Levit & James Announces Best Authority® Version 3.0
8/23/2010
Levit & James Announces Best Authority® Version 3.0
New Version of Leading Table of Authorities Tool and Bedstone Development Framework Pave Way for Series of Revolutionary Products to Come
LEESBURG, Va. – August 23, 2010 – Fletcher James, President of Levit & James, Inc. (www.levitjames.com) announced today that L&J will be releasing Version 3.0 of Best Authority® early next year. Best Authority is the leading tool for producing a Table of Authorities (TOA). By the end of 2010, projections indicate that Best Authority will be used by more than half of the National Law Journal’s NLJ 250 law firms.
According to Mr. James, “Best Authority 3.0 is a breakthrough product. Our development team has entirely reworked the underlying technology, and the impact of this will be immediately apparent to anybody who sees Version 3.0. Each step in the TOA-production process will be faster – four to twenty times faster – than Version 2.7, and processing of even the largest documents with thousands of citations will be effortless. The user interface will feature many innovative ease-of-use features, such as drag-and-drop, and a “final version preview” mode. And, because so many of the steps will be entirely intuitive, end-user training time will be greatly reduced.”
James explains, however, that the biggest impact of L&J’s new technology – codenamed ‘Bedstone Framework’ –will be to substantially reduce the company’s cycle time for product development and enhancement. He notes, “As soon as Version 3.0 goes live, our developers will begin work on a series of companion products which have been requested by customers, the first of which will most likely be a citation-checking tool sharing the same citation-recognition engine which powers Best Authority.”
Under the Hood - Bedstone Framework
Mr. James elaborated further on the Bedstone Framework, which L&J developed using Microsoft dotNET technology, and which L&J is using to create add-ins for Microsoft® Office: “The Framework has important implications for application stability. Users of Levit & James’ products will tell you that our products are already unsurpassed in terms of their reliability. However, on the development side, this consistency has come at a heavy cost, because each new product version has required extensive testing, with multiple versions of Microsoft Office Word, in a wide variety of customer environments. Besides dealing with numerous anomalies in Microsoft Word, our products need to co-exist with other add-ins which our customers rely upon, ranging from Document Management Systems to Meta-Data Cleaners. Many times, issues arise because our code tries to carry out what should be perfectly acceptable steps within a document, but encounters interference due to either bugs in Microsoft Word, corruption in documents, or conflicts with a third-party add-in. The Bedstone Framework dramatically minimizes these kinds of issues, and has correspondingly sped up our product-development cycle.”
About Levit & James, Inc.
Levit & James, Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Leesburg Virginia, is a leading provider of Legal Software. For 23 years, Levit & James’ customers, including government agencies, law firms, corporations, and individual users, have benefited from the company’s thoughtful and time-saving word processing utilities. Over 45% of the top two hundred fifty U.S. law firms have purchased Best Authority from Levit & James. For more information please call Ian Levit at 703.771.1549, visit www.levitjames.com or email to ianlevit@levitjames.com. Follow us on Twitter @levitjames.
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