Any Worldox installation needs to be customized in order to make it most efficient and the best fit for the firm culture. Here are some of the top customizations I routinely implement for my clients.
1. Bookmarks. This is clearly number one on the list. An installation without bookmarks is a bad installation. At a minimum Bookmarks save several keystrokes for every single search a user performs. They also enable users to automate frequently used searches. I generally create bookmarks for each of the firm’s Cabinets, an email bookmark (set so the display lists the To and From on the emails), a My Favs bookmark that lets users mark documents they use all the time and display them with one click (similar to how people used to have commonly used documents on their desktops). The firm may want others and of course users are free to create their own.
The next three customizations deal with the default search screen. These are critical to optimize search efficiency.
2. Name & text together at top. I change the display so that the “Name” and “Text” fields are together at the top. Much more efficient.
3. Get rid of the “Typist” field. I began my career in legal working in a Wang word processing center for a large New York law firm (guess that dates me). Today, however, “Typist” is redundant with “Author” for almost all firms. For one client, I did a search for the 10,000 most recent documents. There were less than 50 where Author and Typist were different. A field is used in only one half of one percent of documents is merely clutter and a distraction.
4. Owner inits. By default the search screen contains a field called “Owner Init[ials]”. This is a misnomer. “Owner” is a windows system term indicating simply the last person to have opened the document. It has nothing to do with who might be said to “own” the document. I change this to “Last Used By.”
5. Save Outside Worldox. Worldox GX4 now ships with a “Save Outside Worldox” button on the save screen. Many firms disable this button in order to protect the integrity of their document store, believing that all documents generated by the firm should be in Worldox. This can be adjusted on a per-user basis.
6. Turn off Spell Check Descriptions. I find that this normally causes more confusion than not, even if it does prevent some misspellings. There are simply too many abbreviations, client names, etc. for it to be useful.
7. Auto size columns. This sounds like a good idea, depending on different size, large screens, etc. However, there are some cases, particularly if you have email addresses as columns, where it doesn’t work correctly. You may want to turn it off.
8. Define column display to include desired items. This requires consultation with the firm as to what fields they want to display by default. However, including desired additional fields (such as Categories) can make a big difference.
9. Set Defaults on Save. The firm should set the default on the “Save” profile screen to auto-fill the Author field with either the person logged in to that machine (the most common) or the last user filled in (in case assistants routinely set an attorney as “Author”).
10. End user customizations. Part of training should include settings that end users can customize for themselves, including the left had Tabs, the “dividers” by date in the display (if you turn off “Sort by Grouping” you may find you have a lot cleaner display), screen colors and fonts, etc. I’ve seen some pretty peculiar displays (pink, green and purple) and some people with poor eyesight may want to have the display set to a larger font.
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