Litigation support professionals use ReadyConvert to convert load files to and from standard industry formats, including EDRM XML. The software supports load file formats such as Opticon, Summation, Trial Director, IPRO, EDRM, Ringtail, and Delimited Text. The product also allows users to:

• Extract metadata from load files
• Verify load file integrity, ensuring referenced files exist
• Generate load files from single or multipage image folders
• View images, text, thumbnails and metadata side-by-side
• Generate cross reference reports with custom fields
• Filter load files using custom search criteria
• Batch update or find/replace on metadata fields

The ReadyConvert software that will be available for free downloads on Friday, April 27, contains all the functionality of the paid version. The free version will include a six-month license.  ReadyConvert usually sells for $279.95.The free download can be obtained only this Friday at: http://compiledservices.com/click.php?r=5.

ReadyConvert is one module in the complete ReadySuite software. ReadySuite is a bundled suite of specialized litigation software for handling various document related tasks. The software includes modules for reviewing, validating, merging, and manipulating load files, converting among multiple image formats such as TIFF and PDF, applying or removing endorsements from image sets, generating searchable text and PDF files using OCR, and batch printing image sets to high capacity printers.

First up, we added a toolbar, status bar and refined the context menu to the image viewer. We found it important to keep relevant functions with the image viewer (as opposed to the main ribbon) – since it’s not uncommon to undock the viewer from the main interface. You’ll be able to hide both the toolbar and status bar to increase screen real estate, if needed. The toolbar will include save, print, zoom, and edit functionality. The status bar will indicate the document’s page number and identifier (customizable) along with the current editing mode.

You can now save the current page or document to a new image file (and change its format) from the toolbar. This is great when dealing with single-page images and you need to quickly save a few documents to PDF format, for example. Along with this option, you can print the current page or document as well – without having to go thru the ‘Batch Printing’ wizard. Again, this is perfect for when you just need to quickly print a couple of documents.

Zooming in and out of a document’s image has also been streamlined. You can use your mouse-wheel, keyboard shortcuts, the right-click context menu, or buttons in either the toolbar and status bar to zoom in and out of a document. We’ve also made more prominent the ‘Best Fit’, ‘Fit to Width’, ‘Fit to Height’ and ‘Full Size’ buttons for automatically handling an image’s zoom. Finally, we now remember your preferred zoom method when you close and re-open ReadySuite.

When it comes to editing images, we’ve added several abilities – including image cleanup, rotation, and redaction options. For cleaning up document images, you’ll be able to deskew, despeckle, remove hole-punches, and remove black borders. Rotating an image to the left -90 degrees or to the right 90 degrees is now possible. For redacting documents, you’re able to setup a default redaction profile when adding redactions to images. Each redaction added can still have its own unique settings. We’ve added options to add text to redactions (or no text), adjust the font (style, size, color), and change the background color. Once you’re satisfied with the redactions on an image, you can then “burn-in” the changes to make the redaction permanent.

To speed up editing images, change the image viewer’s edit-mode. You can set the viewer to read-only, prompt to save changes, or auto-save changes. If you set the viewer to auto-save, when you navigate away from a page, those changes will be applied to the underlying file automatically.

Since our image viewer supports displaying most common image formats (BMP, GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, and TIF) – we also support editing these formats directly. Basically, it doesn’t matter if your document contains single-page images or multi-page images, or if it’s in PDF or TIF format, you’ll still be able to save changes to the original format/file.

We’re excited about sharing other new features and changes in the next version of ReadySuite, so check back here often to follow our progress.

Originally designed as a way for litigation support professionals to convert, validate and handle the nuances of load files, ReadySuite is now being used by attorneys, paralegals and support staff to double and triple check their productions before they go out the door. When opposing counsel sends a production, it’s first passed thru ReadySuite to make sure everything is inline. Service providers are running their deliverables thru ReadySuite at both the processing and production stages of the EDRM model. It’s a great way to quickly validate workflow processes in an industry lacking in true convergence.

ReadySuite makes quality control convenient. We don’t tell our users the application is easy to use, they tell us. No setup, no servers, and no databases make integrating ReadySuite into your workflow fast and seamless.

But we want to make things even easier. Which is why we’re looking at integrating with some of the popular review databases out there. When our users check their production deliverables, they match it against coding including responsiveness, confidentiality, redactions and issues/tags. We want them to be able to import this data directly from the database – without generating an external report. Leveraging ReadySuite as the driver creating a document production? That’s on the table as well.

