Refinements in the process of reviewing the data - share your ideas!

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi all!

 

With Intella Connect 1.7.1 officially released, we have decided to focus our efforts on implementing new features and various enhancements to the process of reviewing the data. This means that we want to give the Investigators some new and better tools, so that they can easily review more items and deliver results faster, than ever before! We have already started working on some new and exciting features, like:

• native rendering of HTML emails - inline images will show up inline the text; the custom styling will be preserved.
• load files export - Intella Connect will have the same capabilities as Intella Desktop in terms of producing various types of exports.
• improved thumbnails generation - will greatly reduce the time needed for fetching and showing thumbnails, making reviewing images very fast
• improved email threads rendering (planned)

These are our main ideas for the 1.7.2 release, but we are not planning to stop there. We wish to encourage you to share your ideas with us, since we have reserved additional time for implementing features which are most crucial for you! Ask yourself this:

 

What features would improve my experience with reviewing the data?

 

and let us know! We will make sure to analyze each one of the ideas posted below and see if we can add it to the 1.7.2!

[AdamS]

Hi Lukasz, the improved email thread reviewing you mention above, is this referring to being able to select a single email, then quickly determine if there are any forward, CC or BCC that relate to the same email?

 

One minor improvement I'd love to see for Connect is the ability to restrict certain users from downloading content (exporting) without restricting their ability to review pictures etc. This is a bandwidth control issue more than anything, as I don't want my clients to set up an export of 100,000 emails and attachments which would effectively bottleneck my server bandwidth for many hours.

 

More to follow.

[ŁukaszBachman]

We are thinking about rendering email threads (emails including a bunch of replies/forwards) just like web clients do with foldable (collapsible) panels. This means that if you have, say 10 replies in one thread, then we show only the most recent one expanded, and the others will be small panels, which will unfold when you click on them.

This aims to reduce the effort of the reviewer to scan through all the messages that he has already seen, just to get to the previously unseen part of an email.

 

The 2nd question seems like another type of ACLs, right? I mean the same sort of a feature that 1.7.1 release has offered while setting who has access to a given case. I think we can add it along with other types of ACLs that we are planning to include.

[AdamS]

I love the expandable panel idea for the email threads. We are already 'trained' by many other software programs to understand and view data this way so it should be easy to use for the end user.

 

Spot on, it's ACL issue (assuming that stands for Access Control Limitation?). I can think of some other granular controls that would be fantastic to implement, of course I have no idea how hard or easy they may be but I can but ask

 

Something I've been thinking on but am having trouble articulating, if we could assign a 'manager' user to a particular case, then set other users with access to 'worker'. When the manager logs into the connect he would have some extra options available which would allow him to see how many 'workers' have access to this case, then he could assign certain data to each worker for review. Each worker can only see the data set that the manager has set for his review. The manager would also have some basic audit functions available such as progress of his workers and he would also be able to see any items that have been tagged etc.

 

I can then simply load up a case with all the data, assign the users with access and give them the appropriate level, the manager then decides which of his staff review what, and he can control and monitor the workflow on his end. I would still deal with any technical issues on the server end, and then at the conclusion export and report.

 

I'm obviously thinking of Relativity and tools like that when I think of this, but I'm trying to look at a simplified type of set up which would take the more useful functions and leave behind all the other 'noise' that these programs have which I think is more glitz than anything.

[ŁukaszBachman]

We use the ACL abbreviation for Access Control Lists, but I guess that is what you are after as well. The idea that you have sounds familiar, as we have been talking about features like that before. We decided to start with implementation of ACLs, as this is the first step to managing layers of access in any case. I think at some point our ACLs will evolve into something similar (or the same) as you are describing. I have a few questions, though:

 

1. How do you divide this work between different reviewers? Is it based on custodian, volume of the data set (say, split equally 33% each), potential value of evidence (possible junk files vs. confidential docs), etc.? There can be plenty of scenarios here, I am wondering what would you need the most.

 

2. In your idea, are Managers essentially the same as admins? Admin can see every case and modify server settings, which of course gives him unlimited access to pretty much everything. Do you need Managers to have some less "power" in hand? For instance, manager assigned to case A cannot do the same stuff i case B, because admin did not give him access to it. 
I am asking about this because perhaps Managers are not really needed, and you would only need more ACLs and some nifty tool for managing them? For instance, if we added limitation saying that a given user can see only the data tagged with a given tag and then added simple wizard allowing to apply this restriction to 20 different reviewers easily, would that be enough?

 

3. Did you took into consideration what impact will the relationships between the items assigned to two different reviewers have? Lets say that user A is allowed to only see emails, while user B - images. If user A searches for children of some email containing attached images, do you think it should pop up in the results (since user A cannot see images due to the ACL restrictions)?

