A recent blog raised the interesting issue of whether Reed-Elsevier will spin off LexisNexis and perhaps sell it to Bloomberg. In the last year or two, Bloomberg has hired away a number of LexisNexis executives, including Lou Andreozzi.
The blog quotes a Bernstein Research report to the effect that the LexisNexis problems are “intractable.”
Another possibility would simply be to spin off Lexis Nexis and divest all the products that were acquired during the LexisNexis buying spree of five plus years or so ago. This might include TimeMatters, PCLaw, Juris, CaseMap, Interaction, Redwood, etc. They already sold HotDocs.
With whatever happens to LexisNexis, they have grown to out of touch with there usesrs. We have been a loyal user of the TimeMatters product for at least 10 years and recently found that you have to dig deep into your pocket with LexisNexis.
Our windows server required a reinstallation, so we did everything we were supposed to do, backup the TimeMatters SQL database etc. We installed the new server, installed TimeMatters on the server and then restored the database.
However, we encountered an issue where the restored database would not open. We contacted LexisNexis under the assumption that this would fall under installation technical support, only to find that we would pressured into getting an expensive annual maintenance and support contract ($1,400). Without this support contract our database was dead in the water, useless...
Luckily we were not alone with our frustration and found a user who had put out a website providing the scripting code required in order to mount the TimeMatters SQL server. Almost made me want to send this user a bottle of wine!
We have found that the TimeMatters software is buggy and crashes daily, not to mention losing appointments during syncs to notebooks. Add to this the installation process which leaves out such basic things as firewall modification and the backup process only backs up the SQL database to the existing SQL drive, (useless if that drive ever goes down). Without the user knowing that they have to manually copy the SQL backup file to another drive....
After this busy tax season we are moving off TimeMatters and over to an outlook with MS Exchange and document management enhancements. At least we know that this software work.
Posted by: Andre Choquette | April 18, 2012 at 06:58 PM