Wish list

[AdamS]

I'm assuming some of these will already be in the pipeline for the next release but I'm just starting to offer this to clients so thought I'd get in early with suggestions.

 

• Ability to dictate which users can access which cases (in case user puts in wrong port number they may inadvertently be able to access another case which is being shared at the same time).
• Ability to set time limit by date for user accounts to be active (assists overall control issues)
• Lock accounts so only one instance can be used at a time (stops multiple users all logging in at the same time with same credentials)
• Lock down on the ability to download data (ie set review and tag only)
• Add query or help capability. ie if a user is reviewing a particular file or email the ability to tag that file for a query, then type in a question which will auto generate an email to a predefined email address with a reference number and enough information to ID the file the question is about. Not only would this feature save our time answering phone calls for sometimes basic questions, it would allow an audit trail of support for a particular case, and it would also allow clients in different time zones to ensure the question can get to where it needs to go.

I'm sure there will be more to come.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam! To address your questions one at a time:

1. This feature will be available in 1.7.1 release later this month
2. I think we will consider this feature in future.
3. See my question below.
4. This feature is on our road map. I think it will be either 1.7.2 or 1.7.3, but no concrete dates have been assigned to them yet.
5. This seems to me like some in built Instant Messaging system. Is that what you are after? This feature looks interesting so I'll pull it on the roadmap. It will depend on the market, however, if we decide to implement it.

Locking accounts:

I understand what you are after, but I don't know why you should need this feature. Could you elaborate on this a bit more? For me it looks like this would only be helpful if you share the same credentials among various users. We wouldn't recommend that, as you could loose track of who has access to data. Credentials should be kept safe and assigned to one person only.

[AdamS]

I create a user "bob" and assign him a password. Bob then gives those credentials to half his office to help him review the 10,000 emails. They all log in at the same time, my computer freezes up and my network slows to a crawl because 20 people are all accessing at the same time.

 

I can certainly access a shared case on my internal network from several different computers at the same time with the same user credentials. From an access control point of view I don't want this to be able to happen, single user, single credentials. I have no problem with other people using the credentials to assist, however we need to be able to control the amount of actual connections to my computer otherwise we are going to have bandwidth and performance issues.

 

Hence if Connect will only allow a single instance of each username to connect at the same time then we have greater access control.

[AdamS]

A couple more

 

• Log out / disconnect activity doesn't appear to be logged in the activity stream
• It would be nice to have the IP address logged in the activity stream as well as the user name (would assist in identifying if log in credentials are being shared around

Some auditing capabilities would be good too, but I imagine much lower priority:

• Ability to produce a 'by user' report detailing date/times of log in or log off events
• Total time spent reviewing/tagging etc
• List of documents reviewed/tagged

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam! Very insightful, as always! :-) You are absolutely right about the fact that someone could share his account in order to aid him with his work. I guess we need to be more preventive here.

I'm sure we will come up with some solution that could help in this case.

 

Correct, log out is not covered in the activities stream. If that would be helpful for you, then we will add it in one of the future releases (most likely 1.7.2).

 

"Audit logs" and "user activities reports" are also on the road map, so I noted down your specific suggestions. They surely will be included.

[AdamS]

Thanks Lukasz, and is IP address of computer connecting something that can be included in the Activity stream and any logs?

 

I'm hopefully going live on this with two clients in the next week so I'll no doubt have some client based feedback coming through soon as well.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Surely, I think that IPs would be nice additions as well. I already wrote it down so it will be processed in one of the next releases. I can't wait to hear some customer feedback also!

[AdamS]

First bit of customer driven feedback, sadly it's not a technical issue.

 

The ability to limit a user account access based on time and/or date.

 

Let's say we want to give our user Bill access to a particular case but only for 40 hours of actual log in time (hence the need to log both log on and log off events), or we only want Bill to be able to access the case until the 10th of October.

 

This is more from a sales perspective as it gives us some options for clients who may want to access the data only for a few hours at a time but over a long period, as opposed to clients who are time critical (lawyers) and may be able to have multiple people over a relatively short period of time.

[ŁukaszBachman]

I think that both ideas are valid and we will definitely consider them as an extension of user access management. I very much like the idea of limiting access till particular point in time. That could be very handy in many use cases.

[AdamS]

Good afternoon, I have a couple of thoughts with regards to Connect which I wanted to share.

 

1 - Flagging is not transposing to Intella from Connect. By this I mean if my client logs in using Connect and rather than Tag items decides to Flag them instead, this work is not reflected in Intella when I log in. I can see items have been flagged via the activity screen for Connect and if I log in via Connect using my clients credentials I can see the items which have been Flagged. In this instance while logged in as my client I just sorted by Flagged items then Tagged them all. Once back in Intella I could see my newly created Tag and then just export the items as needed, so I have a quick work around but I would still love to see Flagged items reflected in Intella.

