iManage Makes Collaborative Content Management Foray

WorkSite version 3.0, released last week, provides an online meeting place where users working in teams can share e-mail and documents, hold meetings and participate in discussion threads. In each space, users can create folders and subfolders and enforce security on documents and folders.

Version 3.0 works primarily with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files using OLE linking. It also includes an add-on for Microsoft Outlook, enabling its calendar to be synchronized with calendars in Outlook applications.

Files requested by a user can be downloaded and worked on using the native application or can be converted into HTML and viewed through a browser.

Documents also can be uploaded to an extranet for users outside the corporate firewall. The system notifies users when modifications are made to a file or when a task is assigned to them.

Users can either invite individuals to a workspace or sign on others based on their roles. The roles provide a powerful method of automatically inheriting all of the file access, tab views, notifications and meeting events. IManage synchronizes roles immediately to enable users to have instant access to a workspace once it has been assigned to them.

The server bundles Autonomy's search engine for both general and content-sensitive searching. It also indexes documents and its attributes to produce more focused results. Searches can be done by content or by taxonomy.

Even though iManage's knowledge management component can archive a variety of document sources, its categorization process and taxonomy creation must be done manually and lack the depth needed to perform automatic topic discovery.

WorkSite provides a link to WebEx Communications' online conferencing service to enable users to start conferencing right from the workspace. The product also offers simple document management options including check-in/check-out and document history tracking.