We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and enable certain core website functionalities. For more information, visit our Privacy Policy page.

Accept
  • Insights

iManage 8.5 SP1 Released – Initial Review

Brian Podolsky

2 min read

All Insights

As many of you may have heard, Autonomy officially released iManage 8.5 SP1 on Monday.   This has been an eagerly awaited release for months now, and firms are looking to implement this pretty quickly.    Here are the modules that have 8.5 SP1 releases thus far:

    • WorkSite Server (with and without Caching)

 

    • WorkSite Clustering Service

 

    • WorkSite IDOL Indexer

 

    • WorkSite Communication Server for Exchange

 

    • FileSite, OffSite, DeskSite, Email Management for Outlook clients

Our initial review is under the fold.

Some of the good news:

    • There are lots and lots of fixes in SP1 across the board.   Be sure to download the Release Notes for the iManage 8.5 SP1 Desktop clients, as that includes all the new fixes that are included in the release.

 

    • There’s a search ranking column now available in the client.  This may not be hugely important, but it is something that iManage’s competitors have had for a while.

 

    • Overall, the IDOL search should be more relevant and with fewer syntax confusion than previous releases

 

    • All server modules now support Server 2008 R2 (however only the IDOL Indexer will actually run in 64-bit mode)

 

    • For administrators, for the first time since Verity, we can now control the WorkSite Indexer services from the WorkSite Service Manager!   The WorkSite Indexer Service is designed to gracefully stop and start all the IDOL services cleanly.   We’ll have to test this one out to make sure…

And the (perhaps) not so good news:

    • The Email Filing toolbar in Outlook 2007 has been updated, and (in my opinion) may cause some confusion and perhaps some eye-popping blunders.  The updated toolbar has a Delete button, which actually performs a ‘File and Delete’ operation.   I can picture it now:  an attorney gets a personal email from a client (perhaps with something embarrassing), and accidentally files it to a suggested WorkSpace because he hit the ‘Delete’ button at his Outlook toolbar.  Oops.   See below for a preview, and let me know if you agree:

Email Filing Toolbar - 8.5 SP1

 

    • A complete IDOL Index recrawl is required to upgrade to SP1.  This will either require possibly significant index downtime, or the purchase of new hardware to build a parallel 8.5 SP1 index.

Overall, after looking through all the documentation, it looks like the benefits will outweigh all of the potential concerns. I am sure updated builds will be released, so it is important again to keep an eye on the WorkSite Technical Support page and look for updated builds and documentation.

We are testing the final release of these products in our research environment and soon production.    Just as with any other iManage release, 8.5 SP1 should be tested on non-production servers with copies of the production databases.   One of our best practice is to take a subset of the production documents and copy them to a test file share, and update the DEFSERVER key to point to your test file share location.  This way you are assured of not touching any production documents when testing your updated server.  As we learn more, we will be sure to share.