 

2 - Bandwidth control by limiting or stopping download / print of items. I'm not sure how hard something like this would be to implement but if we could (on a case by case or user by user, which ever is easiest to implement) have some granular control over what they can do. My main concern is that one of my clients might decide to just print out all 200,000 emails and conduct a paper review or even just save/print off a large amount of emails. It would be great to be able to say limit them to review only (tag/flag etc) and have no option to print or download the original.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam!

 

As to the first question, the flaggings should be seen in both Connect and TEAM. Please note that the flaggings are presented to the user who made them. So if users A and B have both flagged item#1, then each of them will see that item as flagged. But if only the first user has flagged an item, then the only way for user B to know about it is either by following Activity stream or by querying via Features Facet (Flagged > by user A).

Does that help?

 

Good news for you - the Exporting Permission has already been introduced and is now being tested. It will be a part of 1.7.3. New permissions mechanism allows to control who can download and export items. Do you think it should also affect printing of an item (action available in the Previewer)?

[AdamS]

Great news about the permissions

 

With regards to the flagging I understand about the flags will only present to the user that made them, however there may be a glitch as I'm definitely not seeing the flags via TEAM.

 

TEAM 1.7.2 and Connect 1.7.2 are the versions, I even created some tags via connect on the same case and double checked to make sure and they were not visible in TEAM after creation.

 

I can't be sure but I think this case was originally created in an earlier version of TEAM then updated, is it possible that this is causing some sort of conflict or glitch?

[ŁukaszBachman]

I think I might have a clue what's up, but please tell me this first - when you open the case in TEAM then you can properly see all the items flagged by all the users in Features Facet > Flagging node, right?

[AdamS]

ahhhh you clever man

 

The emails are indeed showing as flagged under the features facet, I had not explored fully as I was expecting the 'tick' to be in the little flag box visually.

 

Thanks Lukasz, all is working correctly, this was a PICNIC error

[ŁukaszBachman]

Glad I could help :-) Hey, all in all PICNICs are plain fun! :-)

[AdamS]

Hi this is more of a question than a wish, but if it's possible please consider it a big wish and request.

 

Would it be possible to have the ability for cases shared via connect to also be accessed at the same time via Intella TEAM?

 

I know currently it's not but I'm working on several jobs at the moment where clients are wanting access as fast as possible to key information, while I'm still compiling other information and constantly adding it to the case. Having to take Connect offline to index the new sources before they can access it is slowing us down considerably.

 

This is my thought (non programmer thinking of course) but if Intella TEAM wants to open a case currently being used in Connect it would copy off the necessary files it needs to open the case into a temp directory, it can then index the new sources and then once indexing is complete have some way to merge the new content with the existing content. It may be that Connect would have to be taken offline for that merging process but I'm guessing if it's possible the merging would be far quicker than the indexing process so it would be a huge time win. 

 

If that is possible then extend that and allow someone in TEAM full functionality on the case with the option to merge at the conclusion of their work..

 

Am I dreaming here?

 

PS - Should have some more customer feedback for you soon as all of a sudden everyone wants remote access

[AdamS]

A couple of quick customer requests.

 

I'm not sure if this has been requested before but if the tag sort order for Connect could automatically be alphabetical that would be fantastic, it's a bit rough trying to find tags at the moment

 

Also when using the facets is it possible to have double click on the field be the same as highlighting and pressing the search button? I know it's a small thing but if you have a tag list of several thousand it's quite clumsy to have to highlight a word, then scroll all the way to the bottom and press search.

 

Regional date/time settings would be great too (or does connect take this from the Intella Case file it's opening?) I notice on the activity log that Connect displays date/times in the US formate mm/dd/yy.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam!

 

Indexing and working on the case at the same time will be very hard to achieve. Most of our internal data structures are not tailored to be handled this way. However I understand your need and, oddly enough, this is second such request from our customers during this week. We are currently working heavily on making indexing engine faster and better, so it will be hard to add additional tasks to the pipeline there, but rest assured we will evaluate this. Please just answer me this - how would you expect it to work with regard to searching when new data is indexed constantly? Are you planning to just review & tag all documents in the data that was already present in the case? After all "look and find" keywords can very well be in the batch of data that hasn't been indexed yet so searching might not give accurate results. Would you be willing to live with that?

 

For searching Connect is using the same date settings as Intella Desktop, but it always uses "mm/dd/yyyy" format in the UI. I'll have a look and see if this could be addressed.

 

As to the rest of you ideas - I think all of them are valid and I'll put it on the roadmap. Thanks for those! :-)

[AdamS]

I envisaged something like this (regarding working and indexing simultaneously)

 

The client is using Connect to remotely review the case data that is currently available, meanwhile I'm indexing the new data source. At the conclusion of the indexing I 'merge' the new source indexed with the existing data. Maybe Connect has to be taken offline for the merge, or maybe it can be done live, either way at the end of this merging process the client has all the data from the new source available. With regards to the searching it would be as simple as isolating by 'location' facet, redo all the keyword searches done on the existing data set to bring the new data up to the same point in progress. 

