NetDocuments positioned itself to work in the legal industry, and it has done a very good job. It's kept pace with the challenges presented by the law and it's grown in its offerings. Any organization that must balance mobility and security would benefit from the use of NetDocuments as a platform.
If there is a desire to extract text from emails, documents, spreadsheets, and faxes this is the perfect platform for that. The only thing it does, extracting information, it does well. External information in terms of flat files, databases, and web services can be tied into the platform as well to allow line item matching, address validation, and other features that make it just an overall great ingestion system.
File Organization. Netdocuments is a great tool to neatly organize your virtual files and separate them by workspaces (matters). Each workspace contains folders (document types) that can be customized according to users' needs and preference.
Searching your data base. All the documents and emails saved in Netdocuments are searchable. The search feature works great.
Cloud based document management system. Simply put, Netdocuments can be accessed from ANY web-enabled device. This is becoming more and more important in the age of satellite offices, working on-the-go, and telecommuting.
Disaster preparedness. Should something happen to your office, your documents are safe, secure and accessible.
Seamless integration with Microsoft Applications. Netdocuments provides users with Microsoft applications integrations that can be easily installed on each individual machine.
Support. There is an extensive on-line help library which provides incredibly helpful articles with step-by-step instructions. If you cannot find solution on-line, telephone support is staffed by courteous and knowledgeable people.
Security. This is especially important for a law firm. A designated administrator can put in force workspace, folder, document, or profile-based security.
One of the things we relied on Kofax was its connector with Oracle UCM and Filenet. It was easy to configure batch classes and set up release scripts to UCM or Filent
One other aspect of it was validation scripts based on external Oracle databases. It was very helpful.
After removal of dongle, it became easier to maintain the software.
In my opinion, VERY Expensive. You can not find documents without OCR. OCR doubles your storage cost as they save the OCRd document as a second version.
In my experience, very annoying latency, even when trying to preview documents. As a result, folks in my office often try to save locally as opposed to storing in the cloud.
I orginally signed up for NDMax. However, it would only process one document at a time. I am not a transactional firm, so, in my opinion, this was essentially worthless.
Kofax Capture's interface is antiquated and could use a refresh. An attempt was made two versions back to add ribbons and modernize the interface but anything below the first level looks and feels like a tired application.
Bugs that have existed in the platform for years are still prevalent and there is no priority to fix them. Features and critical bugs are regularly fixed but simple nagging ones that can cause a development project to close and lose all work is commonplace.
Licensing, while reasonable for lower volume solutions, becomes expensive once a project reaches a certain threshold. Ensure future planning capacity is done before purchasing to make sure it's a cost effective solution.
The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.
NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.
I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.
WatchDox and WorldDox both provided what looked like similar features but too much of the technical requirements fall on the customer and they, at the time of my evaluation, were not true cloud products. They were client \ server-based product hosted in the cloud. If you do not know the difference, research until you do. iManger is a viable alternative if you are just not able to get the internet speed you need for NetDocuments. But heads up it is not the Swiss Army knife for security features like NetDocuments.
Kofax Capture was less expensive than the IBM product and was easier to use than both IBM and Amazon in my opinion. The unlimited scripting of Kofax Capture allowed us to fully integrate the tool into our business processes to improve our automation and reduce errors. We also looked at a product from Nuance but at the time decided to eliminate it from our evaluation.
We were able to decrease personnel expenditures as there was not a need for individuals to index documents prior to incorporating them into the record.
