Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers an application for securing, sharing, and comparing documents (see article below), an iCloud-enabled app for creating and editing Microsoft Office documents on your iPad, and two new virtualization applications for running Windows on a Mac. Don't miss the next issue.
COMPARE AND SECURELY SHARE THIS THAT THESE AND THOSE
With Microsoft increasingly pursuing consumers — admittedly a much larger market than law firms and other businesses — lawyers shouldn't hold out much hope for improvements to Microsoft Office such as more robust change tracking, metadata cleansing, secure file sending, etc. Fortunately, some software companies still cater to law firms.
Workshare Professional 8 … in One Sentence
Launched last month, Workshare Professional 8 enables lawyers to secure, share, and compare documents.
The Killer Feature
Workshare Professional grew out of DeltaView, software for comparing two Word documents. The new version of Workshare Professional significantly expands the comparison capabilities. It's also 10 times faster than DeltaView.
In addition to comparing the text od documents, you can also compare embedded Excel tables, numbering, bullets, images, and formatting. You can group changes into categories so that you can focus on substance without being distracted by style or vice versa. You can compare multiple versions of a document, and accept or reject changes from the various versions.
Workshare Professional works with more than Microsoft Office documents. For example, you can compare PDF documents, including scanned documents thanks to the new built-in optical character recognition (OCR) technology. As always, Workshare Professional integrates with popular document management systems.
Instead of waiting around to review changes, Workshare Professional can alert you when everyone has added their two cents.
Other Notable Features
Workshare Professional has long enabled you to remove metadata from documents before emailing them to a client or opposing counsel. This functionality remains (including Outlook integration), but Workshare Professional now includes its own secure file transfer, which works from any device such as PCs, Macs, iPads, and smartphones.
Not only does the new document sharing feature enable you to send documents too large for email and eliminate the need for an Outlook add-on, but it also gives you more control over the documents you send. For example, Workshare Professional encrypts shared documents, which means you can recall a document, limit it to read-only, make it accessible for a limited period of time, etc. The Admin Console enables your IT department to set firm-wide document sharing policies so that users need not fiddle with settings.
What Else Should You Know?
Other new features include synchronized workspaces for everyone in your firm across all their devices, the ability to brand these workspaces (especially those that clients and others outside your firm access), and tools for PDF and PDF/A creation. Pricing starts at $175 per user per year. Learn more about Workshare Professional 8.
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