During our User Group meeting in London on Wednesday, we asked the 70+ audience how many were moving to Office 2010 in the next 12 months. Most raised their hands. We also asked the same question about SharePoint 2010, and well over half also said yes. This poses a question which I keep hearing from our customers – what is the future of Workshare and do we really need you?
The fact is we couldn’t wait for both Office and SharePoint 2010 to arrive as they provide Workshare with a fantastic opportunity. We are able to extend their capabilities and customize them as a legal centric collaborative platform and we plan to do this through a new product, currently codenamed WorksharePoint.
When we presented this at our User Group the response was very interesting, “Are you trying to compete with Document Management Systems?” one member asked. WorksharePoint will indeed enable firm to use SharePoint as a DMS, but we don’t expect large firms to throw away their considerable investment. Small firms and corporate legal departments on the other hand could find this a very cost effective solution. The larger firms however could use the product as a matter centric front end, acting as the glue between the incumbent DMS, SharePoint and Office. The huge benefit is that lawyers will be able to live their lives in Outlook, Word, and SharePoint, leaving Workshare to do the hard work filing and managing the documents back into the DMS.
Workshare has been a TAP partner for Office 2010 and was a launch partner on May 12th. You can see a video in which we appear here.
Microsoft sees us as a strategic partner and is very excited with our idea to present tailored front ends for SharePoint, starting with Legal.
So in answer to the question – what is the future of Workshare, our answer is a very exciting one. Our future lies in providing legal centric platforms that enable lawyers to collaborate and work in a way that is natural and easy to do. More information can be found here.