iManage has been well adapted by the international Valtech community. However, many users have experienced technical problems and poor performance when using the system. The Knowledge Management Team is aware of these issues and is working intensively to fix them.

Richard Fanta, U.S. Senior Architect, carried out a deep audit of the situation and suggested significant areas of improvement on both software and hardware configuration on the shared server in Dallas. All improvement points are implemented and have had a considerable impact on the reliability and performance on the server side.

Collaboration software such as iManage requires a good infrastructure and more bandwidth than a pure branding website, for example. In order to optimise the use of iManage locally, improvement of the Internet access might be necessary.

"The Marceau office in Paris have already improved their Internet access, and this has improved their experience significantly when using iManage," says Michel Ezran, Chief Knowledge Officer. "We hope more local offices will follow."

To ease up on the bottleneck created by the start page - which is demanding in loading time and leaves the user with an impression of a low performance site - the KM Team is in the process of designing a new start page with a limited amount of content and an improved navigation.

"We are encouraging our users to log in directly to their own pages instead of using the start page," Michel says. "This way the user will skip the content-heavy introduction, and limit the use of bandwidth on the way."

Another way to locally assist in leveraging the performance of iManage is to implement a local server to run the local part of iManage. "We are currently testing the use of a local server in Paris," Michel explains. "As soon as the test is done and we feel comfortable with the test results, we will promote the use of local servers for the work space."

The use of iManage is a strategic decision in Valtech. The collaborative workspace is an important tool in our effort to optimise the cooperation between colleagues and clients to create a competitive advantage. "Deploying an enterprise solution is never straightforward," according to Michel, "but we will continue the struggle until iManage is running without problems."

While working on solving the current problem with iManage, the KM Team is constantly seeking new ways to improve the joint workspace. As Michel explains: "We are currently investigating the possibility of migrating to the Java version of the product, and we are also testing the usage of the MailSite application which will integrate iManage with Outlook."