Worldox GX4 Is Coming

Worldox GX4 was officially launched at New York Legal Tech yesterday. I’ve been working with a beta copy of Worldox GX4 for a month or so now. It is clearly a major release and includes new features that clients have been wanting for years.

The first thing that strikes you is the totally reworked, more fashionable, interface. The Viewer is now available via a tab at the right of the display screen, similar to the Outlook Reading pane. The interface can be configured to retain the GX3 look, or provide a Windows 7 or Windows 8 look with various options for icons. In addition to the tradition list display, GX4 offers a “tile” view with documents grouped in two or three columns. While this view sorts documents out in a very attractive visual fashion, it also offers substantially less information than the list view (you can’t have client or matter information or document type, for example) so heavy lifters may find it more trouble than it is worth.

There are two new features that have been at the top of everyone’s want list. First, you no longer need to know or look up the client or matter ID or Doc Type to find an entry. Simply start typing the name (description) and a list of options pops up. Click the option and you are done.

The second feature is a combined profile and text search. Type anything in the search box and all documents satisfying the criteria are returned, whether the query appears in the description, comments field or text of the document. Further, the results are displayed in “snippets” à la Google directly in the list view (snippets do not appear in the tile view). If there are multiple hits in the document there is an indication: “1 of 3”. You can see the various snippets by clicking on the down arrow.

For instant searches, you can now search from the Worldox Ribbon bar within Word. You can do a combined text/description search (as above); the last 20 Word documents you have uses; or all documents with the same profile information as the one you are working on. Very slick. High volume users will probably still want the main search, however.

There are a number of workflow changes that make saving documents and emails easier.

Favorite Matters (built on the old Direct Access model) will be a big hit. They were previously available, but now have been improved and “follow” you on all screens: Search, Save, display list, etc.  Perhaps most importantly, the favorite matters also follow you into Outlook, so there is no longer any need to have to manually create Quick Profiles. They also follow you on mobile devices, so that you can “drag and drop” Outlook email to your Worldox repository from your smartphone.

In addition, you can search your Outlook repository from within Worldox. Client and Matter columns are displayed within Outlook. Actually, you could do this in GX3 but hardly anybody knew about it.

Categories were introduced in GX3 and have been substantially beefed up. They now appear as part of the profile screen when saving or searching for a document. The two major advantages to Categories are that (1) you can assign more than one category to a document; and (2) individuals can make up their own categories.

Most previous Worldox upgrades were incremental. GX4 is much more substantial and should be on current users’ to do list for technology in the coming year.