Exchanging and sharing files are a critical part of your interaction with clients. What functionality do you need and what are your options? Email just doesn’t cut it any more. There is a proliferation of copies of documents and a lack of security that makes email a bad choice as your go-to option.
Then there are basic file sharing apps such as Dropbox and Box. These are very popular due to their ease of use for a single user. But ease of use frequently correlates to lack of security, especially with Dropbox. And despite recent advances of “business” versions of these programs, these don’t really meet your needs for business communications.
That leaves higher-end “portal” options that offer secure file exchange, version control and in some cases other calendaring and “deal room” options.
As with selecting and configuring any software the main thing to decide is what functionality you need.
• Do you simply need to securely exchange files?
• Do you need to exchange large numbers of files?
• Do you need a portal where clients can review and edit a selected subset of their documents?
• Do you need real-time simultaneous collaboration on files, with multiple people contributing edits?
• Do you just need to upload and download files from your document management system, or do you also need to maintain version control with respect to your main document repository?
• Do you need to control what sort of access clients have to their documents (edit, read only, blocking the ability to print, etc.)?
• What short of tracking/auditing of your document history do you need?
In short, what you put in to a system depends on what you want to get out of it.
In addition to simple file sharing mentioned above, Google Docs and Microsoft Teams offer collaboration features, although at present not linked to document management system. Worldox is developing an integration with Teams that will let you manage documents from Worldox, import edited documents back into Worldox as versions, etc. I am currently working with a beta copy, but no release date has been set as yet.
Among higher-end applications, there are three main legal-oriented portals that work with Worldox: Legal Anywhere, Sharefile, and Hubshare. Aside from similar baseline functionality, each one offers slightly different functionality, so you need to consider closely what functions you need and match them with the respective programs.
Legal Anywhere is generally the most full-featured and flexible of the portal options. It is aimed at larger and longer-lasting deals, and features things like deal rooms, great flexibility in locking down and limiting access to documents. Granular rights can be assigned to specific users and even specific files. It is based on an upload/download functionality and within Legal Anywhere is based on a directory structure that mirrors the Worldox structure. Like other portals, it can scrub metadata from documents copied to the extranet.
Sharefile, as its name implies, is primarily a secure file sharing application. Instead of attaching a file to an email, it puts the file in a secure location in the cloud and sends an email prompting the recipient to download the file. This offers very good security and also enables you to transfer much larger files than would be possible with standard email. It also offers meta-data scrubbing and a companion product, RightSignature, that gives you electronic document signing. Sharefile has an add-on integration module that integrates it more seamlessly with Worldox.
Hubshare also offers basic one-way integration with Worldox. You can upload files from Worldox to Hubshare, but you have to get them back manually. Full integration is lacking and the program requires an SQL installation to work.
One of these products may be right for your firm.