1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Would you believe that you can actually save money by switching to WorkSite instead of sticking with your current vendor? It's true! WorkSite
requires fewer servers, resulting in a substantially lower TCO. On average, it takes 30-50% less hardware to run WorkSite than it does to do the same stuff
with your current DM provider. That's fewer servers, lower OS costs, less maintenance...which all adds up to far less hassle and money. We're talking hundreds of thousands
of dollars in savings for a mid-sized firm.
To upgrade to the competition's latest version, you need additional hardware and servers to deliver a minimal document management installation.
And, because their Portal and Collaboration applications are only loosely coupled with their DM, to add those features, you will need even more servers, software,
and professional services. What else could you do with a few hundred thousand dollars???? We'll let you contemplate that while we move on to the next reason.
2. Lowest-Risk Upgrade From Your Existing System
Our 3-tier architecture is indisputably the industry benchmark. Our first product was built on this architecture over five years ago, and over 600,000
users at over 1200 firms have relied on it since. By now, almost all other vendors have attempted to convert their architecture to three tier. However, like anything
else, retrofits are never as effective as building on a solid foundation from day one. And, these attempts at 3-tier architecture are relatively new and not
well tested. The stability and strength of our architecture have also enabled to add new functionality to meet our customers' evolving needs, without straining
the system.
Here's one example highlighting the important architectural differences between products. When the server starts up, WorkSite establishes a pool of fileserver
connections for use with all file operations. This means no lost information. The competition's product does not work this way. When a user requests a file
download, the server instantiates a DCOM object that has to first log-in to the fileserver where the document resides, and then fetch the file. This dynamic
process of establishing connections to a fileserver can cause failure conditions that result in slow performance and, worse yet, lost information. Try explaining
that one to your client!
3. Mature and Robust Architectural Foundation
WorkSite is built on a mature server platform that scales to thousands of users, is reliable and supports the functionality needed to support document
management as well as your document-centric IT initiatives like intranets, KM and extranets. These features have been built on a multi-tier architecture that
has matured over five years and uses industrial strength core building blocks. In contrast, the competition's most up-to-date version is still built on the
same DCOM architecture as the previous version of their server—architecture that is known to have major scalability problems.
Here's a quick history lesson: DCOM was an extension of client side COM technology. It was never designed for enterprise class server based applications. (Even
Microsoft does not use DCOM in its enterprise class applications like Exchange or SQL Server.) The negative impact of using DCOM surfaces when the number of
users is beyond a few hundred and there are a large number of documents and activity records. (If this is not an issue for your firm today, think ahead
a couple of years!) For this reason the competition's product will not typically be able to handle more than two hundred or so users per server. Which means
you need more servers and more money out of your pocket.
4. Superior Performance
Interwoven is continuously improving WorkSite's performance and speed. Meanwhile, independent studies have shown that the competition's latest version is actually
slower than their previous two-tier client. This performance degradation can be attributed to the overhead imposed by DCOM. For example, when there are a
large number of entries in the activity table (it's quite common to have multiple millions of records in this table) the time that it takes to log-in or fetch
the recently accessed documents list could be minutes. Ever had to face an angry mob? Of lawyers? Yikes!
WorkSite's performance advantages are particularly important in firms that need to provide users in remote offices with the ability to search and access
files across the enterprise. WorkSite is optimized to work with the bandwidth and latency constraints that come with WAN environments. If you think WorkSite
is faster than the competition on the LAN, just wait until you see a side-by-side comparison on the WAN!
With the competition, the high network utilization of DCOM causes very slow performance across the WAN. WANs are not very forgiving of software that is
bandwidth intensive or software that is not designed to account for low bandwidth and high latency networks. DM that does not work well in WAN environments will
prevent you from executing your vision of providing global searching for documents across locations or effectively supporting distributed teams that need a common
workspace to share documents.
—First, Interwoven remains committed to the legal industry and have an entire organization focused solely on understanding
legal industry trends and the unique needs of today's law firms
—Second, we are closely in tune with our customers through focus groups, CIO forums and daily interaction,
to make sure our product can take your firm to the next level
—Third, our stable and powerful 3-tier architecture and tightly integrated design make it possible for to
add additional features and functionality without sacrificing performance, reliability or ease of use.
—Finally, we know from our customers that having a document management system that works as well as ours takes
the IT staff (and their budget) away from day-to-day trouble shooting and into the realm of planning and executing strategic initiatives, including
Matter Centric Collaboration, Virtual Practice Areas, E-mail Management or Offsite Data Centers that can increase security, improve utilization, improve
client service and significantly impact your bottom line
6. The Original and Only True Matter-Centric Collaboration
Matter Centric Collaboration enables lawyers to have a single place to contribute and consume all information related to a matter including documents, tasks,
events, stakeholders, and relevant news feeds and time & billing. It's about making DM intuitive for the lawyer and thereby driving adoption and higher productivity.
Strategic initiatives enabled by Matter Centric Collaboration include:
—Effective practice group management without shuttling papers back and forth
—Increased utilization of attorneys by staffing matters globally
—Higher client satisfaction via higher quality work product and online access to matter-related information
—Improved efficiency and quality by leveraging past work for current matters
—Cost effective electronic back-up is much easier than paper
—Enhanced the full record of a matter is a much richer source of knowledge than an individual document
out-of-context
Only Interwoven provides a solution for true matter centric collaboration. That's because matter centric collaboration fundamentally requires
a workspace that is shareable, searchable, can contain documents and all other information relevant to a matter and is accessible from consumption as well
as production environments.