We’re also looking for feedback – how do you want us to further integrate ReadySuite along the EDRM model? What are the most important review and processing platforms out there? Let us know in the comments or e-mail me directly at justin@compiledservices.com.

ReadySuite is a bundled suite of specialized litigation software for handling various document related tasks. The software includes modules for reviewing, validating, merging, and manipulating load files, converting among multiple image formats such as TIFF and PDF, applying or removing endorsements from image sets, generating searchable text and PDF files using OCR, and batch printing image sets to high capacity printers.

ReadySuite now can easily support millions of records with improved import times and reduced memory consumption. As an example, a recent Concordance import containing 400,000 records took over four minutes to import using the previous version of ReadySuite. Using ReadySuite, the same import took just over one minute, with a 55 percent reduction in memory usage.

By supporting the Ringtail format, ReadySuite now gives users the ability to perform all document-related tasks on data stemming from Ringtail files. Although Ringtail relies on an Access database, by using the new version of ReadySuite, users will not be required to have Access installed on their systems. ReadySuite also supports load files from Concordance, Summation, Trial Director, IPRO and those complying with EDRM XML standards.

The new print and blowback features of ReadySuite include saving and loading print profiles, printing color pages to a separate printer, and trimming and adding bates numbers to pages on-the-fly. ReadySuite is the only tool that lets users print directly from load files and image folders without a complicated setup process.

“ReadySuite has been carefully developed to improve the litigation support process,” said Justin Blessing, lead software engineer at Compiled Services. “These improvements will help litigation support professionals and e-discovery vendors become more efficient and provide better quality output for their important projects.”

A one-year subscription of ReadySuite can be purchased for $1,179.95 here. A free 14-day trial of ReadySuite can be downloaded here.

New Features:
Significantly improved application performance and memory usage
Added Ringtail import and export support
Added option to specify encoding when importing certain load files
Added custom columns and column chooser to family grid panel
Added ‘Network Floating’ license option
Added ‘Skip All’ and ‘Repeat All’ to the Delimited Text Import Wizard
Added column ‘ID’ to grid to identify document import order
Added new columns to the grid, including ‘FILESIZE’, ‘NUMATTACH’
Added context menu for columns: Batch Update, Filter Field, Tally Field, Hide Field, Hide All Fields, Field Chooser
Added several help-icon context tooltip items in various Wizards
Added option to force grid refresh
Added fixed rows option to keep specific rows at the top of the grid
Added fixed filter row option to grid for handling filtering columns
Added option to export ‘TEXT CONTENTS’ into DAT file with specified newline character
Added ‘Tally Fields’ dialog for tallying the values in custom fields
Added option to batch update on special field types, including Date fields
Added error/warning output to ‘Batch Update’ dialog when necessary
Added ‘Control List’ export option in ‘Export Documents’ wizard
Added ability to import delimited text files with duplicate field names
Added option to trim and clean-up image files in ‘Export Documents’ wizard
Added print option to skip printing cover sheet when folder sheet is printed
Added new right-click cell options in grid: Filter by Selection, Filter Excluding Selection, Remove Last Filter
Added right-click menu for grid cell icon of file types to open directory
Added options to standardize images, including width/height, with centering and scaling
Added print delay for separator sheets in Print wizard
Added ability to detect and print color pages to separate printer
Added detailed print log output of all print items and printer settings
Added profiles for saving/loading printing settings
Added option to limit the maximum number of pages printed
Added option to reduce color/grayscale images to black & white before printing
Added ‘Print Controls’ area for testing, starting/pausing, and restarting the print process
Added new ‘Color Replacement Sheet’ when printing color pages to separate printer
Added ability to trim and endorse documents on-the-fly while printing
Added several new user preferences to the ‘Preferences’ dialog
Added ability to turn off auto-field detection when importing
Added option to stamp images to document pages along with text for endorsements

