Open Text appeals to lawyers with e-mail toolset

Open Text Corp. will release an integrated e-mail management offering targeted at law firms that aims to help boost the productivity of lawyers with capabilities that take advantage of users' existing Outlook folders.

The offering from the Waterloo, Ont., company combines the basic e-mail filing and archiving features through its E-mail Archiving for Microsoft Exchange software, with features for lifecycle management from e-mail creation to disposal.

The technology comes with several e-mail profiling tools. For instance, auto filer and bulk filer tools allow customers to use the Outlook folders that they already created for different clients or projects. The user can tag a folder so that new documents are automatically profiled, making the typical drag-and-drop process easier and faster, said Mohit Thawani, business development manager with Open Text’s legal solutions group.

Furthermore, the feature relies on a server-side process that doesn’t occupy a user’s system, said Thawani, because often dragging and dropping bulk e-mails “means until the process completes, they really can’t do anything.”

“Everyone has a different work style and this really addresses the different scenarios where people want to create an outlook folder or a hierarchy based on client matter or projects and file e-mails into it,” said Thawani.

Another profiling tool is the e-mail marker, which boosts productivity by marking archived e-mails so that other viewers of that e-mail won’t duplicate archiving efforts on the same document.

E-mail filing assistant is another tool that recommends to a user, based on metadata and past archiving actions, where a particular e-mail should be filed. The tool basically “understands e-mail threading,” said Shirin Leclere, product manager for Open Text.

The fact that the system works in an Outlook environment means that e-mails are also available on BlackBerries, and, said Leclere, “that has become a key productivity tool for lawyers at this point. They need to know that they have complete access to those documents for the 30 days that it would naturally stay on their BlackBerries.”

A version of the technology for Lotus Notes users is not yet available and the company is “fleshing the roadmap out,” according to Thawani, who added to expect more details on that front near the end of November.

The offering “is just another step in integrating the different products that we’re bringing in,” said Thawani, referring to DM (Document Management) and LegalKey technologies from Hummingbird and E-mail Archiving from Open Text.