Peer to Peer Magazine

by Jeff Segarra, Director of Imaging Product Management at Nuance Communications Inc. offers the opportunity to significantly improve your ability to find, gather and share information through a document management system (DMS). There are a few basic things you should consider to make sure a cloud-based DMS solution will serve you well in the long term. A How's the Security? One of the greatest sources of anxiety with cloud services is the perceived lack of security and control. In reality, organizations and individuals have all been using secure cloud technologies for a long time to send email, make purchases, manage our financial accounts and more. Most cloud offerings have the same robust security options as the services you already use, but it doesn't hurt to look for specific features when evaluating a new service. All services offer password protection; however, make sure your account passwords are encrypted during transmission and storage both in the cloud system and on any local computers or mobile devices. As documents are sent and received from the cloud service, 256-bit SSL encryption should be employed at a minimum and preferably AES-256- bit encryption. All working sessions should automatically timeout after a set period. And it would be helpful if your service can demonstrate some additional monitoring, scanning and protection against hacking or viruses, much like the kind of protection you would have on your own PC. Can They Properly Handle PDF Files? 70 www.iltanet.org All cloud DMS services have methods for searching, Peer to Peer s a lawyer or staff member of a law firm, you know that time is money. Creating efficiencies in serving your clients is the best way to simultaneously increase client satisfaction and the profitability of the firm. The cloud organizing and accessing content. You'll have to evaluate these features based on your current work process and methods. But what most law firms overlook is the vital role that PDF- and paper-capture play in the overall process. PDF and a derivative of the format called PDF/A are the most significant file formats used in storing, sharing and accessing documents. You should make sure that your cloud DMS service handles these formats adequately; and, if it doesn't, you should consider additional desktop software to help close the gaps. It is essential to address this format issue because PDF files come from a variety of sources and have different amounts of accessible information. PDF files can include scanned paper pages that contain text, embedded images, annotations, file properties, layers and much more. Many cloud storage services will simply take the PDF files you give them — even if they have no text information or are not in the PDF/A file format. This will severely limit your ability to search for information in these files, which is basically invisible to the cloud DMS. To ensure your cloud service can address this issue, you should gather a sample set of documents with varying degrees of text and see if, after your cloud solution handles the files, you can find whatever information you are seeking. If your service cannot automatically expose nontext-based PDF files to a comprehensive search, you may need to employ desktop optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert all your PDF files into the proper formats before sending to your cloud DMS. The critical part here is to make sure that whichever solution — or combination of solutions — you select, it's important that you are able to convert PDF files into fully searchable documents without changing, modifying or losing vital information that's contained in the file. ILTA

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