A new template management system that is set to revolutionise the creation and management of Word templates in law firms.

Tikit Template Management System (TMS) is a unique product set to revolutionise the creation and management of Word templates in law firms. Word templates are a significant ongoing challenge for legal IT departments. Despite their central role, templates have historically not been subject to methodical development and management. Instead, they have tended to be built and updated on an ongoing basis. Code in templates will typically have been modified by many different people over a number of years and passed through several upgrades to Word and other systems such as CRM and DMS.

This has led to increasingly bloated code within individual templates causing instability and slow running as well as prohibiting quick changes to templates such as amends to branding or names and addresses. Law firms are particularly prone to the problem of template mismanagement as the legal industry is the most demanding when it comes to document creation in Word and their associated templates. This, combined with the regular need for updates to standard document styles, means that their need for a managed template solution is greater than other industries.

The advent of Word 2007, in particular, promises to be a watershed in the development of legal Word templates. The enhanced user functionality and altered interfaces of Word 2007 mean that all template libraries are going to require complete revision. TMS is a robust flexible platform that overcomes these template issues and provides law firms with an enhanced way of creating, using and managing their templates. The system brings efficiency to template creation and maintenance whilst also significantly reducing development time and thus cost.

Tikit’s TMS is based around a core technology that creates seamless back end interfaces between Word and other core systems such as CRM, DMS and Active Directory. It then uses this functionality to create sophisticated Word templates that combine the power of Word with data and inputs from the other applications.

The resultant construction and support of templates is then managed through the easy to use TMS Administration UI.  For example, by integrating your Outlook or CRM system into Word you can automatically populate the contact details of the individual into the appropriate place on documents.
Furthermore, by integrating that information back through your document management system, you can then track documents by, for example, their addressee. To implement this integration would previously have been a project for developers with the associated time delays and costs. With TMS you can select the appropriate application from a drop-down menu and place it into the template structure.

The TMS Administration UI provides a simple way of creating, managing and updating your content across templates without the need for any knowledge of coding. The power of this becomes apparent when you think about updating templates. For example, if your firm changes its brand, in the current template world you’d need a developer to go through each and every template updating the image that it calls upon. With TMS, however, global changes can be effected with a single action, once again massively reducing the time and cost implications of template management.

Finally, TMS future-proofs your new template libraries. In the process of initially implementing TMS, Tikit will create tidy, zero-code workgroup templates from your existing library. Once these templates are in TMS and running smoothly TMS makes them essentially future-proof. Because the code is in the TMS environment when, for example, you move to Word 2007, TMS will manage the move and can even enable your templates to link into and exploit the new functionalities incorporated into Word 2007.

Watch this space to see how TMS will grow in 2008.