New Features:
Added ‘OCR Wizard’ utilizing RecoStar and Tesseract OCR engines
Added ‘Create PDFs Wizard’ for creating searchable PDFs using OCR engine
Added ability to create and save projects
Added ability to auto-save projects on a time based interval
Added ability to set field data types (text, memo, date, number, etc) during import process
Added ‘Manage Fields’ wizard for modifying fields and setting export masks
Added preference to parse Summation field data types or import only as ‘Text’
Added option to specify the ‘DOCID’ field when exporting load files
Added page level information: TIFF Compression, Width (in.), Height (in.), DPI
Added wizard for ‘Import Text Files’ to associate image sets with text files
Added ability to overlay images, text, and/or natives to documents already imported
Added record number output (;Record 1) for Summation load file export
Added ‘Open Output Folder’ links to wizards generating output
Added ‘Path Editor’ for globally editing existing document paths
Added advanced numbering to import wizards with identifier preview
Added preference to disable Page Rows in grid to improve performance/memory usage
Added ‘Memo’ as field data type to improve performance/memory usage
Added ‘Output bad records’ when importing delimited text files
Added check resources option when importing delimited text files
Added ability to parse multi-page and single-page files from a Summation briefcase
Added prompt to save project file when closing application
Added ability to create and delete custom fields using ‘Modify Fields’ dialog
Added ability to set the internal ‘DOCID’ field to a custom field
Added export mask to Number, Date and Boolean fields to change output format
Added page timeout to config settings for RecoStar OCR engine
Added project name and save status to title bar
Added ‘Link In Place’ option when exporting delimited text file
Created 64-bit version – available for download by request
Wizard for ‘Import Delimited Text’ can now populate new fields (useful for importing a “tag list”)
Wizard for ‘Number Documents’ can now track counters by their unique prefix
Wizards for importing Images, Text, Native and Load Files are more streamlined

Important Changes:
Changed folder browser in Wizards to sort alphabetically
Improved warning messages generated by various wizards
Improved error handling in ‘Import Delimited Text’ wizard
Improved remembering last folder paths for folder and file chooser dialogs
Improved drag/drop functionality to remove lock in Windows Explorer
Improved support for creating output with JPEG2000 and JBIG2 options
Improved display of various document and page count numbers
Improved document and page counts in status bar for grid when document set is filtered
Improved ability to sort by field data type in grid
Improved editing fields in grid and metadata panel by data type
Improved ‘Batch Update’ dialog, can search/replace during update and propagate to family
Improved validation of documents during and post import
Improved ability to check for duplicate pages across all imported documents
Improved ability to hash image, text and native files separately
Improved license check with new folder config setting and silent fail option
Improved reading ‘@D @V’ when improperly formatted for Summation DII load files
Improved memory usage and stability throughout application
Improved numbering by prefix
Improved ability to auto-detect file encoding
Improved ability to auto-detect field data types when importing delimited text
Fixed status bar display when document count 6 digits or more
Fixed sensitivity in Find/Replace dialog
Fixed issue where grid disappears under certain circumstances
Fixed crash with toolbar when application left idle for long duration
Fixed numbering documents when value is only in prefix field
Fixed crash with ‘Trim Documents’ wizard when modifying bounds
Fixed project 0kb by saving to temp file first under certain circumstances where saving fails
Fixed rare crash caused by splash screen
Fixed display of installed licenses, added reminder expiration reminder dialog
Fixed grid filter if count is zero after deleting records
Fixed various tab orders in dialogs and wizards

Note that the above list is not a comprehensive list, but includes more of the important changes we’ve made since the last release in October.

First up, we’ve added the ability for you to specify data types for custom fields (aka metadata). An immediate benefit of this feature is how we allow you to sort and filter on columns in the grid. See illustration below – you can now filter on a date column by year, month and day.

