The International Bar Association – http://www.ibanet.org/
The International Bar Association (IBA), established in 1947, is the world’s leading organisation of international legal practitioners, bar associations and law societies. The IBA influences the development of international law reform and shapes the future of the legal profession throughout the world. It has a membership of 30,000 individual lawyers and more than 195 bar associations and law societies spanning all continents. It has considerable expertise in providing assistance to the global legal community as well as being a source of distinguished legal commentators for international news outlets.
Grouped into two divisions – the Legal Practice Division and the Public and Professional Interest Division – the IBA covers all practice areas and professional interests, providing members with access to leading experts and up-to-date information.
Through the various committees of the divisions, the IBA enables an interchange of information and views among its members as to laws, practices and professional responsibilities relating to the practice of business law around the globe.
Additionally, the IBA’s high-quality publications and world-class conferences provide unrivalled professional development and network-building opportunities for international legal practitioners and professional associates
The IBA are proud of their high level of professionalism, integrity, and forward thinking mentality and are continually looking at technology to maximise on business efficiency and improve the facilities and services it can offer to its members through the quality and accessibility of its web based content.
The Project:
Publications
The IBA looked to implementing an Enterprise Content Management solution for improving the management of the Publications Content Lifecycle. Addressing the need to provide collaborative, highly secure web based access to the many authors across the world to a central repository for the development and production of the various publications produced by the IBA. Authors / Editors would be capable of entering a ‘ powerful workflow ‘ via the web and creating their article. Upon completion this would automatically pass, within the workflow, to the editorial process for review.
Access to the content repository would be granted via stringent access control and certification functionality, controlled by the Publications team in London. The system would be required to demonstrate the following functionality :
Version Control
- Controls who can change documents.
- Quick reliable access to the latest version of a document / article.
Change History
- Audit trail for control and compliance
- Who has made changes and when
- Highlights when updates have been made
- Using Workflow to enforce change procedures
The Solution
To initially combat the problem of providing an Intranet / Extranet solution that could offer the functionality required by the IBA – Saybi proposed the ‘ openFabric ‘ product range to function in a distributed, networked business environment.
The OpenFabric solution provided The IBA with a framework that has been purpose built for creating secure, scalable, distributed data. The OpenFabric product suite consists of a number of applications including a Workflow application
openFabric is designed to enable the secure sharing and management of distributed content including but not limited to; documents, images, xml based services, multimedia and CAD drawings. It will also be possible for IBA users to create and share their own dynamic web documents using OpenFabric, when they are ready to utilise this option.
The biggest benefit of using OpenFabric is that the end user can manage it easily. Many IT departments are full of IT personnel spending hours updating content and redesigning Intranets/Extranets on behalf of other business functions. This creates an unnecessary dependency on the IT function – hence so many Intranets fail! Using OpenFabric gives the responsibility of change and updates back to the end user – so both time and resource is saved.
Tim Hughes, Director at the International Bar Association, says “OpenFabric is interesting to us because it allows the intelligent exchange of information globally and in real time, without the dependency on IT personnel. The OpenFabric product will help streamline our business processes, not only internally, but also at the customer interface.”
The Outcome of the Project
The openFabric customized framework is supplying the functionality to enable authors world wide to securely communicate original and up to date documents with the Publications Team based in London.
This will lead to efficiencies in the production of material, and, by eliminating the multiple versions which sometimes accumulate in this process, the need for less storage space and the removal of the risk of an out-of-date version being commented on by one of those involved – which is an occasional hazard of the current pre-web process.