retrieval and reuse. This DMS “overhead” came at a financial and human capital cost. It put tremendous strain on resources including our personnel who are responsible for installing, training and supporting the multi-layer document authoring environment. There were both hard and soft costs associated with our environments, including software maintenance which runs 18% and higher on most enterprise document management applications. These costs were then and continue to be
accepted by our firms because these systems provided the ability to store documents in an organized manner for easy retrieval and reuse. Searching the document “library/ ies” typically involved the indexed profile fields for data such as document name, document type and author. In the early years of DMS, full text searching did not exist as we know it today. And in the early years, we didn’t know about the metadata that is exposed with newer search technologies. That is to say, many of the traditional profile fields of a DMS reside with and are searchable in the metadata of document files, needing only mature search technology to expose that data. So there you have it. The reason why law firms
of all sizes and complexities of practice have used document management systems has been to store and secure documents and to ultimately make
it easier to find, retrieve and reuse those documents. I now believe that document management systems as we have known and used them may be an unnecessary layer in a very complicated environment. With SharePoint, version 2010
management systems as we have known and used them may be an unnecessary layer in a very complicated environment.”
“I now believe that document
specifically, and with the FAST enterprise search functionality (http://www.microsoft. com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02- 10newenterprisesearchpr.mspx), I anticipate that our entire collection of documents and other content will be readily accessible via search and that the days of profiling a document for the purpose of finding it later becomes unnecessary. No more document
profile; no more DMS. So that’s my belief, and it comes with a
word of advice to the SharePoint developers: Lawyers rely on tools for document comparison, formatting, tables of authorities, etc. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 team needs to demonstrate the ability for our lawyers to work with their documents and these additional tools. Only then will this “unorthodox” technology become our new standard. ILTA
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