In addition, date columns will be correctly sorted by oldest to newest or vice versa. Initially, we’re going to support the following data types: Boolean (Yes/No), Number, Decimal, Date, Time, Date/Time, Text and Memo. Other enhancements to the grid will allow you to correctly summarize number/decimal columns, see a checkbox for boolean types, and make coding changes using specialized editors in each cell.

With this change, we’ve added a new ‘Modify Fields’ dialog. Here you’ll be able to add, modify and delete fields. You can set a field to read-only mode by setting its Locked property, preventing accidental changes made to that field.

Fields will also support an export mask. This is particularly useful for Date fields. For example, if you specify an export mask on field ‘DATESENT’ and the date you imported was ‘2011-11-02’, on export you’ll be able to retrieve it as ‘11/02/2011’. You can specify export masks for Boolean, Date, Time, Date/Time, Decimal, and Number fields.

Further to supporting custom fields, we added an option to re-adjust the internal DOCID field. Using the Modify Fields dialog, you can set any field as the internal DOCID field.

In our next post, we’ll discuss how we’re adding support for saving projects.

Using ReadySuite, you can now import a Trial Director load file (OLL) and export it to any of the supported formats. As with other supported formats, verification options like checking all referenced files exist can be ran against the OLL file. Adding support for the OLL format lets us provide a neat package for preparing your images and OLE records for trial. As described in an earlier post, ReadySuite supports numbering exhibits for trial and exporting multi-page images to single page (tiff/jpeg).

We’ve made some significant enhancements to the Import Delimited Text wizard, adding the ability to automatically detect the qualifier, delimiter and file encoding. If the detection fails, you can still manually specify the correct settings or choose from a list of common combination’s. Additionally, we’ve incorporated support for reading tab-separated files (tsv) with a bit more ease.

Additional options have been added to the endorse and stamping process. Originally, users were given the option to add white space to the top and bottom of pages only. We’ve now included the ability to add more white space to the left and right side of pages. This is an important option to have as endorsements can run vertically down and up a page.

Along with more control over added white space, you can now specify if you want to maintain the original page size or allow the page size to be extended. For example, if you’re adding 0.5” to a page that is already 8.5” x 11”, you can choose to keep it at the original size or allow it to extend to 8.5” x 11.5”. Other options now allow you to adjust the margins in each of the nine quadrants, allowing endorsements to be closer or further from the edge.

Lastly, we’ve updated the export process to allow images to be endorsed on the fly. Previously, the endorse process would override an existing image set.

Head over to the download page to check out these new features and let us know what you’d like to see added or changed in a future release using the comments box below.

A lot of changes to the document grid occur after an import. Thousands of documents can be imported, new custom fields added, and metadata field values updated. We’ve added a progress indicator so you can see things are working in the background. But don’t worry: our goal is for the process to be fast and seamless. In our testing, imports over 50,000 documents with new fields only take a few seconds to populate.

Our grid has always featured a way to view the thumbnails of documents in a separate window. While most documents less than a hundred pages would show almost instantly, one area we felt improvement was needed was showing thumbnails of very large documents. You might have waited over 15 seconds to view a 700 page document. Navigating documents took longer than it should as a result. We’re happy to say this is one area we’ve greatly improved: loading a 1,700 page document now takes less than a second! Additionally, the enhancements to the thumbnail explorer now prevent the software from hanging after an import when the first document contained many pages.

We’ve also made additional improvements to editing and sorting in the document grid, aiming to make editing in the grid more excel-like. For example, if you’re editing a cell and press the down-arrow key, the cell below it will be selected and you can start editing. The same applies for moving to the left and right as well. Similar to Excel, you can now highlight a range of cells spanning multiple columns. These values can then be copy and pasted into any compatible editor. For editable fields, you can cut values from the grid or paste them into it. If you need to copy and paste the values from one column to another, go right ahead. You can even copy and paste from an excel worksheet into the grid and vice versa.

Our sorting algorithm in the document grid has also been changed for text fields to sort more intuitively. Taking a look at the below table to see how sorting has been adjusted:

Columns will now default to this new natural way of sorting. You can even sort on multiple columns using the grid; just hold the shift key and select the columns in the order you wish to sort.

