More than a decade ago - in the early 1990s - products and companies that provided legal document management systems (DMS) at the state-of-the-art level were plentiful.  Their number has shrunk considerably over the past 15 years, but WORLDOX is still a force - thanks to its architecture, philosophy and business model.

Designed to Fit the DMS Purpose
WORLDOX is a real or physical folder-based system, as it has been since pre-Windows days.  Its profile database is distributed throughout this folder structure.  In WORLDOX, the record locator (path) is the same as the physical location.

SQL databases are powerful tools that can maintain relational data, such as that used in accounting systems, and therefore deliver a great deal of information.

However, in order to ensure reliability, transactions must be tracked, roll-back points provided in the event of problems and, in mission-critical systems, backup servers and mirrored data stores in place to ensure availability and reliability.

Many SQL-based systems provide a folder-like view of the file locations, but is only a virtual view, not a true reflection of the physical location of where the documents are stored.  While appropriate in a financial system which needs to track monies and balance multiple ledgers etc., this is not really applicable to a DMS system which does not need the complex relational management facilities provided by SQL.  But WORLDOX, designed to fit the purpose of DMS, uses the native structure of the Windows operating system in concert with its profiling and searching features.  A virtual work-around is unnecessary.

Philosophy
One reason WORLDOX continues to thrive in the legal market is because of its philosophy to build on success, to improve on it.  Over the years, WORLDOX development has persevered by adopting and extending what the dominant (Microsoft) vendor has chosen, the Windows Explorer paradigm.  WORLDOX's stability, upgradeability, familiar Explorer metaphor, lowest total-cost and minimal support requirements are legendary and compelling.

Business Model
In the marketplace, WORLDOX has proved to be a low-cost, easy-to-install and effective legal DMS - one that can scale from firms as small as a single practitioner to those as large as hundreds of attorneys, a thousand-plus users and multiple locations coast-to-coast.

While other DMS companies' customers tend to be larger than WORLDOX, with more software seats per firm, this will change over time, as the WORLDOX customer base increases, and as larger firms discover the benefits of World Software's architecture, philosophy and business model.

The Future of WORLDOX
No one can predict with absolute certainty whether the DMS market will change as much over the next 5 to 10 years as it has over the past 15.  But this much appears certain:  WORLDOX is committed in its technology architecture and business commitment to the category of legal DMS.

About our author . . .

Thomas W. Burke is the President/CEO and a founder of World Software the makers of WORLDOX, the multi-award winning Legal Document Management System.  He was previously the President of World Leasing Corporation, leasing computers to Fortune 100 companies. Tom can be reached at tom@worldox.com.