Supporting the Ringtail load file is a bit trickier than the other formats already supported in ReadySuite, primarily because it relies on an Access database (MDB). But this won’t necessarily make things more complicated for you, as you’ll be able to import and export to this format without having Access installed.

Creating a Ringtail load file with ReadySuite is as easy as any other load file – just specify its output filename and you’re all set. Of course, if you need some more fine tined output options, we made sure to make those easily available as well.

Specifically, we added full control for setting the field values for all columns in Ringtail’s main ‘export’ table. Levels can be populated based on a file path of your choosing, or if you prefer – they can be set individually. We added full customization of the ‘parties’ table, allowing you to choose the values for Persons and/or Organisations from the available Correspondence Types.

When it comes to reading the Ringtail format, we support it all. And it’s really simple – just drag/drop the load file into ReadySuite, choose your validation options, and you’re ready to import.

We should be wrapping up our testing phase on 4.1 shortly – and then hope to get that release out to you as soon as we can. As always, if you have an idea for ReadySuite, feel free to e-mail Justin Blessing at justin@compiledservices.com.

What we’re learning is more customers want the ability to create and save a project. We’re finding more users of our product include paralegals and attorneys. Further, our litigation and practice support users want an easier way to pass along their instance and session of the application.

So, now, we’re introducing the ability to save a project in ReadySuite. It’s really quite simple. You’ll specify a filename to “Save As” and all the documents in the grid, along with batch settings, and custom fields will be saved to the project file. We get to keep the premise of our product as being simple, easy to use, with no advanced setup.

Because ReadySuite has no database backend – which would allow changes to the project to be saved instantly – we’ve added an auto-save feature. Any changes you make to the project, including field coding edits, can be automatically saved on a time based interval.

Further, projects created with ReadySuite save quickly and are highly compressed. In the image below, we made a project from a DAT file with 40,000 documents. Its original size was almost 13MB. Imported and saved as a ReadySuite project file, it’s less than 4MB.

Note that a project file won’t embed the external resources (e.g. image, text or native files) – these will remain in place. If you need to adjust the paths or reference to these files, you can use the ‘Batch Manager’ to do so.

Using ReadySuite, you can now import a Trial Director load file (OLL) and export it to any of the supported formats. As with other supported formats, verification options like checking all referenced files exist can be ran against the OLL file. Adding support for the OLL format lets us provide a neat package for preparing your images and OLE records for trial. As described in an earlier post, ReadySuite supports numbering exhibits for trial and exporting multi-page images to single page (tiff/jpeg).

We’ve made some significant enhancements to the Import Delimited Text wizard, adding the ability to automatically detect the qualifier, delimiter and file encoding. If the detection fails, you can still manually specify the correct settings or choose from a list of common combination’s. Additionally, we’ve incorporated support for reading tab-separated files (tsv) with a bit more ease.

Additional options have been added to the endorse and stamping process. Originally, users were given the option to add white space to the top and bottom of pages only. We’ve now included the ability to add more white space to the left and right side of pages. This is an important option to have as endorsements can run vertically down and up a page.

Along with more control over added white space, you can now specify if you want to maintain the original page size or allow the page size to be extended. For example, if you’re adding 0.5” to a page that is already 8.5” x 11”, you can choose to keep it at the original size or allow it to extend to 8.5” x 11.5”. Other options now allow you to adjust the margins in each of the nine quadrants, allowing endorsements to be closer or further from the edge.

Lastly, we’ve updated the export process to allow images to be endorsed on the fly. Previously, the endorse process would override an existing image set.

Head over to the download page to check out these new features and let us know what you’d like to see added or changed in a future release using the comments box below.

In page-level numbering, we divide the numbering scheme into three parts: prefix, separator, and counter. Typically the prefix value is static in content; however, we allow you to use one or more custom fields when building the prefix. For example, if each document being numbered has a field called “ExhNo”, you can use the document’s exhibit number in the prefix of each document. The separator lets you specify a character to put in between the prefix and counter. If no separator is desired, leave it blank.

The counter field allows you to indicate the starting number to use and the amount of leading zeros to pad. Entering “001483” in the counter field will yield 6 digits for each document, starting at 1483 and incrementing by 1 for each page until the end. Additionally, we allow you to reset the counter back to its original starting value for each document. Utilizing this feature lets you number each page in a document separate from the previous document.

In the above illustration, you can see we’ve defined two documents each with a unique exhibit number. Using the exhibit number field in the prefix, with 0001 as our counter and allowing the counter to reset after each document, would yield the above starting and ending exhibit numbers.

Generating cross reference reports is just as easy. At the time of numbering, we let you specify or create new fields to indicate the previous starting and ending document numbers. For example, if you are re-numbering your review set to create a production set, you can save the starting and ending review numbers in fields ReviewStart and ReviewEnd respectively.

As we inch closer towards releasing ReadySuite, we’re looking for a few additional beta testers. Contact Justin Blessing if you’re interested in joining our test team.

First up is conversion among image formats. You can use ReadySuite to convert single-page images to multi-page images and multi-page images to single-page images. Images can be saved in TIFF, PDF, PDF/A or a combination of TIFF and JPEG/LZW formats. For example, you can import multi-page TIFF images with LZW compression and export to PDF with color intact. Do you have a need to save color PDF files to a combination of single-page TIFF and JPEG files? All these options are handled by the export wizard. A key feature for ReadySuite was to allow flexibility with image formats, for both imports and exports.

Once the destination image format has been decided, we provide several options for the folder and file naming structure. For example, you can adjust the primary image folder to “IMAGES”, “IMG”, or leave it blank. ReadySuite gives full control on the naming convention. Image files can then be placed under an incremental folder scheme, allowing specified number of files per directory. For example, if you’re exporting 1,000 single-page images with 250 files per folder, folders “001” thru “004” will be automatically created. This is a very basic feature – but on the advanced side, we allow you to merge several fields together to create a directory structure of your choice. If you want image files to be placed under the custodians name and then under the original file extension, so be it. We extend this functionality to file naming. File names can be the original bates number or a combination of any custom fields.

Do your delivery specifications require you to deliver multi-page images with the original Excel spreadsheets? We provide the capability to accomplish this task without manually deleting files and removing entries from load files. Our loose native export functionality allows you to specify document types to exclude or include from the export process. The same advanced folder and file naming options for exporting images can be applied to exporting loose native files.

Other export options allow you to specify the volume name, load file formats, and if the new documents should be added to the grid once complete. Next up, we’ll be discussing new features aimed at document and page level numbering.