Does It Compute?

Worldox for the Mac

Worldox Web/Mobile was originally designed for the PDA, and works with just about anything from Blackberrys to iPhones. Given that most people have remote access to their office, the primary function of PDA access is usually to email documents to other people.

However, since Worldox Web is platform independent and works with just about any web browser, this means Mac users (otherwise shut out from the majority of legal software) can use their browser to access the firm’s Worldox document store. It won’t be quite as slick as the regular Worldox program, but will be perfectly workable. 

Document Retention/Management in Worldox

Worldox GX introduced an important feature that has been little noticed: Document Retention/Records Management. This feature lets you specify how long a given type of document is to be kept (from 1 week to 64 years) before being either archived or deleted. So correspondence might be kept for a couple of years, and wills essentially forever.  By coupling this with a type of law field, the same type of document (correspondence) can be kept for different lengths of time depending on what type of law is involved.

While this feature is abstract for most firms, there is one area where it is immediately convenient. Many firms restrict users’ ability to delete documents. This prevents human error and also the occasional problem of a hostile employee trying to do damage before quitting. However, users may in fact legitimately want or need to delete documents. You can create a document type called “delete” and set its document retention period to be, say two weeks, after which it will automatically be deleted.  This allows for error and changes of mind, but still helps keep your system clean.

Worldox FAQs Updated

Last December I published a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” about Worldox. With Worldox GX2 being released, I have updated some of them and added six new “answers” for a total of 40 Q&A.

These can be accessed directly by clicking here or on the Cheat Sheet page of my web site at www.heckmanco.com

I have found that a very productive post-training followup is to have a firm email ONE question two or three times a week to everyone in the firm for a month or so. This reinforces training and encourages people to expand how they use Worldox.

Worldox GX2 Released

Worldox has announced the release of Worldox GX2 effective September 1 for new installations, and about November 1 or so for updates to existing sites.

The major new features that are available mostly have to do with the underpinnings and administration of Worldox. It is now much easier to create “ethical walls” (formerly known as “Chinese walls”) and security groups. It is also now possible for an administrator to create Quick Search Bookmarks for a selected group of people (a given practice area, for example). The Archive, Records and Salvage repositories can now be set to a different location than the main document store, which many larger firms have wanted for a long time.

For firms and individuals that make heavy use of the Folder Tree, the descriptions of Clients, Matters or Document Types are now listed in addition to the actual location (typically a number such as 003456). A number of other display features have been added, such as a tri-pane preview window and the ability to see a “cloud” listing the number of each type of document in a list, with the larger number of documents displayed in larger type.

New End User features depend heavily on how you set up Worldox. If you use a relatively “flat” structure – Client and Matter but do not have Document Types as a directory, you can now usefully see Worldox files from within Outlook. You can also usefully make use of “Workspaces” which are basically hyperlinks to directories. However, if you set up Worldox to use saved searches by various criteria (which I regard as faster and more efficient), these functions may be of only limited use. 

One area where they are effective, however, is in making Projects easier to manage. Projects, are a supra-organizational form that lets you group, for example, all closing documents in a real estate document; all Exhibits for a trial; the final versions of key documents for a given contract; or any other group of documents you want to collect together. They are potentially very useful, but  have always been an underused feature of Worldox.

I have created a new version of my Worldox Cheat Sheet to account for GX2. Since it reflects how I typically configure Worldox, some people may find some of the new features underrepresented. It is available on the Cheat Sheet Page of my Web site.

Fujitsu Scanners and Worldox

Fujitsu and Worldox have recently announced a program to get a $25 mail-in rebate if you are using Worldox and buy a Fujitsu S1500. Since this is one of the leading scanners on the market, this is a good deal.

The program also shows a very efficient way of using the scanner with Worldox. You set the scanner to produce OCR’d PDF files. These pop up in Acrobat when your scan is complete. Using “save as” you can then port this file over to Worldox.

This does have the drawback of leaving behind a copy of all your scans, which can start taking up space rather quickly. However, if you define the scanned documents to be saved to, say, “c:\scans” and then write a one-line, old-time batch file to delete them (“del c:\scans\*.* /Q”) the process is pretty efficient. Put the batch file on your desktop and run it once a week. With a little extra effort, you can also get it to run through the Windows Scheduler.

Not quite the true integration of a one step process, but pretty efficient nevertheless. The same process will work with all current or recent Fujitsu scanners (e.g. the S510) as well.

Using Worldox for Closed File Management of Physical Files

I recently sat in on a Webinar which presented (among other things) some of the new and improved features coming in PCLaw 10. One of them was and improved “Safe Custody and Physical Closed File Management” which allows you to manage boxes, sometimes in storage, of a client’s documents and physical items.

