http://www.insidecounsel.com/Issues/2010/November-2010/Pages/Extranets-Cut-Costs-In-Law-Departments.aspx

I have not seen much movement. The biggest and most innovative product seems to be the private ramps on Legal OnRamp. In particular, Cisco is doing some interesting things to manage the needs of its own legal department. I have not seen anything interesting offered by law firms.

As for SharePoint, I got the sense that many people held back on SP2007 and were waiting for SP 2010,

I didn’t mean to be a sales person. I really thought you brought up some very interesting issues which we have grappled with in the past. We put all of our experience into building Content Circles and I thought you should try it. I’m more interested in your feedback on the product than you buying it (of course, we don’t mind if you buy it as well).

I hope you Content Circles a try. You can download and try it out for free at http://www.contentcircles.com.

Sri

You point out a few things that are a challenge to extranets. In moving beyond email, that means you also need to move past attachments. Those word documents need to be converted to wikis so everyone can edit and add to the content.

We are still in a Microsoft Office world, so SharePoint’s integration with the Office desktop applications is very enticing. It also makes it more complicated.

I am not familiar with your product and offer no endorsement. I normally delete sales pitches like this in the comments, but you started off with some interesting discussion points.

Instead, I think what you need a solution that:
1) does not require the rigorous file upload/download discipline.
2) does not require everyone to put their confidential documents outside their firewalls.
3) allows them to work on their documents on their own desktops with their own desktop applications such as Word and Excel.
4) is quick to setup, absolutely secure, and can be used on a pay-per-use basis.

This is the exact problem Content Circles solved. Content Circles is a content management software-as-a-service (SaaS) for distributed team collaboration. Unlike other players in the market who use a pure web-based approach, Content Circles uses a hybrid web/p2p approach to address this need. The hybrid web/p2p approach makes Content Circles the most cost-effective, secure, and easy-to-use solution on the market today, and guarantees that all members of a distributed team are always on the same page. It eliminates all file size, storage and bandwidth limitations common to pure web-based solutions.

Please give Content Circles a try (www.contentcircles.com) and let us know what you think.

Sri
CEO
Content Circles, Inc.