Let's put it this way: QShift is to Microsoft Word what Techron® fuel additive is to Chevron® gasoline. QShift fortifies Microsoft Word by seamlessly and transparently adding the capabilities to do "smart document drafting"-or, in other words, integrating your transaction-specific know-how with document models and editing tools to build, enhance, and maintain the structure and components of legal documents. This "smart document drafting" tool now allows you and your colleagues to collectively share and benefit from a centrally located knowledge store of best practices and associated transaction documents (or pleading documents). You can now leverage partners, associates, paralegals, and law clerks by empowering them with essentially "practice guides" by which new documents can be drafted better, faster, and for less cost than by any other alternative drafting tool on the market today. And QShift delivers this phenomenally simple but powerful capability on demand across the Internet, making it available anytime, anywhere. (You can get more details in the About QShift section of this site.)

You can download the QShift client from our web site (under Get QShift). Simply subscribe, download, activate, and QShift is ready to use. We've also added aQuick Start Guide to help you get up and running efficiently and productively. And, if you want to expand the depth of your use, we also provide PDF-based tutorial lessons for practice.

Not at this time. QShift is designed and built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and takes full advantages of the services-oriented architecture made possible by the .NET infrastructure.

QShift currently requires our custom Internet client. We believe this offers the best user experience (the cleanest interface and the fastest response). We realize that for some users, however, the ability to access QShift via a browser, without the client, would be useful, and we are exploring a future version of the QShift on-demand smart document drafting service that would present the user experience in a standard web browser. The technology challenge is significant, but it is being explored, and we're measuring market demand.

The technology challenges to producing a browser-based version of QShift are at least twofold. First, Ixio believes it's about the right tool for the right job. Someone said, "When all you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts looking like a nail." The web browser has been the catalyst for a commercial Internet, but many now realize the web browser is akin to training wheels for the Internet. In other words, in the early days of the Internet, the browser was ideal for teaching people how to "navigate" or "surf" content. Fundamentally, the browser was designed to browse content of all kinds-rich media. Although the richness of media naturally leads to higher amounts of interactivity, at some point, asking the browser to handle certain computational and data manipulation tasks is overloading the tool beyond its most suitable purpose, leading to a less-than-optimal, if not dysfunctional, solution.

Second, there are simply limitations to the capabilities of a web browser. The web browser is intended to be the interface to the Internet's content stores-served by hundreds of millions of servers worldwide (perhaps even servers of your own do so-your firm's web server, extranet server, and the like). For security reasons-designed to protect your client computer and your data-the browser has limited interaction with the remainder of your machine. Furthermore, the browser is a "process" that already consumes significant amounts of computer processing resources in order to "present" to you (the visual experience of) content it connects with and displays. QShift, for example, requires precisely these two capabilities: (1) the ability to tightly interact with Microsoft Word and other resources on your client computer, and (2) the ability to allow you an extensive amount of data manipulation and interaction. For example, QShift maintains a tripartite display, where the recipe elements of the model document are synchronized with annotations and transaction-specific know-how at the clause or section level, and with a Word preview window that is a view port into the portion of the document you are currently drafting. As you may choose to rearrange clauses and scan the document, these three displays use considerable computer power to maintain the synchronicity of the views. As you know, constantly reloading the browser window can be a painstaking experience for a visually rich display of data. However, a basic limitation of the browser lies in how visual updates are managed.

So while building a browser-based version of QShift is not impossible, it is fraught with design and development challenges that keep our engineers blurry-eyed. At the end of the day, the browser is a magnificent tool for opening the content-rich stores of the first-generation Internet, but as the industry thought-leaders evangelize, and their companies develop, the next-generation commercial Internet is making every application "Internet ready." We believe the QShift client will become the quintessential document drafting tool in the coming years-made possible by graduating beyond the limitations of the browser, embracing service-oriented architectures, and shifting compute-intensive processes to their best location of resource.

