Archive: Legal Mac

Their Concept

Your Reality

File Management (what you are using now) relies on users to name and organize folders and files. In order to find a file, a user must:

1. Know and understand the folder structure that holds the files, AND
2. Know the methodology for naming files, AND
3. Know enough information to predict the actual filename, AND
4. Hope that all other users adhered to the same conventions when storing files

This method is fine if the only user is you – you know where you put files and how you named them. But as your organization grows and more users are involved and more file are created, the potential for human error – or simple misunderstanding – increases, and files become misplaced. This causes user frustration with the system and they look for ways to keep files on their desktops, and the problem snowballs.

Document Management (what we want to sell you) uses a central sever-based program to enforce where files are stored. A database is used that contains a record for each file stored. This record can contain as many fields as you like, such as client name, matter, case number, document title, document type, and whatever else you deem important or useful for finding files. As a result, in order to find a file in a document management system, a user must:

1. Know just one of the pieces of information contained in the document record.

The server program uses the submitted information to locate the correct record, and the document associated with the record is retrieved and displayed on the user workstation – all in a second or two. Users no longer need to keep the complexity of the folder hierarchy and file naming scheme in mind when searching – they simply have to know one of the many items of information you have selected to index your documents – a much simpler and much faster task.

With a Document Management system, compliance with folder and file naming conventions is offloaded to the central server, making user conformance a non-issue. Because users no longer need to remember folder structures and file naming schemes, and because any file can be found and viewed in seconds, users no longer have the system integrity concerns that accompanied their reliance on old File Management techniques.

For clients that find the older file/folder methods attractive, Mindwrap can supply custom folder action scripts. This allows firms to specify a single “drop folder” into which users place documents, triggering the display and prompting for user-input metadata, using your own custom screen design. And because all Optix indexing screens are capable of using table lookups, pulldown menus, and multiple choice controls for gathering user input, the accuracy and consistency of the resulting metadata recorded for each document is greatly enhanced, ensuring that you can later search for – and find – the documents you commit to Optix.

The result is that – relieved of mundane file management duties – your users can focus on the goal at hand. Your team is more united. And because you freed up the time previously wasted on tracking down files, they can handle more work (but don’t tell them that).

As your firm has grown, you probably acquired several software applications and would like whatever Document Management system you select to integrate with your existing systems. Perhaps you have extensive client data stored in a FileMaker Pro database – we can help you leverage that data. Do you receive important correspondence via email? Our integration allows users to selectively store and index emails directly to the server repository from within Apple Mail or Entourage. Do you receive searchable PDF documents during discovery? We can help you load and index those documents so they are searchable by content.

Mindwrap’s technical team has decades of experience building highly integrated systems for both commercial and government clients, and we can help you analyze your existing systems and advise you on the best strategies for leveraging your legacy applications and data. You can read more about our system integration tools here.

You probably arrived on this page because your desktop and file server systems are Mac-based or you operate a mixed environment of Macs and PCs. Congratulations – your search is at an end. Since 1988, Mindwrap’s Optix has been the premier name in Document Management and Workflow systems for the Mac and cross-platform environments. We have installed hundreds of systems worldwide that support thousands of users just like yours.

Other vendors offer browser-based solutions and call them “cross-platform”. We do not believe that any generic browser-based system can offer the speed, power, and functionality needed to perform production-level document management. For this reason, we have invested over two decades of development in our native Windows and Macintosh clients, ensuring that your users have the right tools to get the job done.

Our native Optix Workstation client for Macintosh is written from the ground up using the latest Cocoa APIs and XCode tools to provide a Mac OS X user experience second to none. Our native client for Windows is based on MFC and C++, developed in a COM environment for maximum integration flexibity. Our clients applications have been tuned to work exactly like Mac and PC users expect, with appearance and user interface appropriate to each platform.

Our workstations both support native scan to PDF and TIFF using super-fast high-end Fujitsu scanners. Need to annotate or redact your TIFF or PDF documents? No problem – our clients even lets you create custom electronic “rubber stamps” to indicate things like invoice paid status. Want to search your PDF’s based on content? Our Optix Text Search add-on server module allows you to index and search the contents of PDF, Word, and other text-based files.

Have something you need to do that we haven’t mentioned? Our Mac client supports Applescript and our PC client supports COM, so they can integrate with your other desktop applications – ask us, we may have done it before.