On two beautiful sunny days last week, iManage held its annual ConnectLive customer and partner conference at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. As leader of the Enterprise Content Management Practice here at Kraft Kennedy, I attended iManage ConnectLive19 with my colleague Caesar Rodriguez.
The two day of iManage ConnectLive19 s were packed with both technical sessions as well as case studies that covered customer success stories, from implementation of RAVN to migrations to the Cloud.
On the RAVN front, Wednesday’s keynote by Nick Thomson, GM of iManage RAVN was a highlight. Nick highlighted the use cases and benefits of RAVN’s AI technologies, and described how AE should not be a “reinvention,” but rather a “redefinition.” The analogy Nick used was Spotify compared to a brick-and-mortar record store. It’s still the same music you’ve always loved. It’s still organized by genre and artist.
With Spotify, however, there is no physical media to purchase. There is no Walkman or turntable or CD player to insert the tape or disc in order to list. Instead, the music is streamed to you. You can organize how you wish, make your own playlists, and listen to similar music very easily.
That is how iManage has changed the traditional DMS content with RAVN. Nick showed how the documents aren’t just organized by client, matter, and doc type. RAVN also provides a new, redefined experience of working with content. Key concepts, entities, people, places, and clause banks can be presented to you. RAVN can surface your DMS content in ways that you couldn’t even imagine five years ago.
The next highlight was the presentation and demo of iManage Drive, which will display iManage Work as a virtual network drive in Windows Explorer. Work Product Manager Shawn Misquitta explained what the iManage development team has been up to, and then Ganesh Krithikavasan provided the demonstration. The demo showed how much effort iManage put into making iManage Drive function well within Windows Explorer. It was really slick, and will make integrations with legal websites and other (usually) non-integrated applications a snap.
RAVN and iManage Drive may have provided the “WOW” factor, but other sessions highlighted the “HOW” factor. I attended some great sessions discussing best practices for migrating content to iManage Cloud, as well as the latest technological advances in the Work 10 on-premise world. Howard Russell (CEO, RBRO Solutions) and John Carroll (CIO, Taft Stettinius & Hollister) described their case study of migrating Taft’s 800-user iManage on-premise environment to the cloud with less than ten hours of downtime, with the help of RBRO’s Lift & Shift application.
Off the cloud, iManage’s Tamikia Alford led a very technical session (in a good way!) of all of the latest best practices to ensure that each Work 10 component is highly available and optimized. Not only can the Work 10 servers, Work Web Servers, and Communication Servers be clustered, but now there are also more underlying fundamentals, such as the Redis server, that can be clustered.
It was also great to meet up with clients and partners that I’ve worked with over my 14 years with Kraft Kennedy and in the iManage ecosystem. And based on what we all saw at ConnectLive, there will be plenty of opportunities ahead to bring in new technologies to our client systems.
iManage has said that all ConnectLive19 materials and presentations will be made available to customers and partners, so be sure to keep an eye on the help.imanage.com portal in case you missed anything in Times Square last week.