12d Synergy is document management and project collaboration software for architectural, engineering and construction offices. 12d Synergy manages the thousands of emails, documents, tasks and gigabytes of geospatial & CAD data surrounding built environment projects. The vendor states their goal with 12d Synergy is to create a common data environment and single source of truth, and boast over 5,600 architects, engineers and surveyors from sole traders to global enterprises as users.
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iManage Work
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
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.
The iManage Communication Server, which interacts with iManage and Outlook, filing emails to the workspaces has always been bug riddled. Our current version is the most stable we've seen yet, but we still have issues every few months. We often find suddenly linked Outlook folders (which allow users to save emails in Outlook folders that in turn link to the DMS to automatically save a copy of that email in the iManage folder the user linked) aren't filing the copies in iManage anymore, in other words, the linking is broken. IT has to restart the Communication server, then the user has to recreate their Outlook folder and move the unlinked documents to the folder to kick off the filing process again. The worst part is that unless the user notices the filing isn't working, there's no monitoring IT can do to determine the linking is broken.
Due to the nature of how iManage captures the File-Open/Save function of applications, there are times that it leaves documents checked-out on user machines. When a user opens a document, it locks the server copy, creates a local copy on the user machine for edits, and when the user closes the document iManage copies the local copy to the server overwriting the original (by default) to save the changes. Sometimes, the process of writing the changes back to server doesn't happen so the local machine copy (the latest changes) are only on the user machine and the user much check in the documents manually. This happens a couple of times a month for almost everyone at my company. It's usually not a big deal, until an employee is terminated. If IT forgets to check-in that user's documents before the user machine and account are wiped, then the edited documents is lost forever because it only exists on the user machine.
iManage works with Windows Server native encryption features to allow you encrypt documents. Microsoft's native encryption is crude and problematic at best, especially with roaming profiles. iManage needs to partner with other software encryption technologies to offer alternatives for encryption at rest and in transit.
Positive ROI when it allows us to find precedent documents or language (because we do not have to reinvest the wheel).
Positive ROI from workflow continuation when other lawyers go on maternity leave or are otherwise dealing with medical issues, because it allows another lawyer to look at the history of the file and piece things together.
Positive ROI from having all documents on a single server. This means if a laptop is lost or stolen, the important documents do not have to be recreated from scratch.