 

Thanks for shedding a light on the topic :-)

[AdamS]

Hi Lukasz, I can see terminology might make this tricky for me to explain, but I think you are understanding me mostly.

 

1 - Allocating the work load might be easiest done on a volume basis, either equally amongst all reviewers or with the ability to dictate specific percentages to each reviewer individually. That should avoid the conflicts you are describing in point 3 above.

 

2 - I think I explained badly my 'manager', 'reviewer' concept. Lets say that I as the admin on my local Connect server set up a case for client A. Client A tell me they have 3 staff they want to authorise to remotely connect to my server to review the data, one senior and two juniors, with the senior having responsibility for their overall review. So I set up the case on my Connect server and create 3 users, call them Senior and Junior A & B. I then set the Senior user with elevated privileges (not to be confused with a Connect admin who can see all cases and make server changes), this elevated privilege level applies only to the case which I (the admin) have authorised him for. I set the Junior reviewers to normal level.

Now at this point in time although I have created and authorised 3 users for Client A, only the Senior user can currently log in and access the data, if the Juniors try and log in they get an error message saying they have no allocated content for review (or something similar). When the Senior logs in he can see a 'case manager' screen which shows him who his other authorised users are and in this screen he can set up who will review what based on percentage of total case data. Once he allocates a percentage to Junior A&B and sets them active they can log in and begin reviewing their data. The Senior can choose a percentage for himself or not as he sees fit. The senior can also see some basic stats on his log in screen such as his reviewers, their percentage of data for review and their progress.

This all takes place remotely and is completely separate to my local administration of the Connect server, the Senior and Juniors would only see the case I had authorised them to see.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam,

 

perfect, I can see the clear picture now! I will gather your use case along with similar ideas and try to come up with some solution that would satisfy all of them. Then I will present it to the rest of the staff and see if we find a room for it in the upcoming release. I'll get back to you when we make a decision.

[AdamS]

Hi Lukasz, a quick bit of user feedback from my client, they have suggested an integrated print button within Intella, allowing them to print emails or documents that are being previewed.

 

I know they can print from within the web browser, but I think they were having some issues with Chrome splitting the email body over two sheets and they couldn't seem to rectify this. I'm not sure how difficult it is to integrate this type of functionality, but if it could be done it would simplify matters somewhat.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam!

 

Would it be enough for them to print the contents of a singular tab at a time (contents tab, raw data, actions, comments, whichever)? If so, then that would be an easy one and we would surely add it in 1.7.2! We will simply modify the way in which browser is rendering the Previewer. That should be perfect for this use case.

 

About your feedback regarding ACLs and "roles". We had a meeting on Monday and decided to implement restrictions on Exporting as one of the first ACLs which will be added. That should be good news for you as I know your organization will benefit from it Also, we have talked about different layers of user roles (types). We have agreed that this is something we will have to implement soon, but we'll need to create mechanism flexible enough to match any organization, but very easy to grasp at the same time. This will require some more thinking and design process.

 

Now, about the deadlines. We have reached the point where upcoming 1.7.2 release has a lot of improvements ready, so we want to push them to the end users as soon as possible. We are doing a code freeze this week, so I don't think I will be able to squeeze ACLs there. However this will be a first task for me to start 1.7.3 with, so you can expect it to be done in this release cycle.

 

I hope those are good news for you :-)

[AdamS]

Excellent news, thanks Lukasz

 

With regards to the printing issues they were having I couldn't replicate this on my own browser so I'm unsure if it was local printer settings or something else, but either way thought I'd pass on the request.

 

I look forward to the updates

[AdamS]

Auto start and auto share of select cases would be a great addition to Connect.

 

In the case of a power blackout or Windows brain fart or software update where the computer will need to be rebooted it would be great to have Connect automatically start with Windows and then have the ability to auto share select cases.

 

I can set the Connect.exe in the startup folder for Windows but I think it would be smoother to have a 'start with Windows' option within Connect.

 

And take this one step further would it be possible for this to happen regardless of whether a user account is currently logged in or not?

 

Currently my machine will reboot but not auto log in, Team viewer seems to be able to function in this state as I can remote in to the welcome screen and remotely log in if need be. I know I can set the computer to auto log in as well but I'm just curious to see if Connect can function regardless of the account being logged in.

[ŁukaszBachman]

Hi Adam!

 

Yeah, those are known issues with the current approach. We are thinking about starting Connect as a Windows service, which should solve most of the issues. The task is already planned on our todo-list, perhaps even for 1.7.3.

[AdamS]

Great to hear Lukasz