NetDocuments is a document management solution from the company of the same name in Lehi, Utah.
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XaitPorter
Score 9.0 out of 10
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XaitPorter is a co-authoring software solution for teams to collaboratively create, manage and produce documents. With it, users can streamline and optimize document production to maximize revenue from bids and proposals and other business-critical documents. XaitPorter is designed to enable co-authors to focus on creating bid-winning content so that teams can become more efficient while production time and costs are reduced.
It is ideal where security is your number one concern or where there is a need to share securely across different physical locations. Speed is less than ideal in certain usage scenarios. It is limited by the speed of the internet and it can be difficult to pull large quantities of documents when researching or answering discovery requests, although, that being said, it can be addressed by maintaining your own secure server to contain a mirror of your online documents. But then the security for a mirror falls back on the organization.
XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision.
We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away.
We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word).
Delay. At times, there is a delay between saving a document into Netdocuments and actually seeing them in the appropriate workspace. Such a delay is caused by the system indexing the newly added file.
Netdocuments' servers slow down at times causing users to receive error messages. This can be quickly remedied, but can become a nuisance.
It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions.
The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation.
The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins.
The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool.
Word import/export could be cleaner.
The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too.
The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better.
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.
He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
We switched to NetDocuments 11 years ago. So, to be fair and accurate... the OpenText product at that time was called PC Docs and the company (that OpenText acquired) was Hummingbird. I can't remember who owned iManage at the time. Anyway, NetDocuments was a superior product at the time, in general, and more specifically because the search and remote access features\functions were superior (and still are).
The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in.
Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications.
