Leading UK Law Firm DLA to Extend Its Global Intranet with Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management Solution

London - 15 November 2004 -DLA, one of the UK's largest law firms, today announced that it has selected Rhythmyx, Percussion Software's enterprise content management (ECM) solution, to enable it to enhance and localise the content of its staff intranet, iSIS, improving global communications across the firm. Rhythmyx will enable DLA to devolve content creation and publishing responsibilities to non-technical business users in the UK, Europe and Asia, who will be able to author and update content quickly and efficiently. Rhythmyx was selected in a competitive evaluation ahead of Interwoven, Fatwire and Documentum, as the best ECM to address DLA's business challenges.

DLA is the UK's seventh largest law firm and the firm employs over 3,700 people, including more than 400 partners, worldwide. The employee intranet encourages knowledge sharing amongst staff, incorporating 10,000 pages of content including practice group information, support group information and HR forms, policies and procedures.

The decision was prompted by DLA's need to provide a more powerful way of retrieving intranet based information and to organise and distribute its content more effectively, whilst providing international offices with a localised intranet site. Currently only two IT resources are updating and managing content in iSIS, and DLA wanted an ECM system that will enable them to fully transfer content ownership to approximately 100 business users worldwide, enabling the IT team to focus on other projects.

“When the re-branded iSIS is live, our content contributors will be predominantly UK based, but over time this number will be extended globally so that approximately 100 content authors from all three regions will be publishing information to iSIS,” explains Claire Moseley, IT Project Manager DLA. “Rhythmyx's Intelligent Relationship capability proactively manages all content dependencies and connections. Authors will be able to analyse the impact of content changes before they occur; prevent broken links and make global content edits which will be automatically updated, wherever the content appears on iSIS.”

“We also chose Rhythmyx because of its De-Coupled Delivery architecture. De-Coupled delivery allows us not only to use our existing IT systems, but also to optimise the content for these systems, resulting in improved performance without having to use proprietary technology” continued Moseley. “And last, but not least, we were looking to work with a company that was able to demonstrate a clear understanding of our business strategy and what we were trying to achieve with ISIS. Percussion Software's professional services team has visibly demonstrated this and continues to impress us,” Moseley concluded.

“Intranets offer an ideal platform for knowledge sharing and enable organisations to increase staff productivity, a key goal in Law firms today,” commented Joseph Wykes, managing director European operations, Percussion Software. “Selecting a robust and scaleable ECM solution such as Rhythmyx ensures DLA has the ability to support its information sharing requirements as it continues to expand and grow.”