Acrobat for Legal Professionals

September 25, 2007

Free DMS Integration Plug-in for Acrobat

Acrobat integration with Document Management Systems (DMS) is a key requirement of large law firms.

Unfortunately, many firms have been frustrated getting Acrobat to work with their DMS.

While the DMS vendors generally supply Acrobat integration, there are issues which affect customer deployment:

• Integration for the latest version of Acrobat may not be available until a new release of the DMS becomes available, which could take many months.
• Support for newer versions of Acrobat running on legend (older) versions of DMS software is seldom available.

Acrobat integration—while expected by large firms—isn’t a revenue generating activity for DMS vendors.

I shared this customer issue with Thaddeus Bouchard, the CTO of Omtool. Omtool offers AccuRoute, a document routing solution which I see at many large firms. This company has lots of expertise in DMS integration because AccuRoute works with just about every DMS available.

When Thaddeus said, “Hey, maybe we can work together on this problem . . .” I knew something good could happen!

Sometime before the end of October 2007, Omtool will offer a free download of the Swiftwriter plug-in for Acrobat.

Swiftwriter offers integration with the following DMS products:

• Interwoven/iManage FileSite/Desksite (versions 5.x through 8.2)
• OpenText/Hummingbird DOCSOpen (3.9.6 through 4.0)
• OpenText/Hummingbird DM5 through DM6
• World Software Worlddox GX
• Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007

Read on to learn more about the Swiftwriter plug-in and some background information that you may find helpful.

More…

September 10, 2007

Acrobat and PDF Clones: What you should know . . .

Chances are if you are on a legal technology listserve or read blogs, you'll hear about alternatives to Acrobat. Apparently, you can do everything with these alternative products that you can do with Acrobat for $29!

Sadly, the legal market seems especially amenable to these messages. Cheaper is better, right?

Now, there are some clones that have even started to state that they are better legal tools than Acrobat.

I've updated this blog entry originally written in 2005, with more up-to-date information and some downloads.

Read on to learn more . .

Maybe not . . .

More…

September 06, 2007

Archived Legal Forms On Demand eSeminar

I've updated this entry to include a direct link to the archived eSeminar "Creating PDF Forms for the Legal Community".

All you need is the Adobe Flash player which you undoubtedly already have . . .

Read on for:

• a Link to the archived eSeminar
• An outline of the presentation,
• Link to presentation materials
  

More…

Using Acrobat with the Fujitsu fi-5110C Scanner

Fujitsu has an excellent reputation in the document scanning business. Many solo and small firms use their popular and inexpensive ScanSnap S510 document scanner—about $400 or so street price—for document scanning.

While I've scanned thousands of pages using my ScanSnap, it was a workflow challenge because the modely I have could not be directly controlled by Acrobat.

The ScanSnap S510 doesn'tt support TWAIN, a standard software protocol that allows scanning devices and software programs to communicate.

Thus, I was delighted recently when Fujitsu was nice enough to send me an evaluation unit of the ScanSnap fi-5110C, the next model up in the line. You can find this model for about $600 to $700 at various online stores.

The ScanSnap fi-5110c is a good choice for solo or small firms that want more control over scanning to PDF. It includes a good TWAIN driver and the full version of Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard. Fujitsu tells me that they will be upgrading to Acrobat 8 shortly. This device is compatible with both XP and Vista.

The ScanSnap fi-5110C is rated to scan fifteen double-sided pages per minute.

Read on to learn more about my experience using this scanner and some tips and techniques for setting it up.

More…