This is the second article in a multi-part series on why Time Matters users should move to NetDocuments for their Document and Email Management needs.
In the first part, I identified NetDocuments’ outstanding email handling capabilities as a reason to replace the Time Matters DMS with NetDocuments. In this article, I discuss using NetDocuments to mitigate the risk of failure of the Time Matters Document Management System/Email Management System (“DMS/EMS”) Office add-ons if your firm has or is going to discontinue payment of the Time Matters Annual Maintenance Plan (“AMP”).
Ensuring the Ongoing Viability of Your Time Matters Use
To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, “the reports of [Time Matters’] death are greatly exaggerated.” While many firms have moved away from Time Matters, thousands still use it. Time Matters does many things very well – workflow, matter management, task management, calendaring and docketing, etc. There isn’t a cloud-based Legal Practice Management System (LPMS) as powerful as Time Matters. The main problem for those still wanting to use Time Matters is that it has gotten very expensive. In 3-4 years, the AMP more than tripled in price. Some of the increases brought it closer to cloud-based LPMS, but at $139 or more per month per user, it is very costly for a premise-based product that doesn’t provide cloud-based cost savings.
Because of the cost increase, Time Matters firms were forced to consider cloud-based alternatives. Many moved to such systems. Others couldn’t find a cloud-based LPMS that could do what Time Matters does and chose to keep using it. One of the choices for those firms was to stop paying the AMP. This froze their Time Matters at its current version, which is where NetDocuments enters the conversation. With a perpetual license, users can keep using Time Matters indefinitely. However, the DMS/EMS features depend on proprietary MS Office add-ons that work with Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, and Outlook. If they continue to use their current version of Time Matters without updates to support Office, the time will come when those add-ons no longer work on updated Office applications. While everything else in Time Matters that doesn’t rely on the add-ons will work, the DMS/EMS add-ons will no longer work.
For this reason, a viable approach is to switch to NetDocuments for your DMS/EMS, which will continue to support the Office add-ons, and use Time Matters for everything else. We have helped dozens of other Time Matters move to NetDocuments while continuing to use Time Matters.
This strategy plays out like this:
- Get the most recent version of Time Matters and update it.
- Discontinue the AMP (please understand we aren’t necessarily recommending this, but dozens of our Time Matters clients contacted us to inform us they were making that decision).
- Once that decision is made, subscribe to NetDocuments to mitigate the main risk – incompatibility with the Time Matters DMS/EMS add-ons and Office.
- Work with us to migrate your documents to the NetDocuments cloud-based service – our decades of Time Matters work make us the best choice for this service.
- As part of your move to NetDocuments, we will connect Time Matters and NetDocuments so that Client/Matters added to Time Matters are automatically added to NetDocuments.
- For about 1/3 the cost of the Time Matters AMP, you can still use all the features of Time Matters/Billing Matters for as long as you want and have a full-featured, cloud-based DMS/EMS.
Time Matters has been a fantastic program for a long time. This plan will enable you to continue using it without the AMP, with minimal risk of stopping working as MS Office is updated.
Please contact us to discuss your use of Time Matters, and let us give you a demo of NetDocuments.
