I had a very productive discussion with senior NetDocs representatives last week. They vigorously assured me that NetDocs plans to support Worldox for the foreseeable future. That is certainly positive.
In light of that, why would current Worldox clients want to consider switching to NetDocs? There are several main reasons.
1. The Cloud. With hybrid work patterns now apparently firmly entrenched, cloud availability (as opposed to remote access to a firm’s servers) may be advantageous. In addition, firms with multiple offices may find the cloud structure attractive. Note that SaaS applications like NetDocs deal with a single application at a time, whereas the “desktop in the Cloud” approach has all your apps in one place in the Cloud, and not each one accessing the cloud separately.
2. Firms typically have three core products: Document Management, Time and Billing, and Practice Management. In addition, there may be specialty products for boutique firms or particular practice areas (Contract software, e-discovery, etc.). As firms migrate to cloud versions of these products, they may find that integration with NetDocs is superior to that with Worldox, which does not integrate well with cloud products.
3. NetDocs superior ability to provide collaboration features in terms of client portals and document collaboration may be important to many firms.
4. There will come a time when firms have to replace their server infrastructure. At that point, rather than a major investment in new hardware, NetDocs may be an attractive alternative.
Why stay with Worldox?
1. The firm is happy with Worldox and has no felt need to replace current remote access functionality.
2. Switching to NetDocs might mean the loss of important functionality. For example, firms using the Symphomy Profiler system which dramatically increases the efficiency of scanning documents or the Worldox Email Agent. I have one client that automatically processes over 10,000 emails a month into Worldox from their debt collection system. That would be a major issue if they switched to NetDocs. On the other hand, NetDocs is developing functionality at a significant rate and missing functionality may become available in a year or two.
3. Financial. NetDocs is more expensive than Worldox on an ongoing basis by several orders of magnitude. In addition, the conversion process will be a very expensive one-time charge. Firms may not want the expense or may need time to plan for it.
Imponderables. NetDocs has a dramatically different “look and feel” from Worldox although the basic functions are similar in both products. Some people will love it; others will hate it. I would recommend that as part of their “due diligence,” firms have one of their senior power users look at one of the NetDocs on-line training offerings to get an impression of what using NetDocs would be like. The one I prefer is DoxAdvisor’s NetDocuments Academy, available here
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