The competition's most updated version does not offer shareable workspaces. While they try to position community pages in the EIP product as
sharable workspaces, these community pages are not visible from desktop environments like Word and Outlook, thereby significantly limiting their use.
7. Cost-Effective Business Continuity
Good disaster recovery or business continuity solutions require that you maintain redundant data sites, so that if one site is unavailable for
any reason the backup site can transparently take over. It is far more cost-effective to design a business continuity solution if your data is centralized in one
location rather than having your data distributed across offices. WorkSite has sophisticated data-caching and remote monitoring capabilities to enable a centralized
DM deployment. These capabilities coupled with a WAN-friendly architecture enable firms to create a single redundant site with all firm documents, which greatly
reduces the cost of disaster recovery solutions. Data-centralization also enables you to set up practice-centric rather than the traditional location centric
libraries. Only WorkSite can truly support centralized architectures.
8. Hallelujah for E-mail Management!!!
One of the most exciting (and highly demanded) functionality added to WorkSite is E-mail Management. Clearly, with e-mail as the de-facto method of communication
between attorneys and clients, an alarming amount of important information relating to specific matters is inevitably located in individual attorneys' inboxes,
where other lawyers collaborating on the matter cannot access it. Worse yet, crucial information can be easily lost with attorney turnover or simply buried
in an ever-expanding sea of e-mail. The e-mail management functionality provides your users with a single virtual workspace for all information (e-mail correspondence
and other matter documents) regarding the matter. Our e-mail management solution enables attorneys to effortlessly file e-mails into virtual matter files in
the repository, where the documents related to the matter are already stored. Say goodbye to e-mail overload! Hallelujah is right!
They are spending more of their time on productive, billable activities and less time hurling profanities and desk
gadgets at their IT department
The IT department is spending more time on high-impact technology initiatives and less time ducking flying expletives
and sharp objects
We believe that the secret to happy users is two-fold. The solution must be entirely reliable and easy to use. And clearly, users are happiest when
they are 100% confident that all of their hard work and precious documents are safe, up to date and easy to access. But we also know that rock-solid architecture
is useless if your people do not use the system. So our intuitive and seamlessly integrated user interface is just as impressive and important.
WorkSite is comprised of several modules that are truly integrated, not stuck together after the fact, so there is one consistent interface, one
login, one repository, one security protocol and one super-intuitive interface. And, when we say intuitive, we aren't talking about how computer programmers think. We mean it's intuitive for actual attorneys, paralegals and secretaries.
In comparison, the competition's portfolio of products has been built through acquisition of several separate systems, and integrated only on
the surface. Improvements have definitely been made over the years, but the DM, collaboration and portal modules are still separate products with different
architectures, different databases, different user tables and different administrative modules. This means that users require a lot of extra training as you roll out
additional functionality. But it can also cause more serious problems.
Here's a painful example. With the competition, when a user needs to collaborate on a document with a co-worker or an external partner, the document must be copied from the DM repository to the collaboration repository.
This means the document is no longer available via the MS Word or MS Outlook integration. Instead, the user must manage the burden of keeping track of multiple
copies of the document: one in the DM system and one in the collaboration system. Isn't version control the problem that DM is supposed to fix?
Further, WorkSite provides a flexible array of client applications that enable each of your users to have the most efficient interface for the
type of work they do, in the way they like to do it. We offer the traditional desktop client for heavy document producers such as secretaries, and Microsoft
Outlook or Web clients for lawyers and a portable client for users that travel. In contrast, the competition has decided to eliminate their desktop client—leaving
heavy document producers like secretaries and paralegals without a client application that meets their specific requirements.
We don't just assume our users are happy. We hear it from our customers and we have the highest user adoption numbers in the industry. Why?
Because we focus on making the product work the way your users do rather than the other way around. Put simply, WorkSite is created by people who LOVE technology
for people who don't. And that makes EVERYONE happier!
10. Commitment to Our Customer's success and Satisfaction
At Interwoven, our most important goal is having happy customers. That means
the people who signed the check are happy, the IT folks people who maintain
it are happy, and, of course, the end users who rely on WorkSite to get their
work done everyday are happy as well. To that end, Interwoven is committed to
creating innovative, reliable products and offering service that makes our customers
genuinely happy. Here's a statistic that makes us very proud. Interwoven has
a 96% customer loyalty rating—that's considered to be "world class"
for our industry and the whole software industry. When you are an Interwoven
customer, you become an important partner to us and are always treated that
way.
This is not just lip service. We gather customer input in every way we can.
We survey our customers after every tech support case, we bring them together
in user groups and forums and we also retain a third party research firm to
conduct a soup-to-nuts customer satisfaction survey every year. We can rattle
off plenty of great statistics. For example, in addition to our 96% loyalty
score, all of our closed tech support cases give an average satisfaction score
greater than 9 out of 10. But, for the best proof of all, talk to any of our
huge pool of referenceable customers. We can't think of better spokespersons
than your peers at law firms. We think you will be impressed with what they
have to say.
Do We Have Your Attention?
We hope you have found these reasons for switching as compelling as the customers
who helped us put together this list. To arrange a demo, or obtain additional
information, contact info_sales@interwoven.com.
