Concordance Native Viewer Andy Kass

Transcription

1 Concordance Tip Sheet August 2011 Concordance Native Viewer Andy Kass Remember how we ve said, here and elsewhere, that what Concordance really needed most desperately was an electronic document viewer? And, of course, the means of producing electronic documents. Well, that need has been addressed, in the form of Concordance Native Viewer 1.0. And the first thing you ll need to do to appreciate it is to forget what came before. That comment bears some explanation: Concordance Native Viewer is a fundamentally different animal from Concordance Image / Opticon. It links images and an assortment of common native file formats to Concordance in near-native view. It supports redaction (translucent overlay display to facilitate review), stamping, batch printing and production across original formats (albeit only into TIFF or PDF output). So props are due for what it does; but you should also be aware of what it does not do that we have taken for granted in the old image viewer. Here s the Setup Concordance Native Viewer v1.0 (internal release number , if you attend to such things) may be installed parallel to Concordance Image, following LexisNexis s practice of not forcing users to blow away legacy systems immediately upon install of an upgrade. In fact, Concordance Native Viewer (henceforth CNV ) is not an upgrade to Concordance Image; it is a separately licensed product. You could, in theory, license both CNV and Image along with Concordance, and make your LexisNexis rep very happy indeed; there are, as you will see below, plausible if persnickety reasons to do so. CNV requires Concordance v10.10 in order to run. It will not, in fact, run without Concordance 10.10: it cannot be opened independently, and most of its administrative, production and batch printing controls are embedded into Concordance.

2 Concordance Tip Sheet August Image Base Management, for example, is found under Concordance s FILE / Administration menu; batch printing and production are under TOOLS; and the utility to export the links in an Edocument or and Attachments database for the new single SQLite Concordance Image Base (CIB) is located under DOCUMENTS / Export. Concordance Image 5.3 is also cited as the minimum compatible version. This may relate to old imagebase (DIR) conversion, but more likely to the fact that this is the version compatible with the latest release of Concordance Classic. One item that brought me up a bit short was this note in the Installation Guide: Installation of Concordance Native Viewer requires that the application be installed on individual workstations. This is apparently owing to the use of Brava! Desktop 7.0 as the viewing engine. This may not be much of a problem with a pilot CNV installation, but I for one hope that there is a network-based distribution package by the time serious roll-outs commence. Here s the Scoop You may relate CNV to a single (current) database, all databases, a single (current) user, or all users in Viewer Preferences under TOOLS. If you are choosing to test a single database, change Viewer from <Use Global Settings> to Concordance Native Viewer, and point to the executable ConcordanceNativeViewer.exe in Application path. This allows the View Image button to open CNV rather than Concordance Image or IproView. Next time you open your database, you ll see more than just the usual image, paging, zooming and redline tools. You ll see a conversion screen (to be covered in our next episode) prompting for conversion of an existing DIR if one exists for the current database, or for an OPT file to load. Once you respond and the process loads, you will wind up with something that looks like this:

3 Concordance Tip Sheet August NOTE the tab at the top of the image pane; CNV, unlike Concordance Image, will open a separate tab for each Concordance database tab having a live image/native link. Note, too, that you can see coding or metadata in the Information Pane when Document Information is selected; the [View] button allows you to select the fields that you wish to display here, [Save] saves the updated view, and [Print] sends currently listed coding or metadata to the printer. Image Information shows image file location, image type, width, height, and XY Resolution. Markup History displays the redline history of the document (there are still some issues displaying Markup History of added Concatenated databases). The remaining controls are pretty lean: Document navigation (First, Previous, Next, Last) takes the place of image navigation in the lower-left corner. Go to

