Item: Square 9 Softworks
Rating: 6
Author: Megan Cobleigh

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SmartSearch Document Management to keep track of all of our contracts and other miscellaneous documents. It is used by all senior management and managers in the company in order to retrieve contracts or to analyze the contracts we have with specific companies. Our Legal department finds this software especially useful because we are able to track expiration and renewal notice dates of each individual contract. This helps us tremendously in making sure we stay ontop of renewing or terminating contracts on a timely basis.

Pros and Cons

Sends email notifications to appropriate individuals when expiration or renewal notice dates are approaching.
Offers an easy and fast way to search for specific documents.
It allows managers to simply drop documents into the inboxes for Legal to permanently archive.
Allows documents to be easily emailed. No more sorting through various files on the desktop to try to find the correct document.
Is set up in an organized manner that is appropriate for the documents that are contained in the archives.

There was some difficulty initially setting up the workflows for the email notifications to work. This was frustrating to get worked out and involved multiple test attempts.
The system can be slow at loading long documents, which for a legal department is not ideal.
The documents do not automatically get uploaded with search pdf capability, a workflow must be set up in order to enble this feature.

Return on Investment

Increased efficiency in time management
Assists the company in not missing termination dates of vendors we do not wish to continue business.
Allows an easy analysis of all active vendors and customers.

Alternatives Considered

Time Matters

A similar product I have used was Time Matters. For a Law Firm, I think Time Matters is more useful as it keeps track of everything for a client, including billing. However, since I now work for a legal department of a corporation, SmartSearch is definitley more useful. It is not possible to seperate the documents we have internally in neat client files. We have various miscellaneous documents for many different services and customers or vendors. SmartSearch allows us to organize in broad categories that make sense to internal employees using it and to make sure security is set on specific documents. Time Matters would not have been sufficient for our managers to have access to, since it uploads all documents to the file - some of which are confidential.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think this software is great to organize documents for mid-sized companies. We primarily use this system to keep track of legal and regulatory documents that have dates we need to be aware of. It is easy to use, but does have some frustrating features. The workflows can be somewhat difficult to set up. In addition, I wish that the documents were automatically uploaded with pdf search capabilities. However, the ease of searching for documents and the emails that are sent to warn employees of dates they should be aware of, are extremely helpful in managing our company's contractual obligations.

Likelihood to Renew

We are definitely renewing our SmartSearch. This is the only place all of our companies contracts and regulatory filings are kept. Our company would lose track of all expiring contracts if we did not renew. We would also need to spend many hours figuring out a new organizational system for all of our files, as well as savings the documents from SmartSearch onto the computer.

An Easy Way to Store and Retrieve

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with GlobalSearch