Workshare integrates with Microsoft Office and Vista to provide information leak prevention
(31/07/2007)

Workshare has launched Workshare Professional 5, the document control product integrated with 2007 Microsoft Office and Vista as well as previous Microsoft Office and Windows systems. Designed for information workers who depend on sharing and reviewing Microsoft Office documents to get their job done, Workshare Professional provides safe, compliant and usable document lifecycle management across organisations.

The Workshare document control product line is used by one million people in 6,000 organisations across 65 countries. Since 1999, it's produced over 2.2 billion DeltaViews, the de facto content change "report card" for documents. Unlike perimeter-bound, proprietary document management systems whose market size peaked at $1.1b in 2004, Workshare Professional 5 securely manages how business people exchange content directly inside their standard creation and sharing tools. Its content management within the Office and Windows systems gives users standards-based access rights, better collaboration abilities, heightened security parameters, adaptable workflow, and complete version tracking.

"Business Professionals can no longer settle for products such as Adobe Acrobat for document control and compliance," said Andrew Pearson, general manager of the Document Control market group at Workshare. "Acrobat not only takes users out of the Office system causing fidelity loss, review inefficiency of 400% or more, and lost document masters throughout the document lifecycle, but it produces unsafe, un-auditable and non-compliant document version control. Workshare Professional customers trust our solution for its simplicity, accuracy and reliability. We continue to innovate ahead of the pack as this market explodes."

"Barclays Legal will be adding Workshare Professional 5 to our Microsoft Office deployment to be able to control and audit the review of our documents. As well as helping to ensure our documents remain secure throughout the document lifecycle, Workshare Professional 5 will make our document processes more efficient and more accurate," said Richard Daniel, COO, Barclays Legal & Compliance.

Workshare Professional 5 includes beta use feedback from hundreds inside this large user base, and has been in development since Workshare was selected to join the 2007 Microsoft Office Technical Advisory Program in March of 2006. It is the only document control suite in the market to fully support the workflow capabilities of 2007 Microsoft Office system and the security enhancements in Vista Windows system.

"Workshare Professional, together with the Microsoft Office system, delivers policy based security and control for business document lifecycles across organisations," said Jeff Raikes, President, Microsoft Business Division, "We love to see partners like Workshare successfully extend the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Workshare did this by integrating simple to use, ad hoc information compliance processes optimised for our open file formats, UI and workflow, while delivering safer Office file sharing and more secure PDF creation."

Workshare Professional 5 is fully integrated with and take advantage of the infrastructure and Open XML file formats delivered by the 2007 Microsoft Office system infrastructure. Workshare Professional embeds Lifecycle Workflows inside the 2007 Office Ribbon Bar and Task Pane, ensuring policy enforced and compliant document lifecycles. Workshare Professional's review and comparison capabilities are fully embedded in 2007 SharePoint Extranet and Collaborative Workspaces as well as Live Meeting for real-time collaboration. Workshare extends the power of Office 2007 Document Inspector and Vista Rights management by providing content and context aware policy enforcement and usage auditing of these capabilities.

Workshare Professional delivers leak proof PDFs, with complete policy based and auditable risk discovery and remediation prior to PDF conversion. Workshare provides Policy-enforcement for secure PDF creation 'in motion' over email and portals, including enforcement of 128-bit encryption and signing and PDF restrictions. Workshare delivers Secure PDF/A ISO compliant PDF conversion from any application or Document Management System, including support for "tagged" PDF files.

Workshare Professional now delivers complete protection from Privacy, IP and confidential information leaks when sharing documents over email and portals. Professional's ILP security is fully configurable and delivers centralised security policy management, risk alerting, auditing and reporting. In addition, Workshare Professional can take advantage of Workshare Ready partners such as Interwoven and Documentum for risk classification and Microsoft RMS and PGP for risk mitigation.

New exclusive features based on customer feedback in this release include centralised, fully auditable track changes and DeltaViews stored independently from the source file. Workshare has continued to set the standard on document comparison with unmatched accuracy for challenging and critical problems such as complex table comparison, and intricate numbering and formatting changes. An innovative new capability called One-to-Many DeltaViews shows multiple document comparisons across versions inside tabbed views.

Workshare Professional also meets the output needs of a wide range of its users by now not only providing standard Deltaview output, but by delivering Deltaviews in Secured PDFs or as editable Track change redline options. Lastly, Workshare Professional metadata links allow document management systems users to track matters across documents when sent for review from and to anywhere, all while maintaining a full audit trail of review and sharing activities.

Workshare is integrated with all major versions of Microsoft Office in use today, including Office XP, Office 2003 and now the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Workshare Professional is Vista ready, and also runs on previous Microsoft operating systems versions. Workshare is integrated with major email and messaging systems including Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and Live Meeting, and IBM Lotus Notes.