iManage Work

Security

Access documents remotely

Effectively storing in one place, practice-specific documents, e.g. precedents, guides, and checklists

Better knowledge bank functionality

It's easy to use but a very powerful tool.

Supports multiple document versions.

Allows a combination of versions in different file types (i.e. .docx; .pdf).

Saving a document in multiple matters in a single action.

The full text searching feature, once implemented properly, is incredibly powerful.

Integrates seamlessly with Outlook to reduce the number of pieces of software you need turning at any given time.

Filing is relatively quick most of the time.

Proper implementation of the software is important. We have a client who also has iManage for their large in-house legal department but the implementation seems to have not been as thorough so their experience with the software has not been as positive.

Again, proper implementation is key to how powerful the software can be. For a long while our organization did not have the full-text searching implemented, and it was a game changer when we finally did it.

I understand that our implementation of iManage does not allow for multiple template matters based on different situations. So we have five default folders, but it would be nice to have a couple of templates, with different numbers and names of the subfolders depending on the situation.

Very reliable, once setup it is usually pretty flawless outside of Outlook-related issues.

Simple and easy to use organization of files and groups.

Customizable for different departments or sections to divide up access and partition document system.

Allows collaboration with outside parties and makes sharing documents quick and easy.

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.

The search features are fantastic. While it takes quite a bit of resources on the back end to make this happen, it searches document meta data, such as name, date created, author and so on zippy quick. But more importantly for us, any text readable document (Office documents, Text Searchable PDFs, etc.) are indexed and easily searchable as well. Users are presented with a powerful search screen to limit search results with a large variety of meta data search filters and key word searching in an easy to understand format. With a document library of over 3 million documents, this is a critical need for our business.

The integration with the Microsoft Office products is flawless. We have several add-ins for our Office suite and most of them cause our IT Department some grief, but the iManage integration just works, which is great for IT and the users. Our users love the FileSite integration, which allows for published workspaces to display in their Outlook tree. Since our users are in their Outlook working email all day, this integration allows them easy access in an application they are already familiar with to interact with our DMS.

The history of the documents, tracking which users have accessed, edited, saved, opened, printed, etc. documents is always correct. We've had to use this history multiple times for tracking user access or interaction with documents for a variety of reasons and it's easy to follow and always correct.

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.