It occurred to me that you can also do this in Worldox using the Projects feature. This feature is normally used to collect in one place items like closing documents in a real estate transaction or lists of exhibits for a trial. However, if you created a “Project” listing the client documents and a “place holder” document describing any physical items, you could do the same thing in Worldox. If you put the physical location (storage bin, filing cabinet, whatever) in the comments you could then easily generate a list for a particular client or a list of all the holdings for any number of clients.

Timeout Errors in Worldox

On occasion, people get an error message #1460 in Worldox, that a file failed to save. This happens most often in saving PDF files, but occasionally with other programs as well. This is a network timeout error, indicating that while Worldox expects to be able to save a file within a specified amount of time, the file was taking longer than that to save and therefore Worldox thought something was wrong and abandoned the process. This happens most often with PDF files due to the combination of the time it takes to convert a file to PDF and the fact that people may be trying to save an extremely large PDF file and it simply takes longer.

In many cases, the document HAS actually been saved, but just under the document ID number and without the profile description. If this is the case, you can manually modify the description (although obviously it would be better to fix the underlying problem.

This error can also sometimes happen with other programs. In these cases it can be an issue with the number of programs you have open at the same time and how long you have been working. Logging off and logging in can fix the program.

For the underlying issue, however, a change in the Worldox ini file (the file that governs most of the settings in Worldox) can fix the problem. You should not try the unless you are comfortable, but your “network guy” can benefit from the following. And as usual, you should back up the file before making any changes.

Open the “worldox.ini” file and look for the section [Wait for Save]. If the section does not exist create it, with the following settings:

[WaitForSave]
MaxSecsNoExist=180
MaxSecsNoSave=4
MaxSecsNoChange=7
MaxSecsNoMirror=3

Your section may read “MaxSecsNoExist=30.”  If so, increase the value to, say 90 or higher. You can experiment with the setting until the problem goes away.

Linking PCLaw Client/Matters with Worldox

When various programs are linked – such as Amicus or Time Matters with PCLaw or Timeslips – the client/matter information is exchanged between the programs as well as time entries. Thus if you enter a new matter in one program it is ported over to the other one.

There is no such direct link between PCLaw and Worldox, but there is a fairly easy way to keep your client/matter list up to date.

You can schedule the Worldox indexer to import a given comma delimited file containing client/matter information every night at a given time, say 11 pm. So any accounting program that allows you to export client/matter IDs and descriptions to a given file can be linked to Worldox. The accounting program (say, PCLaw), exports the current client/matter list to a given file (say wdximport.txt) at 10 pm. At 11 pm Worldox imports all the new information in that file (leaving the information previously in Worldox intact). Your list is now current.

PCLaw does not have an automated export facility. However, it is trivial to assign someone to export the correct information (the Client, Matter, Description and Last/Firm Name fields) every day last thing before they leave.

This does mean that there could be up to a 24 hour lag between when the firm gets a new matter and when it appears in Worldox. To compensate for this, many firms create a “client” called “unassigned” or “newclient” or something similar. If you have to work on documents before a client/matter number is assigned in Worldox, store them under “unassigned.” Then, the next day, move them to the new client/matter number.

Saving Web Pages in Worldox

As most people know, when Worldox is running, if you save a Web page, Worldox pops up and you can save the web page to Worldox. However, due to the nature of the web, the page does not always save correctly (graphics, frames, etc.).

So as a matter of good practice, when you save a web page, you should save the URL with it. Unfortunately, Worldox does not do this automatically (yet), but it is fairly easy to do manually.

Before you start to save the page, hit F6 in either Firefox or IE to highlight the URL address. Then Ctrl-C to copy the address.

The click on File | Save Page As to save the page. As you are filling out the profile information, click into the Comments field and hit Ctrl-V. This will paste the URL into the comments field. When you look at the page again, you can easily go to it to verify that it is correct or to see whether the information has been updated. Note that the URL in the comments field will not automatically launch the site, you will have to edit the profile (to gain access to the comments field) then cut and paste it.

Searching for Secured Documents in Worldox

I recently had a client want to find all the documents that were secured to a given classification group. Now of course for a specific client or search you could view the security group by putting a “Classified” column on the search results (and perhaps saving it as a “Column Template” for future use. Then for a given search results, you could display the secured documents.

But what if you want to search for ALL the secured documents?  It turns out there is a way to do this IF you are a Manager (with full administrative rights -- generally only a very few people in a firm will be able to do this). In this case, if you create a search template that includes the field “Owner Inits” and instead putting in the Owner (or “last used by” as I always rename it), you put in the parameter “/p” you can search for all secured documents across your system. If you then sort by security code, they will all be grouped together. Of course, depending on the size of the firm, you may get more than you bargain for, but it IS possible.