We’ve made a few other minor changes here and there. For example, when new columns are added to the grid they will show automatically. Previously, columns were hidden until shown by the user. The field chooser still lets you pick which columns to show and hide. Additionally, we’ve added support for Windows 7. When a long process is running, you’ll notice the progress bar in the taskbar. As we add more features, we’ll look into adding more support for Windows 7.

This concludes our introductory series to ReadySuite. We’ll update you next week as ReadySuite progresses from Beta to Gold.

First up, we’ll highlight how we’ve improved the import of delimited text files. One of most requested changes by our users was to allow new records to be created by this process. Previously, you had to link the delimited text import with an existing record (i.e. native and/or image based document). The benefit here was we could tell you which documents were “un-linked” or not found. Now you can add the record as a new document if it can’t be linked. If you don’t need to add these as new records, the option to generate a warning is still there.

We’ve also implemented an update-mode if the record already exists. You can choose to replace an existing field value or append the new value to the existing record. For example, if you had a field named PRODRANGES with the value “ABC001-ABC002” and a delimited text file with a PRODRANGES field having the value of “DEF001-DEF002”, the append mode would combine the values to be “ABC001-ABC002 DEF001-DEF002”.

Additionally, you can now choose to repeat the value of a field during the import delimited text process. If a field is marked to have its values repeated, any empty values will be replaced with the previous non-empty value. If you’re importing a FOLDER field whose value is only entered for the first document inside that folder, but you need it repeated for each document inside that folder, then mark the field to be repeated. The folder information will be re-used for each document until a new folder is encountered.

Moving on to exporting delimited text files, we’ve added the ability to export page records. When setting up the delimited text export, you can simply check a box to export all the pages or images in a document. Page level fields, such as filename, page number, folder and color status will be available. Document level fields will simply be repeated for each page in the document.

Group fields are now available to the delimited text export in addition to the EDRM and DII exports. This feature allows you to specify two or more fields to be “merged” on export in the event that one field does not have a value. This is useful if you have three fields called Author, From, and Creator but you only need one export field called Author. Based on the order you add the fields to the new group field, the first non-empty item will be used in the export field.

For those users who want to merge two or more fields together regardless of any existing data, we’ve added that ability to the Batch Update dialog. For example, if you want to merge BEGPROD1, BEGPROD2, and BEGPROD3 into a BEGPRODS field, you would use the following syntax:

${META:BEGPROD1}; ${META: BEGPROD2}; ${META: BEGPROD3}

Don’t worry if the above is confusing: we have an easy-to-use field picker to help in the process.

The changes highlighted in this post are also being provided to our ReadyConvert users, among other bug fixes, free of charge. ReadyConvert is our free load file verification and conversion tool used by many litigation professionals.

Our next blog post will focus on overall stability improvements and important changes to the document grid.

In page-level numbering, we divide the numbering scheme into three parts: prefix, separator, and counter. Typically the prefix value is static in content; however, we allow you to use one or more custom fields when building the prefix. For example, if each document being numbered has a field called “ExhNo”, you can use the document’s exhibit number in the prefix of each document. The separator lets you specify a character to put in between the prefix and counter. If no separator is desired, leave it blank.

The counter field allows you to indicate the starting number to use and the amount of leading zeros to pad. Entering “001483” in the counter field will yield 6 digits for each document, starting at 1483 and incrementing by 1 for each page until the end. Additionally, we allow you to reset the counter back to its original starting value for each document. Utilizing this feature lets you number each page in a document separate from the previous document.

In the above illustration, you can see we’ve defined two documents each with a unique exhibit number. Using the exhibit number field in the prefix, with 0001 as our counter and allowing the counter to reset after each document, would yield the above starting and ending exhibit numbers.

Generating cross reference reports is just as easy. At the time of numbering, we let you specify or create new fields to indicate the previous starting and ending document numbers. For example, if you are re-numbering your review set to create a production set, you can save the starting and ending review numbers in fields ReviewStart and ReviewEnd respectively.

