery and having to manually pull paper files. In addition, we have saved thousands of dollars a month by not storing paper files offsite any longer. If the searching were not so powerful, we would not done this because our old paper storage system worked well for us previously.