 

Then once that's done both new and old data have had the same level of review then any further searches can be done on the entire data set. This same process could apply internally with TEAM if I needed to work on a case while indexing new content for that same case.

 

I don't imagine this is something that would happen on every case, or it may not even be often, but my last couple of jobs this would have been very handy functionality to have and would have saved me a few headaches

[AdamS]

When logged in to the admin dashboard on the Connect host computer the activity logs for a shared case don't appear to populate unless the case is being actively access by a remote user. I assume there is a log file somewhere that is static but if this window would populate all the time it would be an easy way to conduct a quick review.

 

Also I noted a possible glitch in the history view when logged in as a remote viewer. I had a client working from home on a case and I could clearly see him active in the activity window, yet a few hours later when he logged in from a different location (I was present for this log in) that mornings activity was not visible when switching to the activity view on his remote session.

 

Not sure if this is a regular issue or a once off as it's not something I've seen or looked for before but thought it worth mentioning. 

[AdamS]

Request from a client to take the hidden content control one step further and not only hide the content of the restricted tag, but also the tag itself. Assuming the tag they have used imparts some meaning they wish to remain hidden.

 

From my point of view a couple of thoughts on this:

• The ability to hide the tags themselves but still have the content they refer to be visible (where the tags impart meaning more than the data itself)
• The ability to hide all tags and the data based on the user that created the tag instead of the tag itself (again also have the choice to hide just the tag itself or both when required.

Currently the method to hide this data is either to create multple rules with the tags listed themselves to hide

OR

The easy method, view all the tagged items you wish to hide simultaneously, then create a new tag and go into the settings and hide that new tag.

[AdamS]

Would it be possible for us 'the host' to leave some sort of system message if we have to take the connect server offline, or even stop sharing a case?

 

I have several matters on at the moment and from time to time I have to take Connect offline to index new content or even reboot the server after a crash (caused by other software). It would be great if we could leave some sort of custom message should someone try to log in to a case that is not currently shared or if the server is offline.

[Chris]

Hello Adam,

 

Thank you again for this very useful feedback. To answer them one by one:

 

We are considering several improvements for extending cases with new evidence data, e.g.:

• The ability to merge two cases: you index the new data into a new case and then use Intella's Case Manager to merge the two cases into a third case, or add one case to the other.
   
• Give Connect itself the ability to index data. As Connect is not a local, single-user application, it makes sense to be able to do this without having to shut down the server or even the case.

I will ask one of my colleagues to come back on that issue with the history events. This should not happen, I believe.

 

As for hiding tags and/or tagged items: I realize that there are multiple uses cases for hiding information, sometimes it's the item itself that is sensitive and sometimes it's the tag that it has received. Right now we only support one mode of hiding tagged information. We will likely support all others in a future release.

 

It indeed makes sense to show a "public service announcement" system event, either for live cases ("going done in 30 minutes") or temporarily unavailable cases.

[AdamS]

 

• The ability to merge two cases: you index the new data into a new case and then use Intella's Case Manager to merge the two cases into a third case, or add one case to the other.

   

• Give Connect itself the ability to index data. As Connect is not a local, single-user application, it makes sense to be able to do this without having to shut down the server or even the case.

 

 

Uncanny, I was just about to update my post to suggest a merge feature would be the best way to go, that way Connect would only have to be offline for a short amount of time.

 

I'm not sure about Connect having the ability to index data as that implies the user would then have the ability to either upload large data sets to my server, or index across the internet to their local drive. Both would have some serious time issues and it would defeat the purpose of wanting the most amount of uptime for the Connect content.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam!

 

Most of your suggestions have been converted to internal tasks. Can't promise which releases will they be included in (as always, matter of available time and other priorities) but I'll definitely want to have sorted tags in next release. Later we will add: admin system notices, double-clicking on facet values, "case currently not shared" messages.

 

You mentioned that it would be good to hide not only tagged items, but also tags themselves when proper permissions are specified. This should already be the case! When implementing this I didn't want other users to see tags which they can't assign or search themselves. So if "privileged" user added a tag called "hidden", then users with limited rights shouldn't see neither this tag nor items tagged with it. Can you check if this is how it works in your case?

 

I also had in mind hiding any sort of activity coming from specified user. That would allow for regular user not seeing any review outcome coming from "Super User". That would be lots of work, though, so I'm not sure if this would be even useful in your case?

 

Also you wanted to connect with TEAM to a case hosted by Connect. I am not sure now if this was just about indexing additional sources and merging cases, but if your question was more about doing a parallel review with Connect and TEAM simultaneously then we have good news - this is already possible! In fact, we are often testing Connect with browsers and TEAM instances at the same time. There are some caveats to this cooperation (like TEAM not fully respecting RBAC model yet), but this shouldn't be a big problem. It won't work other way around, though, so cases shared with TEAM can be only accessed by TEAM reviewers.