RelativityOne’s Mayapple release arrives in a couple of weeks, and to say we are excited about it would be an understatement.
The release marks a significant milestone in a journey that has been underway for quite some time. We began the work in earnest at Relativity Fest 2019, when around 30 customers and solution providers from our Australian community sat down with Relativity CEO Mike Gamson and several members of the executive team to provide feedback about what they needed out of Relativity.
The feedback was instructive, direct, and actionable. As a result, we committed to move forward with big investments in support of the Australian market in 2020. With the Mayapple release, we are delivering to you the promises made at Fest 2019—and we are jazzed to continue building that momentum.
Earlier this year, we hosted our first Spotlight: Australia event to connect with the local community and illuminate the important role they play in our business and product strategy. There, we shared how our investment in the region has been anchored around three main principles:
- Building our local team to provide more support and empower our Australian users to be successful. For example, we’ve opened an office in Melbourne and committed to hiring additional staff—including a managing director for APAC, Georgia Foster (who you heard from at Relativity Fest last month).
- Introducing more flexible pricing options for RelativityOne, removing barriers to taking advantage of the platform. In 2020, new pay-as-you-go and flex commit commercial models make it easier to get value out of RelativityOne immediately, with zero up-front commitment.
- Delivering a solution that makes meeting processing and production requirements in Australia simpler, so local teams have a truly end-to-end e-discovery platform in RelativityOne. To get this right, we introduced a preview program enabling some Australian customers to provide real-time feedback on our development efforts, giving us time to iterate on the functionality before release.
The Strength of the Australian Community
It’s been a lot of effort, but we’ve welcomed it. Our Australian community is strong, made up of nearly 400 passionate e-discovery professionals. Some of these folks have helped move the needle on what’s possible in Relativity, and demand for better tools to support their work is only growing.
To say that that 2020 has been a challenging year would be an immense understatement. The year started off as any other, but quickly evolved into a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime crisis. When we held our first Spotlight: Australia event in March, COVID-19 had just been declared a global pandemic, altering the way we live and work for the foreseeable future. Despite these obstacles, the Australian e-discovery community has continued to thrive.
The Relativity community in Australia has showed more engagement than ever over the past year, including:
- A 93 percent increase in attendance at user groups
- A 17 percent increase in Relativity Community members since the last Spotlight event
- Nearly 40 percent growth in overall certifications (for context, that’s twice the global average)
- 3 Australia-based Relativity Innovation Award winners (up from 2 in 2019 and 1 in 2018)
Looking to the future, we are all anxiously awaiting a safe opportunity to work physically together again. In the meantime, remote work, social distancing, and stylish mask wearing are our reality. But while this pandemic plays out, we will continue to look for ways to stay engaged with these innovators—even from afar.
Mayapple & Beyond
“After receiving feedback at Fest 2019, we mapped out all of the components of the software that needed to be built and planned out and set delivery dates. Then, we got to work,” said Rene Laurens, Relativity senior product manager, during the Spotlight: Australia session at Relativity Fest 2020.
Now, one year later, we’re excited to announce that all these gaps will be filled with the Mayapple release, which will become available for RelativityOne users in Australia on November 7. Here’s what to expect:
- Level Numbering – Eliminate the Need for Multiple Processing Platforms
A new number type, called level numbering, lets you publish documents with a control number that follows the Party Code, Box, and Document (PPP.BBB.FFF.NNNN) format at the document level. You can also define how many digits to use on each level to ensure your numbering remains consistent. - PDF Rendering and Viewer – No More Importing/Exporting
We’ve revamped PDF capabilities so that you can render natives to PDF and store them along with valuable document metadata within RelativityOne to meet the needs of the Australia document management protocols. Along with that, we’ve added a new viewer to display your rendered PDFs. This eliminates a time-consuming import/export workflow to generate PDFs outside RelativityOne. - PDF Redaction Workflow – Apply Redactions from within RelativityOne
We’re also delivering the ability to apply redactions your documents. With the Mayapple release, just create image of your original PDFs, so that you can apply redactions and render the redacted image to replace the original. - Relativity Desktop Client – Export Rendered PDFs
Finally, we’ve updated options in the Relativity Desktop Client (RDC). As of the Mayapple release, you’ll be able to use the RDC to export rendered PDFs that were created, reviewed, and redacted in RelativityOne.
“We’re really excited to deliver this functionality,” said Rene. “We’ll continue to work on enhancements to PDF functionality, and we will be providing more updates beyond the Mayapple release, because we know there’s still work to finish.”
We can’t wait for you to dive into these updates next month and, of course, share you input on how else we can continue to improve.
