AI Responsibly with ndMAX
As we look back over the course of this year, it has been extremely rewarding and humbling to see our momentum continue to swing upward. From accolades to growth to dependable innovation, a lot has happened for the NetDocuments community in 2021. In case you missed anything, we wanted to give you a recap of the year’s highlights.
Our team experienced many wins this year, including awards, acknowledgements, acquisitions, and authorizations. On top of 21% employee growth, here are some exciting milestones:
In May 2021, Kirk Haselden became our Vice President of Engineering. Kirk previously spent over 18 years with Microsoft and held leadership roles at Cox Automotive, Blackbaud and numerous startups. He will help set us up for the next stages of our company’s growth and product development.
Jill Schornack joined NetDocuments in September as our Vice President of Products. With a long history in legal, she will be invaluable in defining the vision for our portfolio of products, creating product development roadmaps, managing the launch of new solutions, and exploring opportunities to further align, integrate, and grow the portfolio.
And in December, Chris Stewart took on the role of Chief Customer Officer. Chris built the customer success, professional services, and support functions for Cornerstone OnDemand, a vertical SaaS application provider for human resources providers, as they scaled from $50m to $700m in revenue. As we increase our number of new customers and new products being adopted by existing customers, his deep experience building systems, processes, and metrics to allow for improvements in customer journeys will help us take our great customer success to the next level.
We’re still growing and want to work with the world’s best talent. Interested? Check out our career opportunities.
The NetDocuments Work Inspired Scholarship Fund is in place to provide opportunities for students to discover what inspires them and learn how to harness that inspiration to drive their future success. This year we awarded three recipients — Anysia Boozer, Juan Perez, and Jamal Sayid — with a $10,000 scholarship to continue their education. In addition, all three will take on internships with NetDocuments in the summer of 2022.
NetDocuments also donated $15,000 to charities selected by our inaugural Hackathon winners.
At our annual Inspire event, we honored innovative work across the NetDocuments ecosystem. Customers Sullivan and Cromwell, Kean Miller, DuPont, Corteva, and Husch Blackwell were recognized for their efforts in security, adoption, integrations, business expansion, and overall advocacy and innovation, respectively.
Partners Kraft Kennedy, eSentio, Centerbase, Pronet, Verlata Consulting, Advanced, Affinity Consulting Group, and Element were awarded for going above and beyond to grow the NetDocuments community and provide elevated support and service.
And our inaugural Hackathon introduced a new format that saw teams of three to four people taking six weeks to create a viable solution to a problem of their choosing that had to be solved using the combined power of NetDocuments and Microsoft Power Automate. Affinity was our big winner, followed by Kroll, Verlata, Kutak Rock, and Element.
Throughout the year, we host many educational sessions and webinars, as well as our annual Inspire event that brings together NetDocuments leaders, customers, partners, and prospects for multiple days of learning, reveals, interviews, and celebrations.
We also develop blogs, case studies, and other resources that are available to the legal community. Below are links to some of our most popular content in 2021. Have an idea for content we should cover in 2022? Send it our way!
For more webinar recordings, guides, whitepapers, and more, visit our Resources Library.
A few of the major updates to our core ORGANIZE solution this year include delegation of the ndWeb Home Page (see this blog for more details) and a complete redesign of the ndOffice Activity Center to include Home Page contents (more details here). Both of these updates enable NetDocuments users to share work with other team members and get to the files they need more quickly without having to search.
Another major update within the NetDocuments core functionality is the ability to support six languages (English, French, German, Canadian French, Spanish, Portuguese - Brazilian and Portugal). The user interface was also updated to make the addition of other languages quicker to implement.
DocuSign eSignature Integration
Phase one of the NetDocuments DocuSign integration has been released as part of the ORGANIZE solution to enable a full electronic signature workflow within NetDocuments. Enhancements are ongoing based on common requests we have received, and work has started on phase two of the integration. Stay tuned in 2022 for updates on specific workflows that will be enabled.
ndMail Email Management
In 2021, both the ability to automatically file entire email conversations to NetDocuments and to exclude individual emails within conversations from being filed were added to ndMail, so users don't have to individually file emails. In addition, ndMail for Gmail was released to give Gmail users the ability to save their emails to NetDocuments.
