New Workshare Spices Up Version Management For Word; Excel On Deck

The current Workshare product is typically used by law firms and other companies that collaboratively build Word documents, whether they are contracts or sales proposals. The need for better change tracking along with the ability to scrub sensitive, often hidden data out of documents once they are complete, has taken on more urgency with new Securities and Exchange Commission requirements and other regulations.

Available on Tuesday, Workshare 3.5 manifests itself as a small panel on the Microsoft Word screen and lets users attach multiple documents and mail them out for review without leaving their familiar Word interface. The current Release 3 has been available since August. The company also fields DeltaView, software for comparing document versions, and Protect, a meta-data-removal application.

Workshare 3.5 adds security, auditing and e-mail control features, said Amy Millard, vice president of marketing at Workshare, a London-based company with U.S. operations in San Francisco. Upcoming versions will add similar capabilities for Excel and PowerPoint, two other members of the Microsoft Office family.

New reporting tools provide a good understanding and audit trail of who suggested changes to a given document. "What that means is there's a record of Jack said this and the CFO said that and the internal controls people said this," Millard said.

But as important as providing all that information for internal use, is the ability to strip it all out from the documents once they leave the premises.

"We just sold it to a very high-profile law firm in the U.S. that bought it because they send out documents that contain meta-data--the meta-data stripper now is a big-buzz item," said Grant Watt, director of sales and marketing at Premier Technology Solutions, a New York-based integrator.

The software "not only gets rid of the meta-data, the internal vs. external policies, but it's an automated process that can be done in the background. It automatically sets up a PDF that is sent out," he noted.

The existing Workshare 3 release already stripped important meta-data, or data about how the document was created and by whom, from it before it was sent to external users. There have been some embarrassing examples lately of people sending out documents that recipients then manipulated to reveal early versions of those documents.

"There are 15 types of meta-data in Word, and if you're very, very technical, you could remove maybe seven of them yourself, but some cannot be removed from Word because they're saved outside the document," Millard said.

The new release automates more change management and eliminates the need to cut and paste changes to update document versions.

E-mail integration with Exchange Server, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise also promises to eliminate the toggling back and forth between Word documents and e-mailed versions of those documents. "If you suggested changes three days ago and I don't understand why, without Workshare I'd have to go into e-mail and do some kind of search on your message. Now, within Word, I can click on the change in question and bring up the e-mail suggesting that change."

Workshare 3.5 costs $300 per user with volume discounts available.

IDC collaboration analyst Mark Levitt said the close integration with Word is both a blessing and a challenge for Workshare. "They play atop Office, are enhancing its value, so Microsoft will likely view them as an ally. On the other hand, if you're paying $200 for Office you had better understand the benefit of paying that or more for an extension to Office."