There has been tremendous interest in the Enterprise File Sharing/Collaboration market, or as I sometimes refer to it: the “Enterprise Dropbox” market. It pains me to use “Dropbox” in the way people use “Q-Tip” when talking about all cotton swabs, but I do think it’s the easiest way of describing the file sharing market.
Ever since Dropbox has become just as well-known for its security concerns and breaches as it has for the core services it provides, industry leaders have raced to fill the void. Workshare, Citrix, and OpenText are just a handful of companies who have strong offerings in this area. These offerings all provide the ability for employees to create collaborative folders and share files with external clients in a secure fashion, among many other functions. And now, many of these are adding integration to the legal document management systems (DMS) to further complete the ECM circle.
Workshare just announced that the Workshare Platform will include direct integration with both SharePoint and Autonomy iManage clients. Attorneys can upload or download documents between the Platform and the DMS while maintaining version control and auditing. Similarly, OpenText tweeted on Friday that their Tempo Box product will now have direct integration with their own eDOCS DM system (although for some reason, I doubt they’d integrate directly with iManage).
These enhancements show that the demand for secure, enterprise-grade Dropbox alternatives is continuing to grow. It’s almost turning into an arms race of features and integration points that will benefit all law firms in the years to come, and that’s pretty exciting.
UPDATE: On April 4th, just a week after this article was first published, Citrix announced that they have partnered with DocAuto to release WorkSite Organizer for ShareFile, which adds seamless integration between the ShareFile platform and Autonomy iManage. The arms race is on!