iManage Work is a document management solution formerly known as HP Worksite. iManage was divested from Hewlett-Packard in 2015 and is now an independent company, headquartered in Chicago.
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M‑Files
Score 8.9 out of 10
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M-Files is a platform for knowledge work automation. M-Files helps knowledge workers to find information faster, work smarter, and achieve more. M-Files features a metadata-driven architecture, embedded workflow engine, and advanced artificial intelligence that enable customers to eliminate information chaos, improve process efficiency, and automate security and compliance. By embedding automation and GenAI into its core, M-Files' platform not only increases efficiencies…
iManage is well suited to managing the large volume of documents and emails that are created on a daily basis. Lawyers can get dozens if not hundreds of e-mails a day, and we need something to do with them. Deleting them is often not practical, because you may require the information a year from now. Leaving them in Outlook is also impractical, because a large Inbox will slow Outlook down. Outlook has an archiving feature, but this doesn't really help for collaboration (and your colleagues are likely out of luck if you end up unavailable due to emergency). iManage is less well suited to small organizations (ex: sole practitioners and small firms) because it is does require a significant investment in implementing and maintaining the software. iManage Work is well suited for large law firms, because it is great for collaboration, including between different offices.
M‑Files is great for companies with multiple locations. Drive letters can become cumbersome to use and collaborate with colleagues and M‑Files fills that gap. The check out/check in system is great and allows only one editor at a time. This can be good and bad depending on the situation.
The system can be fairly buggy. I have issues with freezing, and a lack of responsiveness each time I use it ( although not for long and does not prevent me from getting what I need to be done, it's just annoying).
It has a slightly larger learning curve to use than other more simplistic records managers
More user friendly customization options that do not require knowledge of coding/scripting. For example, prompting the creation of a new document from a template in a workflow.
When using the 'insert property' feature in a Word doc, I would love to convert dates from a mm/dd/yy format to be written out (such as September 21, 2018). Or possibly even just to pull the year or the month from a selected date to insert into a document.
I've often wished that I could find more detailed tutorials online for some features.
It has been what our firm has always used, and overall everyone seems to be pleased with it. It is user friendly and intuitive and it doesn't appear we have any intention of changing what we use for our purposes.
M-files meets our almost all needs, we dont have other option to replace m-files. it saves lots, like Hardware because of Vault Feature means we can create many vaults (mini-servers) in m-files in other solutions we need more hardware for more installations.
To me iManage is very intuitive and user friendly. The switch from the application vs the Outlook extension was an adjustment, but it was one I made pretty easily once it happened.
It is a powerful system that can locate content fast and effectively. The system takes quite some time to setup initially. It can be hard for M-Files support to know how businesses operate and how they want to use the system in a way that works for them. The customization makes it great for companies to cater to their own needs. Once the system is set up in a way that makes sense for the business, the user experience is positive. There is room for improvement in the notifications, workflow, and support areas.
I noticed some lagging with the integration with Microsoft Office but not so much that I would not use it. It has gotten better with updates. to be fair the issues were when Office 2013 first came out.
We had an issue a few years ago where a plug-in of some sort which allowed the viewing of PDFs got updated and then whenever some people previewed PDFs in iManage then Outlook would crash. My outlook crashed over 20 times in a single day once. It was a pretty bad time. I know one of our information technology professionals in another office worked non-stop with iManage to get it resolved, and it seemed like they did take the issue pretty seriously.
Usually when I need help from them I got support and it was very good and focused to solve my problem. I didn't have so many problems, but when used it worked. I just would like to have a support in my native language, but I can understand that sometimes is hard for the companies.
The key insight is that the most important thing is to have a open mind. The application is easy to use, but if you have a company with different views and it is not aligned could be a huge problem. So the company transformation is required together with the application. Ensure to use as much as possible the capabilities of the application helps to have best ROI.
MS SharePoint requires a lot of time to integrate and efforts are expensive compared to iManage product. iManage is quick setup and well integrates with existing on-premise environments and integrates well with major iDP systems for authentications and manage RBAC systems for permissions via API calls.
I've compared recently with Box, but they still predicate their storage on WHERE instead of WHAT, which means if it isn't in a specific folder, you won't find it. Some documents may relate to multiple projects. In M-Files instead of putting a copy of a file in many folders (thus having many copies) you can build out the relationships, so there is only 1 copy of a document which prevents multiple "originals" from being developed separately.
Since our policy is that all client documents are saved into iManage, we have been able to keep an email retention policy for Exchange to 90days to delete. This has saved us significant resources in both Exchange management and hardware to support excessive email storage for archived databases or extremely large databases.
The ability to search documents quickly by text inside the documents allows to review previously created contracts and use similar language that is well suited to a new project over again without having to spend time manually opening and searching ourselves. The software does it for us.
We used to store old files at an offsite storage facility for a monthly fee. We have implemented a new procedure, where we now scan these old paper files into our iManage system, making them text searchable PDFs. Since the software has such robust searching capabilities, this makes the documents much more accessible when needed than requesting an offsite storage delivery and having to manually pull paper files. In addition, we have saved thousands of dollars a month by not storing paper files offsite any longer. If the searching were not so powerful, we would not done this because our old paper storage system worked well for us previously.
The price we pay for M-Files is about one third less than the price that we were paying our previous vendor plus we have a custom-built amazing dependable system with great support.
From a compliance and legal standpoint, our policies are always available to end users including easy access to previous versions.
