Company Profile

Dykema is a Midwest-based law firm serving clients nationally with offices in four states-California, Illinois, Michigan and Washington D.C. As one of the country's largest law firms, its diversified legal practice and international reach has made the firm the choice of both multinational fortune 100 corporations and entrepreneurial enterprises alike.

"For any company looking for enterprise RSS solutions, I would highly recommend NGES. NewsGator has been a first mover in this space in the past and by all accounts will continue to be in the future,"- Bill Gratsch, Web Technologies Manager, Dykema

Information Overload

As a large law firm with almost 800 employees in 10 offices across the United States, Dykema was faced with myriad content and information management challenges. The first challenge was improving methods for gathering and delivering web-based content. Current web technologies employ the browse and search model of finding, sharing and delivering information, which is time consuming and too often fruitless. Dykema was looking for a solution to help its employees find relevant information in a more efficient manner.

Dykema's second challenge was improving the distribution and dissemination of internal information. As with most law firms, attorneys and staff are often required to manually run reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to uncover information that is pertinent to them. The inefficiencies inherent in forcing attorneys and staff to continually seek out these reports, as compared to automatically delivering them in real-time, was a recognized target. In addition, Dykema was particularly interested in finding methods to readily access, combine and distribute data living in disparate databases and information silos, including a mechanism to notify users when a change or update had been made.

NewsGator Enterprise Server to the Rescue

Bill Gratsch, the firm's Web Technologies Manager, determined that delivering information to employees via RSS feeds would be a huge improvement over the existing browse and search information delivery methods. "It's very easy to create, search for, subscribe-to and read feeds," he noted.

Since Dykema's user base was only initially going to be interested in subscribing to and reading feeds, he searched for a product which best addressed this requirement. In the course of his evaluation, another key requirement was identified: ease of administration. Any solution had to be easy to administer across the enterprise.

Dykema chose NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) to handle its firm's RSS needs. The deployment began with the firm's IS and Marketing departments and then expanded to lawyers and support staff. The installation and implementation of NGES was straightforward and relatively easy, with core functionality working immediately and minor issues quickly resolved. According to Gratsch, "We were especially impressed with NewsGator's courteous, professional and responsive support team."

Once installed, the NGES Administrator pre-subscribed functional groups and business units to RSS feeds that were defined as pertinent to those user groupings. This feature alone started proving the idea that the "subscribe" model distributes information to employees more efficiently than simply having employees browse and search for information on their own. And, since these pre-subscribed feeds were delivered directly into Outlook, users were able to get accustomed to "feed reading" within an application they were already using everyday and with which they had a level of comfort. This latter point was critical as none of the users had ever used a stand-alone RSS aggregator. "Busy attorneys often lack time for significant training on new technology, so delivering the feeds via Outlook is a major benefit," Gratsch said.

Dykema was also able to address its goal of improving notifications to employees of important updates. For example, Marketing Department professionals were pre-subscribed to an internal feed from the firm's client proposal tracking system. This application stores relevant information about past and future client proposals and is constantly updated by attorneys and staff across the enterprise. Leveraging NGES and an RSS feed, department members automatically receive every update to the tracking system right in Outlook^® instead of having to visit the system every day to see if any updates had been made. Similar systems are being rolled out to attorneys and staff to help them stay current on clients, matters and key internal reports.

Another benefit of immediately receiving updates to these systems in Outlook^® is that users can now easily prompt other users to update the material and/or database (as simply as forwarding the update to another user). Moreover, the updates can serve as useful documentation in building and enhancing Dykema's business intelligence system. Finally, the firm has a long-term vision to move to a read/write model, wherein the user receiving a feed update could not only read the update, but write back new updates to the database via the same feed.

Since NGES has only been in place for a few months, Gratsch believes it is too early to clearly quantify its benefits. However, he expects a significant payback. "NewsGator Enterprise Server will ultimately help us improve internal and external efficiencies in the form of faster research and knowledge transfer, improved communication and collaboration and enhanced service delivery to our clients. This is a very compelling value proposition for a new technology."

Why NGES?

Dykema's initial evaluation began with off the shelf RSS aggregators, or feed readers. The most logical aggregators evaluated were the clients that reside within Microsoft Outlook^®, since the firm's employees used Outlook^® frequently and little training would be required to teach users how to read feeds. After evaluating several RSS aggregators that reside in Outlook, Gratsch realized there was a major barrier to deploying this type of solution enterprise-wide: each aggregator would have to be installed on each individual employee desktop. "We have 10 offices nationwide and almost 800 users supported by a relatively small technical staff. Products which require a manual install by an IS staffer are typically not a feasible enterprise solution due to the cost of the installation and ongoing maintenance and support," he noted. Gratsch came across only one aggregator that didn't require a client "touch," NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES).

As the evaluation continued, Gratsch uncovered other key differentiators that made him realize NGES was the best solution to meet Dykema's business challenges. First, the product had tight, native integration with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory. Next, every other news reader that Dykema evaluated was client-based and required manual installation at the desktop. That is, they would require the client to be installed on every user's computer, which, as noted above, would be unmanageable across its ten offices. Conversely, NGES, which is managed from a centralized server, allows for new users to be added in seconds via a central administrator simply checking a couple of boxes. NGES does the rest, creating a feeds folder in the user's Outlook^® folder bar. All management across the enterprise is handled from this central location.

Finally, NGES was the one product that allowed administrators to create and manage groups from a centralized location. The NGES administrator assigns users to groups and then can assign specific feeds to these groups. This results in these groups receiving "focused" views of information sourced from both internal and external systems. This functionality recognizes the reality that for many busy attorneys, time is at a premium. They simply may not have the time to browse and search for information every day, let alone seek out relevant feeds for subscriptions, especially as they first get used to a feed reader. NGES's centralized grouping and feed assignment functionality gives Dykema the ability to pre-assign relevant feeds to unique business units within the firm (e.g. Marketing Department, Real Estate practice group, etc.) with no time requirements for its attorneys and staff.

Next Steps

Dykema is currently in the process of creating internal feeds from other databases and information sources, with an eye to expanding NGES's use to all employees. Moreover, as federal and state governments and paid legal information providers begin to offer content and data via RSS feeds, Dykema plans to leverage NGES to deliver that content to its employees. These feeds will initially be pre-subscribed to relevant groupings within the firm, while still giving users the ability to add their own subscriptions as they become more comfortable with feed reading. These groupings could be legal practice areas, specific firm departments or executives and practice group leaders. In the end, via its utilization of NGES, Dykema believes it is well on its way to positioning itself for the coming growth of the "subscribe" model for information-sharing and delivery.

For more information about Dykema, visit the Dykema web site at http://www.dykema.com.

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