The New Comparison Paradigm

From the very beginnings of my brainchild iRedline, back in the days of Office 2000, I believed there was an opportunity to provide a major enhancement to Word’s comparison and tracked change features. Word’s built-in tools were starting to get better and I noticed some firms were beginning to use Word comparison tools exclusively. I was a believer in Word’s Tracked Changes and Comparison engine from the very beginning. I saw that Microsoft was going to build Office’s technology on this collaborative methodology, and it made so much sense. This was a future I wanted Esquire Innovations to be a part.

Unfortunately, it was difficult for most firms already familiar with and entrenched in third-party comparison applications to suggest they use Word exclusively. Word still lacked many of the features these other products had and most importantly, Word’s comparison engine could not fulfill attorneys’ requirements. On the plus side, Word did provide the very accurate Tracked Changes feature, but this presented only a collaborative approach while many attorneys still required a static document with marked changes.

Then Came Word 2003

Then in late 2002 came Word 2003. Word’s new and improved comparison engine was much better than the previous versions, but still less accurate than standalone applications. I felt it was time to unleash iRedline and help Word out a little (in some cases… a lot) with an application that fit right into Word and provided some of those features by now common in standalone applications, but at a fraction of the cost.

Lack of E-Discovery Features

As more and more companies are instituting E-discovery processes for managing internal electronic information (metadata), the ability to report on the specific metadata within a document, and the metadata that has been removed, becomes paramount. Document Inspector lacks any reporting capability and, in fact, the user has no idea what has been removed or where it was in the document.

Summary

Document Inspector is significantly lacking as an enterprise-metadata management tool. The limited number of metadata elements that can be removed (much less viewed or actually managed) makes it a poor choice for document intensive organizations that truly need to manage their discoverable metadata. The cost and effort associated with extending the Document Inspector to a richer metadata management model will be much higher and less efficient than investing in a proven metadata product, such as iScrub, which does significantly more out of the box at a much lower overall cost.

iScrub

iScrub is the premier enterprise solution for metadata management in document intensive organizations. iScrub uses sophisticated technologies to remove the visible document properties and the difficult to reach file elements, such as the list of past authors (all document authors) and Deleted Text.

iScrub provides a centralized administration feature that allows firms to establish and control the metadata removal settings – this is called an enterprise-metadata management approach.

iScrub publishes the clean version of a document, separate from the original file, inside or outside of a document management system.

iScrub works with Outlook, Lotus Notes and GroupWise to prompt users to scrub e-mail attachments before sending them; automatically helping to prevent sensitive metadata information from leaving the organization.

Preventing Metadata Disclosure from Email Attachments

Document Inspector only works within its intrinsic Office Object Model, and will not prompt users to manage the metadata from within Outlook (or any other email system). Once again, the firm must put its trust in the individual user; trust in his/her memory to actually apply the Document Inspector before attaching the document, and trust in his/her judgment or knowledge to remove the proper elements for that specific transaction.

An enterprise metadata management solution should prompt the user to manage metadata in Microsoft Office attachments to an e-mail. When a user has an attachment, the application should recognize it, and manage the metadata as the document exits the company’s electronic walls.

Only One Level of Metadata Management

Metadata should be managed differently depending on who the document is being sent to or its intended purpose. If a document is going to a client or collaborator then perhaps only certain metadata elements might be removed. If the document is going to an adverse party, then most (if not all) of the document’s metadata should be removed. A company may wish to provide several standardized levels of metadata management to their users, thus removing the decision-making responsibility from the individual, and transforming the process into a conscious enterprise approach.

Document Inspector only provides one level of inspection and removal. This disadvantage makes Document Inspector a poor choice for enterprise-metadata management. Document Inspector relies on each user to understand and remove metadata components they happen to think are potentially damaging. Therefore by its nature (to be effective), extensive user education and training is required.

An enterprise metadata management solution enables a firm to set up fixed standards for metadata management and enforce those standards. Users simply select one of the levels available to them – there is no guess work and little training needed.