As we inch closer towards releasing ReadySuite, we’re looking for a few additional beta testers. Contact Justin Blessing if you’re interested in joining our test team.

First up is conversion among image formats. You can use ReadySuite to convert single-page images to multi-page images and multi-page images to single-page images. Images can be saved in TIFF, PDF, PDF/A or a combination of TIFF and JPEG/LZW formats. For example, you can import multi-page TIFF images with LZW compression and export to PDF with color intact. Do you have a need to save color PDF files to a combination of single-page TIFF and JPEG files? All these options are handled by the export wizard. A key feature for ReadySuite was to allow flexibility with image formats, for both imports and exports.

Once the destination image format has been decided, we provide several options for the folder and file naming structure. For example, you can adjust the primary image folder to “IMAGES”, “IMG”, or leave it blank. ReadySuite gives full control on the naming convention. Image files can then be placed under an incremental folder scheme, allowing specified number of files per directory. For example, if you’re exporting 1,000 single-page images with 250 files per folder, folders “001” thru “004” will be automatically created. This is a very basic feature – but on the advanced side, we allow you to merge several fields together to create a directory structure of your choice. If you want image files to be placed under the custodians name and then under the original file extension, so be it. We extend this functionality to file naming. File names can be the original bates number or a combination of any custom fields.

Do your delivery specifications require you to deliver multi-page images with the original Excel spreadsheets? We provide the capability to accomplish this task without manually deleting files and removing entries from load files. Our loose native export functionality allows you to specify document types to exclude or include from the export process. The same advanced folder and file naming options for exporting images can be applied to exporting loose native files.

Other export options allow you to specify the volume name, load file formats, and if the new documents should be added to the grid once complete. Next up, we’ll be discussing new features aimed at document and page level numbering.

There are two ways to batch-redact documents using ReadySuite. The first method allows you to trim an entire portion of a page. The second method allows you to redact a region on a page and fill it with a white or black background.

For an example of the first method, you can remove 0.5” inches from the bottom portion of a page while maintaining the original page size. You can perform this operation on the top, bottom, left, or right sides. The amount to trim can be adjusted, allowing you to batch-remove 0.223” inches from the bottom of a page.

The second method to batch-redact documents is to select a region on a page and designate a fill color. We make this process easy for you with our preview control. To use it, enable selection mode, draw a region on the image, and we’ll translate those bounds into coordinates. Using this method also allows you to see where the redaction will occur on each page across all documents. For the advanced user, we offer options to manually input the start and end positions of the redaction area.

All pages are not created equally, therefore, applying document- and page-level filters allows precise control over which documents will be redacted. For example, if you have a field named “Production” with values of “Y” or “N”, you can filter for all documents with a production designation (“Y”). The page-level filters allow you to redact based on even or odd page numbers, being the first page only, or portrait and landscape orientation.

In part 4 of our series, we’ll go over new functionality allowing you to export images and native files.

Have you ever endorsed a set of images only to realize after the fact your settings don’t seem quite right? You may not have added the legend stamp in the right location or the formatting isn’t what the client is expecting. Whatever the issue might be, you’ll be able to preview your settings before you start the endorsement process.

Shown above, we’ve added “DRAFT” to the center of the image in red. Using the preview window, we’re able to see how this would be applied to the image. You can preview any page or document using the provided navigation controls. Additionally, you can zoom in or out on parts of the image.

As illustrated in the preview window, endorsements can be angled. We provide options for horizontal, vertical, clockwise and counter-clockwise orientations. Each endorsements orientation is unique to its quadrant, allowing for different variations.

Other functionality included will allow you to apply endorsements to the first page of each document, or only even pages or odd pages. You’ll also be able to apply the endorsements to only portrait or landscape pages. These options are shown below.

In part 3 of our series, we’ll be discussing the batch redacting and cropping options. In addition, if you’re interested in joining our test team, contact Justin Blessing and provide a little background on your firm and your computer environment.