4 Concordance Tip Sheet August Document / Go to Image Page (within a document) is next; there is no longer any way to go to a certain Image Key. This is followed by Previous / Next page, and the various magnification, auto-sizing and zoom controls. Redlines remain to the left, but updated: In addition to Notes, Text Boxes, Redactions, Lines (with a menu of line choices) and Shapes (ditto), there are new categories of Images and Stamps; Highlights is now a part of a menu including strikeouts and underlines. Unlike Concordance Image or Opticon, none are searchable in CNV, object or text. On the other hand, redactions are translucent until printed or produced, in order to facilitate review. Stamps or Images, once selected, offer choices of prepared items in the title bar of the image window: Images (above stamps) are in.png format; the everpopular CONFIDENTIAL and FOR PUBLIC RELEASE are included in the package. NOTE that existing Redlines are not convertible into CNV redlines or annotations. Remember, those marks were not part of the imagebase, they were in a linked Concordance Redlines database. These are the only controls located within CNV itself (other than image rotation under the VIEW menu). Everything else has been placed within Concordance itself. Here s How It Starts There are two ways to load CNV:

5 Concordance Tip Sheet August (a) Change an existing Concordance database from Image to CNV, then open the View Image link to be prompted to convert the imagebase to a CIB. The existing imagebase DIR and VOL files will be renamed for safekeeping. Or, (b) Create an Opticon load file and open the View Image link for the conversion or load prompt. NOTE that, once you create the CIB, you cannot add to or subtract from it. That strikes me as an issue that will need to be addressed soon. Image Base Management, found under Concordance s FILE / Administration menu, offers only the ability to Rename Media Paths and Folders, Rename or Delete Media Keys, or Bulk Export CIB to OPT Format (which needs work). OPT file loading is faster, a best practice for larger databases. It can be: (a) A load file from a production set; (b) Exported from an existing Imagebase (Concordance Image TOOLS / Export imagebase to LOG file); or (c) Intriguingly, exported from an existing Concordance Edocument or and Attachments database using the new tool integrated into DOCUMENTS / Export / Concordance Native Viewer, where you specify the field containing the native file path and the name and location of the OPT file to be written:

6 Concordance Tip Sheet August We ll take a closer look at the batch print and production utilities next time. In the meantime, the key question is, should you jump on CNV? Well, that depends: If you have a large, stable collection of native discovery and wish to save the time and cost of TIFFing for production of redacted material, don t wait this is the tool that completes Concordance for high-value review. If you have a rolling discovery where the database and imagebase are being augmented regularly, CNV is a bit awkward. If you have come to depend upon the ability to select a bates# in OCR and use View image to go right to the corresponding image, or search markups in the image viewer, you will have to bear up without these features here. Take a look, and set up a pilot evaluation you might find that Concordance Native Viewer is ready for what you need to do now. The views expressed in this Concordance Tip Sheet are solely the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of U.S. Legal Support, Inc. NEWS YOU CAN USE Some other items on the CNV 1.0 punchlist: (a) CNV forgets frame settings for sizing the different parts of the screen when you close and re-open it; (b) it forgets zoom settings going from page to page; (c) links cannot be fixed beyond broad path re-pointing and item renaming; (d) the FIRST/PREV/NEXT/LAST navigation arrows in Browse View are greyed out sometimes after imagebase conversion until Table View is opened or the entire database is closed and reopened; (e) the pound or Hash character (#) is now illegal in the name of a document to be imported to CNV. For more info on Concordance Native Viweer or to sign up for a demo webinar, go to The Concordance Tip Archives (all the way back to October 2005!) has a new home on a new FTP server. You can (or will shortly be able to) go to ftp:// / (User USLClientReference, Pass MF121pCP [case-sensitive]). In the meantime, if you need an old archive, just call or write to ask! -- Andy Kass akass@uslegalsupport.com

7 Concordance Tip Sheet August U.S. LEGAL SUPPORT, INC. Array Technology Group ESI & Litigation Services PROVIDING EXPERT SOLUTIONS FROM DISCOVERY TO VERDICT e-discovery Document Collection & Review Litigation Management Litigation Software Training Meet & Confer Advice Court Reporting Services Record Retrieval At Trial Electronic Evidence Presentation Trial Consulting Demonstrative Graphics Courtroom & War Room Equipment Worldox Document Management Deposition & Case Management Services Document Review & Contract Staffing Copyright 2011 U.S. Legal Support, Inc., 425 Park Avenue, New York NY (800) All rights reserved. To update your address or unsubscribe from these mailings, please reply to this with CANCEL in the subject line.