ActiveDocs is a document management software offering from ActiveDocs.
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iManage Work
Score 8.5 out of 10
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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.
There are not a lot of competitors to compare this product with, but ActiveDocs holds its own as a very useful software for the need. I recommend doing a demo to see how the process works, but it's rather streamlined and easy to create a template and produce a document from it.
Legal team using this product helps the team to better access documents securely within their email app (Outlook) and the user experience to control the document is excellent and being able to make it private and isolate confidential documents during a court session is very important and iManage has met our requirements. Also, being able to access instantly from users' workstation/laptop devices is very important and iManage plugin for outlook has satisfied our Business requirements.
Complicated setup. On initial installation it is cumbersome to configure on each workstation just to connect to service.
Does not enforce structure. Once setting up structure, users can save outside of iManage Work and make their own files and folders under pre-configured system.
Outlook is a finicky software, access to iManage Work depends on Outlook, nothing against iManage Work, but it sometimes has issues caused by the application it relies on.
Very good usability overall. Any user can pick this up and run with it. HotDocs, the closest competitor, has similar end-user usability, but from a designer of templates perspective, ActiveDocs definitely has the edge in this regard. I would recommend this for any company that mass produces documents from templates as deliverables.
The software overall is very excellent. It responds quickly and produces documents well. The integration with systems makes data input easy. Questions can be designed to allow further expansion of template creation/customization. The rules section is very useful for complicated If/Than/Else style templates. Although experience and training help, the software is very user-friendly out of the box.
ActiveDocs can be a considerably complex product because your use cases can be potentially endless. In our experience, when we have come across a problem or issue with the product ActiveDoc's support has always responded to our queries within 24 hours. Support is only provided via email in 95% of cases. Each year your support and maintenance includes support hours. These are used when you contact support and your issue is not found to be a bug or problem with the product (completely fair and understandable). When we've identified or discovered bugs (mainly with the latest version of Word) it is patched by the next release. They typically release about 4-5 updates per year.
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.
In relation to other software that have a functionality similar to ActiveDocs, they don't even compare in relation to the interface, I didn't use all the software available on the market, but the ones I used and I can compare, ActiveDocs is without a doubt the best among them. We really likes the interface.
I have viewed several other document management system software, but iManage was already installed at my company before I started working here. For us, I think this is the right solution. Companies with a smaller number of employees or smaller document collections could find some other options that might suite their needs and budget better. We definitely want an on premises solution that provides all the security, tracking, searching, and integration issues iManage offers. Many of the other solutions have adopted cloud technologies only at this point and we are not ready to consider cloud storage due for our sensitive documents at this point.
