However, while SQL is extremely powerful and offers wonderful benefits, it also requires a large investment of capital and time to install and maintain. If you choose not to use SQL, both GroupWise and Worldox offer comparable alternatives. A document management system should provide several ways to search and retrieve documents. For example, if you are looking for a letter a colleague drafted for a particular client, but you cannot recall the date and name of the document, a QBE search will list every document created by your colleague for that client. When researching document management systems, be sure the system can search for information in a manner that is intuitive and understandable to the people who work at your firm.
Document management works only if everyone in the law firm uses the system.
Otherwise, the searches you perform will be incomplete, missing the documents created by those who do not use the system. The one way to ensure participation by all is to integrate the program seamlessly with your firm's word processor. This way, all documents will contain information that the system can database and catalog. Accordingly, make sure that the document management system you choose will work with your firm's word processing software. The three products all can support popular Windows word processors.