Up until now, people accessing our website could only read about Relativity, and while overviews have been an educational tool that we are proud of, we felt like something was missing. You see, communication scholars, such as myself, believe that words shape our ideas, but that images also aid in solidifying them. Therefore, we have incorporated two new visual instruments to supplement the experience of learning about Relativity.

Under the “Relativity” section of the website, awaits a six minute video (entitled Video Overview) that highlights key pieces of functionality, and also a click-by-click tour (entitled Relativity Tour) that allows for a more in-depth study of each section of the Relativity system. We hope that these distinct tutorials will help our potential customers to understand our product in a more well-rounded way. In the near future, we will also be uploading tutorials geared for our already valued client base, which will allow for 24/7 access. We hope that you like these additions as much as we do, and we look forward to finding new ways to inform you about Relativity!

We have wrapped up version 3.40 and while I write, we are deploying to our customers.  Although, the time cycle on this release was relatively small, the functionality we introduced is significant.  Some of the more notable enhancements are:
 
Foreign Language Capabilities
We have come to understand how critical foreign language capabilities in a modern, global, litigation situation have become, therefore, we have made UNICODE data fully supported in Relativity.  You can import and export UNICODE documents and meta-data, TIFF, and run cross-language searches against the full-text and fielded data. 

Scalable Enterprise  Architecture
Every component of the system can now be distributed to many machines.  We can now deploy Relativity on a redundant web farm; running databases deployed on multiple servers, and then have a processing grid of servers for running productions.  Our clients consider our system business critical and now we give them the tools to deploy in a highly redundant and scalable infrastructure.
 
Enhanced Searching
With ranked searches, proximity support, and smarter operators, we continue to integrate features to aid in culling document collections.
 
We now have the capability to join multiple search providers into Relativity.  Of course we deliver Relativity with a robust and scalable search engine, but we also give you alternatives so you can choose what’s best for your review.  It's also a great mechanism to build creative search providers.  We’ve developed an experimental search provider that uses a pattern matching algorithm to run linguistic searches against the existing keyword index.

I'm excited to see how our clients and partners roll with this.  Often when I talk about Relativity it's more than just a application, it's a platform.
 
Enhanced Speed
We always find ways to make things better and faster.  And of course, this release is no different.  We’ve improved doc to doc speed and including families or duplicates into queries is lightning fast on multimillion record datasets.

More of the Little Things
We continuously incorporate little nuggets of functionality that make Relativity more intuitive and useful.  My favorite in this release is something we call the Active Record.  Relativity will now follow a user in and out of the document list and document review screen, and always keeps the record you last looked at, or selected, in the list view.  Searching, sorting, and filtering will also page to the Active Record so the users never loses context to where they were at.
 
While these are several major accomplishments, this is just a handful of what we've done.  Existing users can learn about others by into our Support page and clicking Release Notes.
 
We at kCura hope you enjoy the release and wish you a Happy Holiday!

I am logging in to make a post today, the day after Thanksgiving, to talk briefly about the peripatetic month that Andrew and I have had. In the last 3 weeks, we spent a total of 12 days on the road talking to people about Relativity in Washington, D.C., New York, and London. In that time we had roughly 30 face-to-face meetings. We have clients ranging from Southern California to London, and all parts in-between, thus we conduct a lot of meetings over the phone and over the web. During the month of November it has been refreshing and productive to get out of the office and meet with some of you in person.

I would like to thank all of the folks that took the time to meet with Andrew and me. Your time is appreciated, and your comments and feedback are invaluable tools that enable us to continue to develop Relativity and work toward our ultimate goal of providing the best litigation support platform in the industry. Some of you not only met with us, but helped us along the way by setting up meetings and making new introductions, as well as giving us conference rooms to run demos, catch up on e-mails, make phone calls, or just have a cup of coffee and log some of our notes from the day’s meetings.

Our travels will continue throughout the month and end of the year. We have an aggressive schedule which includes initial meetings, in-person training sessions, and software pilot programs.

Thanks again to everyone we saw over the last couple of weeks.

Nick’s On the Road Top 10 (in no particular order)

1. The lobby of the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C.
2. Timothy Taylor Landlord on cask - London
3. Discussing the Barbican – London
4. The 300+ Starbucks in Manhattan
5. Miss Milford Plaza – New York
6. Always being offered tea, coffee, and sweets at every meeting and lobby reception in London
7. Number 365 from the Malmasion wine list - London
8. Being offered free tickets to Rock ‘N’ Roll – New York
9. The Real Greek – London
10. No matter where we were, or where we were going, every time we asked for directions in central London, we were told our destination was a 10-minute walk

After reading James Fairbarns’s article in the August/October 2007 edition of Litigation Support TODAY, where he discusses pairing beer styles with phases of the litigation pipeline, I decided to continue the discussion of craft beer in kCura’s corporate blog. At kCura we like to say our strength is our ability to build great software. I like to think we also know something about building (or perhaps more appropriately, brewing) good beer. As kCura’s resident homebrewer, I am lucky that the making of a good beer is far less complex than developing great software. In both pursuits, however, the end product demonstrates strength through simplicity. The goal, of course, is a positive end user experience. Okay, so in that respect, perhaps the homebrewer has an advantage over the software developer.

This holiday season will bring the release of Relativity 3.4, which includes enhanced searching capabilities and foreign language indexing; amongst other notable improvements. In addition to version 3.4 of Relativity, kCura will also be releasing version 1.0 of kBrew: Holiday Ale 2007. kBrew 1.0 is an English brown ale brewed with gingerbread spices. Fall has always been my favorite season in the Midwest for reasons ranging from idyllic weather to football to stuffing and gravy. For the homebrewer and beer advocate Fall presents the most rewarding time of the year for robust and flavorful seasonal ales. A good seasonal should make use of quality ingredients and traditions that define and pair well with the season. Our spiced brown ale will attempt to do just that with a caramel and malty profile leading with a bouquet of gingerbread. It will pair well with a gingerbread dessert, any beef dish, game, a hearty stew, or just plain by itself.

This past Saturday was dedicated to the brewing of kBrew version 1.0. We are targeting an early December release. A special mention to Randy Mosher who’s book Radical Brewing gave the idea for a gingerbread beer.

Keep an eye out for Relativity 3.4, as well as kBrew 1.0 (…and NO, kCura does not sell beer. I brew it for enjoyment only!)

For Geeks Only

Beer Style: Spiced Brown Ale

Grain Bill: 4lb UK Pale; 1lb 80L Crystal; 1lb Victory; 1lb Vienna; 1/2lb 30L UK Crystal; Gingerbread Spices

Hops: Fuggles

OG: 1.040

Yeast: British Ale

kBrew - Collaborative Drinking

I joined the kCura team in July of this year to help guide and solidify the growing training needs of the company.  With a Six Sigma and higher education background, I hope to streamline how educational materials are prepared, presented, and evaluated.   Since July, we have refurbished kCura’s entire educational library to enhance each user’s experience with our system. 

Relativity is dynamic because we develop, test, and implement new functionality on a continuous basis.  Each new function brings new customer training needs, and we strive for both a broad conceptual understanding, and a customized approach.  If a user requests topic clarification, we will churn out reference guides or cheat sheets addressing their specific concerns.  If further aid is needed, we’ll schedule a personalized training session.  We do this because while sometimes a classroom approach with a large participant pool is suitable, certain occasions call for one-on-one training.  We openly welcome these instances to help our clients feel more comfortable with our product. 

In the end, we want to ensure that everyone has an exceptional experience working with us.  While working in conjunction with the support team, we in the training department hope to holistically educate you on kCura and Relativity.