SRC now deploying Workshare Professional 5

Safe, Compliant and Efficient Document Lifecycle Management for Microsoft Office and Windows System Infrastructures

London, 22 June 2007 – Following on from the recent launch of Workshare Professional 5, SRC, the leading digital dictation and speech recognition provider, is pleased to announce they are now deploying the latest version of the Workshare software. Workshare Professional 5 is the first and only document control product integrated with 2007 Microsoft Office and Vista as well as previous Microsoft Office and Windows systems. The latest release is 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 organizations.

The Workshare document control product line is used by one million people in 6,000 organizations 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. Workshare Professional’s design is content-aware, works across organizations and is easy to learn. It provides accurate and regulatory-ready document control that 30m business professionals in all organizations need; at a price they can afford.

“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 organizations,” 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 optimized for our open file formats, UI and workflow, while delivering safer Office file sharing and more secure PDF creation.”

Key New Features of Workshare Professional 5

Document lifecycle management inside 2007 Microsoft Office system and Vista
Workshare Professional 5 is the first document control product to be 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. And finally, 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.

The World’s Most Secure PDF
Just as Workshare Professional was the first to ensure safe sharing of Office documents, it is now the first and only to deliver leak proof PDFs, with complete policy based and auditable risk discovery and remediation prior to PDF conversion. Only 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.

Complete Information leak prevention
Through seamless integration of the Workshare Protect 5 client, the world’s leading information leak prevention endpoint software, 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 centralized 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.

Exclusive Document Control functionality
Building on the usage of 1M customers over the last 7 years, Workshare Professional continues to innovate making document sharing and control more powerful. New exclusive features based on customer feedback in this release include centralized, 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.

Full Collaboration and Repository Integration
Workshare Professional is built to work in customer’s current and future environment and infrastructures. 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. Optional document repository system connectors include SharePoint, EMC Documentum, Interwoven, Hummingbird, OpenText and IBM Score. In addition, Workshare Professional fully supports the remote client implementation on Citrix.

“Workshare Professional 5 delivers safety, efficiency and audit visibility during document exchange and review, all without forcing users to change the way they work or the tools they use,” said David Ferris, senior analyst with Ferris Research. “Workshare Professional is much easier to use, and more powerful, than its main competitor, Adobe Acrobat.”

Over 30m knowledge workers today (and nearly 50m expected in 5 years) share Office documents inside and outside their organizations to get their job done. These professionals work with confidential data and are found across every organization in functions such as product design, sales operations, human resources, procurement, finance, legal and compliance. Workshare’s approach is unique, keeping users in their native tools environment and file formats. Document authors simply use Workshare Professional inside Microsoft Office, a familiar set of creation and communication tools found on desktops and laptops of more than 98% of all business professionals. Document reviewers only require Microsoft Office and have the luxury of editing directly in the document. When authors receive those documents back via email or via a portal, Workshare maintains the master document integrity, and preserves all changes between versions.

“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.”

Workshare Professional 5 is available immediately from SRC.