There is A Lot of Metadata Elements That Cannot Be Managed

Document Inspector lacks the ability to manage much metadata. And unless a firm invests in development efforts to extend it, Document Inspector is not robust enough to implement an enterprise-metadata management policy.

Additionally, the Document Inspector does not show you what the metadata is, or where it is. For instance, once the user inspects the document the Document Inspector will tell you that you have document properties (built-in and custom), but doesn’t show what the document properties are. This metadata may contain case-supporting evidence that should be disclosed or discovered.

Because Document Inspector lacks the ability to view specific metadata, and if this metadata is left in the document, the “producing party must notify the opposing party and court, and retrieve the information should privileged information be inadvertently produced.” [Michele C.S. Lange, Esq. "New FRCP Rules: What Does it Mean for You" MSBA Computer and Technology Law Section. December 01, 2006] This can be costly and embarrassing.

The table below shows the metadata Document Inspector removes, compared to the metadata that Esquire Innovation’s Metadata Management solution iScrub manages.

Excel Formula Errors Will Occur when Hidden Rows, Columns and Worksheets are Deleted

Beware of deleting Hidden rows, columns and Worksheets with Document Inspector in Excel (figure 1). If you have formulas in a document that are referencing other values in a hidden row, column or worksheet and Document Inspector removes them you will get an error (#REF!) in your formulas that referenced them. On the other hand an enterprise metadata management solution (iScrub) will convert the formulas to values before unhiding or deleting these items.

Figure 1

Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) is a great feature. Seriously! With UAC, you will finally be able to run your user machines as standard users as opposed to computer administrators. If you are running Windows XP, you are most likely running your user’s’ machine as administrator, probably because some vendor’s software requires it. Hey we’ve been guilty of it.

From a security standpoint, this can cause the damn break and allow spyware, malware, viruses, non-standard firm software, etc to leak through. By running your computer as an administrator, a leaky part of the damn can easily write to your system files. As a standard user under Vista, access would be denied.

I’m sure you’ve tried to run, as a standard user or Least-Privileged User Account (LUA) in Windows XP but it is difficult and a pain. Yea, there are ways to do it with special applications but Windows XP was not designed to run this way. Com’on!

In contrast, Vista was designed to run this way by default. As a Computer Administrator, any administrative task will prompt you with a dialog box to elevate your privileges, and then you can perform the specific task.

When you run as a Standard User, under Vista, an administrator password is required to perform the appropriate task. This is a true secure desktop implementation.

We Develop with UAC On

Here at Esquire Innovations we develop all our applications with UAC turned on. At first it was a little difficult for us because we (as most software development under Windows) we were pretty much spoiled by the unconscious security limitations in Windows XP. Now we are much more disciplined in our approach to file locations and providing our clients with software solutions that can run without hassle as a Standard User.

User Account Control Step-by-Step Guide

Not all Databinding Link Information Is Removed In Office 2007 Word

There are fields in all versions of Microsoft Word that can contain linked data in the form of text, pictures and hyperlinks that can reference files on a server.  Document Inspector does not remove or unlink (turn the field to text) these type of links. 

Here are examples of Link Fields that are not removed using the Document Inspector (notice these have the server name and path information): 

• { HYPERLINK “\\\\PRODEV\\People\\JDoe\\DOCS-” \l “609447-v18-Bylaws.DOC” }  

• { INCLUDEPICTURE \\\\ PRODEV \\People\\ JDoe\\iRedlineLogo.gif” \* MERGEFORMAT }  

• { LINK Equation.3 \\\\ PRODEV \\People\\ JDoe\\iRedlineLogo.gif” \p } 

• { INCLUDETEXT “\\\\ PRODEV \\People\\ JDoe\\DOCS-#609447-v18-Bylaws.DOC” \* PRODEV }

To appreciate iRedline version 7, I want to first state an assumption I fully believe.

Word 2007’s comparison engine is so accurate and with a feature set much more complete than its predecessors, firms now have two completely new choices – do I use Word 2007 exclusively or invest in a standalone application?

I am betting the future of iRedline on firms staying elusively with Word 2007 and foregoing the old paradigm of standalone comparison applications. For legal work product, we do not need them anymore…period.