Major PROTECT updates this past year include the release of Workspace Security Manager; enhancements to FlexStore, Tools, and the PROTECT user experience; and the addition of a native connector for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (CASB).
Workspace Security Manager
In our initial release of Workspace Security Manager (WSM), we’ve allowed authorized users to create, edit, and apply security policies to content in their NetDocuments workspaces. This makes it easy to build ethical walls around specific content and maintain granular need-to-know security environments. With WSM, users can see at-a-glance the security applied to the Workspace and all its contents from within the workspace. WSM Policy Managers are also able to generate reports for all workspaces.
FlexStore for Law Firms and Corporate Legal Teams
FlexStore gives customers the ability to store documents outside of the NetDocuments Service Regions, allowing the customer to adhere to data residency requirements globally. Amazon S3 support and FlexStore Searching Capabilities (search on physical location of document) expand the utility and usability of FlexStore.
Tools
As part of our FedRAMP authorization initiative, we updated Proof Key for Code Exchange (PCKE) default browser logins instead of having legacy Internet Explorer control across all tools. PKCE helps protect against various code injection attacks by ensuring that the application swapping the code is the same as the one that requested it.
ndLink enhancements expanded the security and reach of ndLink with representational state transfer (REST) APIs, updated hosts to service regions US, EU to UK, added new service regions DE and US-Gov, and added login with Federated ID. ndToolkit was also updated to a 64-bit, PKCE login.
Additional Updates
The PLAN solution is all about collaboration, productivity, and efficiency. Over the last year, we have focused on improving and enhancing usability and experience based on customer requests and feedback.
ndThread Real-Time Messaging
ndThread received several crucial usability updates this year, including the ability to mark items as read/unread and to mark all items as read. The search function was redesigned and improved. And for fun and the ability to convey exactly what you mean, Giphy integration was added.
Tasks Management
Tasks received several updates that improve its usefulness for teams and enable more workflows. The addition of Task Templates and the ability to associate them with Workspace Templates makes tracking work and having consistency across matters/projects much easier. No longer will you have to reinvent the wheel each time a new matter or project is started. The addition of the My Tasks view means individuals can easily track their tasks across multiple projects.
SmartView/Margin Notes
A lot of work has been done on the back end of the SmartView document viewer to improve response times and enable future functionality. One new function that was enabled in 2021 is the ability to include NetDocuments links within Margin Notes. Watch for additional functionality coming soon!
Preparing documents for sharing with and delivering real value to your clients is at the core of our DELIVER solution. Enhancements this year centered around building out a strong foundation for future developments.
SetBuilder for document bundling was migrated to a new backend platform in order to enable future developments. Within SetBuilder, a document interface redesign enables searching for documents within the workspace and the ability to both sort and preview documents as you are building a document set. These make the creation and customization of electronic document sets even smoother than before.
The LEARN solution allows you to gain a deeper, more actionable understanding of both your documents and how people use and engage with those documents. This year we advanced LEARN through our integration with LexisNexis® and Workspace Analytics, unlocking valuable insights and functionality not available in any other DMS on the market.
NEW: Workspace Analytics
Transparency and good data analytics are important. NetDocuments customers want information to help improve operational efficiency and identify and fix potential issues. Three levels of Analytics – Repository, Cabinet, and now Workspace – give you insights for your business, learning for your departments, and detailed information on your projects. Analytics delivers the insights you want, in an easy to digest format by using charts, visualization tools, heat maps, and more.
This roundup is just a small representation of all the exciting things happening at NetDocuments. We’re thankful to our NetDocuments staff, customers, and partners for making 2021 a year when we were truly able to win together, and we look forward to more big wins and lots to celebrate in 2022.