Important Changes:
Improved application responsiveness when handling long tasks
Improved family grid panel display with separator between parent/children
Improved EDRM check against schema with progress and verbose errors
Improved error messages for OCR when resources are invalid and/or 64-bit process
Improved application keyboard shortcuts
Improved tooltip pop-up time delays
Improved ‘Batch Update’ to refresh grid immediately after each update
Improved ‘Event Log’ to allow copying of data to Excel
Improved error handling when importing IPRO LFP load files
Improved ‘Delimited Text’ preview UI responsiveness
Improved ‘Check Ranges’ dialog actions
Improved preview portion of load file export when handling large exports
Improved error handling when configuration file is corrupt
Improved installation process and viewing of previous license files
Improved separator sheet designers in the ‘Print Documents’ wizard
Fixed issue where certain Summation token values did not reset when token was missing
Fixed custom filename output naming for OCR wizards
Fixed issue when linking to existing documents would duplicate Page reference
Fixed notification of more than one ‘DocLink’ fields when field is set to ‘Skip’
Fixed crash in find/replace dialog
Fixed issue with ChildDocID when exporting EDRM XML
Fixed order of columns in CSV output when exporting Document/Page reports
Fixed duplicative data appearing in ‘Source’ column on grid
Fixed issue where batch update would apply an insert instead of an append
Fixed issue where grid checkbox cell would jump cells with arrow keys
Fixed drag/drop handling to prevent action when a process is running
Fixed issue with dashes in field names during import process
Fixed handling of RSP file associations for project files

Here is a quick breakdown of the new features/options we’ve added:

• Detect and print color pages to separate printer (with optional slip sheet),
• Added print log output for detailed log of print items, including diagnostic data,
• Save and load print profiles for all print option settings,
• Set the maximum number of pages printed per document,
• Add a print delay (time in seconds) between separator pages,
• Option to reduce color and grayscale documents to black and white,
• Print documents to file,
• Add bates numbers and endorsements to images before printing,
• Clean-up images with trim options and deskew, despeckle, border removal and hole punch removal options,
• Re-designed separator sheet setup for cover, folder, and color-replacement sheets,
• Option to skip printing a cover sheet when a folder sheet was printed,
• Added ‘Color Replacement Sheet’ output when printing color pages to a separate printer,
• Added ‘Print Controls’ for handling testing print output, start/pause and restart of the print process.

With the new ‘Print Color Pages to Separate Printer’ option we’ve added, you’ll be able to automatically detect if a page is color, and if so, route it to your color printer. On your primary printer (that is, your black & white set), you’ll have the option to print a slip sheet with the original image or with details about the color image (such as bates number/page identifier). This then allows you to print that slip sheet on a different tray, for example – red paper, which can then easily be replaced with the output from your color printer.

In the above test, we imported a Concordance delimited DAT file containing over 20 fields with various data types. The import consisted of just a little over 400,000 records at 145 MB. Running the import in the older version (ReadySuite v4.0) – took approximately 4 minutes and 15 seconds to complete. With the improvements we made in ReadySuite v4.1, the same import took just 1 minute and 14 seconds. Overall, that’s a 350% boost in performance and a 55% reduction in memory usage.

As a result, ReadySuite and ReadyConvert can now handle much larger imports, from bigger load files to bigger metadata and delimited text files. During our testing, we were able to successfully import just a little over 1.3 million records running the x86 version of ReadySuite v4.1. While running the application in 64-bit mode, we’re able to scale even more – and being able to address much more memory space – we can handle well over 5 million records.

With more data being imported into ReadySuite, certain areas of the application would hang or give little progress on actions going on behind the scenes. We’ve addressed this by 1) speeding up actions that took a long time to complete and 2) added progress dialogs to give you an indication that a task is still running. For example, the ‘Check Range’ process on the grid might have taken several minutes to complete in the older version with a lot of data imported. Now, that process takes just a few seconds to complete.

We hope you’ll like these improvements as much as we do. Our goal is to release ReadySuite v4.1 this week, so we’ll be highlighting some of the major improvements here as the week goes on.

Additionally, each column has a more advanced ‘Custom Filter’ dialog which allows filter criteria such as less than, greater than, regular expressions and more. Given this, we wanted to make it even easier to filter on a particular column (and any value) by just right-clicking a cell.

In the above screenshot, you’ll see the new grid context-menu. Clicking ‘Filter by Selection’, you can add a filter to the column for that cell’s value. ‘Filter Excluding Selection’ will filter out that cell’s value from the column. ‘Remove Last Filter’ acts as an undo – so you can quickly get rid of the last applied filter. And then you can remove all the filters from the grid with ‘Remove All Filters’.

This feature (along with many others) will be a part of ReadySuite v4.1 – which will be available in February.

Using this feature, you can summarize all the values in a particular field – and the result will be a tally of each unique value. The results can then be saved to a CSV file or alternatively, just copy the values from the table and paste them into a spreadsheet.

Opening the ‘Document Tally’ dialog is as easy as right-clicking on a column’s header, which will present you with the below context menu.

You can also get to this dialog from the main menu. We hope you’ll find this useful – and if you have any feedback or feature suggestions, feel free to contact us.