Worldox GX3 Officially Announced

World Software is officially announcing Worldox GX3 today at LegalTech NY. The really big news will be about Worldox GX3 Cloud (an SaaS product) and Worldox GX3 Enterprise, both coming later this summer.

But let’s look at the traditional version of Worldox, now GX3. As usual, there are a number of “under the hood” improvements, including a new set of viewers and significantly greater speed (in an already fast program). But what are the things that affect the end user more immediately?

The new set of viewers means that Worldox can now view PDF Portfolios and Binders, which wasn’t possible previously. With more firms using these functions, this is important. For example, I have a series of PDFs I compiled out of jpeg images that GX2 viewers could not display. Now they do. Some Word 2010 tables also display more accurately in the new viewers.

The new Legal Hold function could be a very big deal for certain firms, especially those involved in litigation. You mark documents as “Legal Hold” and they are moved to a separate area where they can be searched for and viewed but not changed in any way. This can be done en masse (by people with appropriate rights). When the Hold is released, the documents can be returned to the main document store.

The toolbar at the top of the Worldox screen can now be edited by users. You can change the icon, the description, move them around, etc. So you can get rid of things you never use and make the toolbar more functional.

The entire left side, formerly the “Folder Tree,” has been reorganized along the lines of the Outlook Navigation Pane, with buttons at the bottom selecting various functions. A new function is “Favorite Matters” (which reflects a “My Matters” function available in other programs). This lists the matters you have most recently accessed. No need to open up a search screen, they pop right up. It does involve a certain amount of scrolling up and down, but many people will find this extremely useful. Various functions in the Navigation Pane can be sorted and reorganized depending on how you work.

Projects, a very powerful but somewhat clumsy and underused feature of GX2 has been placed here and made much easier to use. People already using projects will really like this.

Finally, there are the usual number of small but very nice improvements. In general, the messages on pop up windows are improved and more obvious. One of my favorite improvements is the “Same Profile As” button on the save screen. This is very useful when you email someone a document and they send it back with revisions. You want to save this as a version, but how?  It was always possible, although a couple of screens deep. Now that function is right there staring you in the face.

Similarly, the “8th field” has been make more obvious. There was always a button in the comments field called “table.” This was a drop-down list that allowed users to select comments from a list, such as keywords in documents involved in litigation. Since comments are searchable as part of the profile, this was powerful, but again, under-used. Now it is much more obvious and should be very useful to litigation firms in particular.

All in all, a nice upgrade – and as Worldox users know, with the very inexpensive Worldox maintenance, upgrades are free.