Not at present, but because the QShift interface is built upon Ixio's Smart Data Machine, it will shortly support all Latin-based languages. Ixio is also exploring how to produce its documents in a range of languages. If you are interested in this feature, please let us know.

QShift is available exclusively (for now) from this web site (see the Get QShift section).

QShift is shockingly inexpensive. The cost is only $99 per month. There is no minimum commitment. There are no surcharges. There is no cancellation penalty. For firm or companywide implementation, simply give us a call at 1.877.ASK.IXIO. In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions (for which we cannot answer because that's our secret) is "How do you do this for so little?" The only answer we can vaguely, but honestly, offer is that it's possible only because of our patent-pending technology. But there's more to it, and we'll be explaining that in the ensuing months.

QShift is an "on-demand" computing service, making it available to you anytime, anywhere through the Internet. QShift provides a small client application (that you download and is automatically installed after you register) for your Microsoft Windows-based computer. Ixio then provides a processing server securely "across the Internet cloud." You create document models-templates and recipes for creating new documents for any given transaction-by loading a best-practices reference document from your current online library. After reviewing the new model and (optionally) setting up some "conditions" on when and how clauses should be included or excluded, you can immediately begin building new instances of the transaction document that, with a single mouse-click, are produced in Microsoft Word ready for final touches, adding in values for blank fields (if any), and saving the actual document instance on your local machine or network. You can also (and this is where the applied knowledge management comes in) optionally add comments and annotations to the model so that the next time you or one of your colleagues needs to draft another instance of that type of document, the transaction-specific know-how is right there at the point of drafting. It's that easy. Really.

Essentially, QShift is a document-drafting application and service that interoperates with and extends Microsoft Word.

Unlike other systems, QShift is designed with the recognition that document drafting is an intelligent process performed by trained professionals who need to exercise far more intellectual processing than merely answering canned questions and verifying grammar. Our CEO likes to say that QShift treats you like the intelligent professional you are and not the trained monkey some solutions leave you feeling like they want you to become.

Current document-assembly tools have not achieved the level of widespread use they should because they have some high barriers to adoption; that is, they require significant setup for configuration, translation of documents into templates, and development of dialog sessions in order to make clause-level inclusion/exclusion decisions for you. And then, should you require a change to either that canned decision-making process or the language itself (and you need that change to be available to everyone the next time this type of transaction arises), you must have another trained specialist "crack open" the template and make adjustments. The results are higher cycle-time, less access, and higher costs.

QShift offers an entirely different approach. QShift respects your ability to recognize clause-level decisions and to apply your legal acumen at the point of practice to make those kinds of decisions immediately. QShift gives you "direct manipulation" of the document model and recipe for building new instances. You can immediately add, modify, or even delete content-sections, clauses, etc.-without requiring a paid consultant or a technical specialist.

In fact, there are several differences between traditional document assembly and QShift smart document drafting. Our unique approach is the most noticeable difference. And while this approach is not novel (at least one other software maker takes a similar and, we argue, smart approach), we believe you will see that the QShift advantage is in how we put the power of smart document drafting at your fingertips. Another example is simply that QShift leverages the services architecture of .NET to provide a seamless and transparent integration into and extension of the most prolific document-drafting tool in the legal profession-Microsoft Word. Look for a comparative document to appear in our Resources section soon.

Your finished documents, built using the QShift Document Modeler, are always stored locally on your network or disk, and 100% in your control. Here are the details: QShift maintains a "repository" of "models" that are used to build instances of new documents. Resulting Word documents are always stored on your local disk drive or network drive in either a Windows file system folder or a document management system (if you have one), such as Hummingbird or Interwoven. The repository, which is actually a relational database driven by a powerful application server known as the Ixio Smart Data Machine, is maintained on the QShift Server in an Ixio secure data center.

For the brief interruption in service, the QShift service will be unavailable-and, of course, that is beyond our control. You will still have access to finished documents, as those are locally stored. Like any on-demand service provided across the commercial Internet, there is always a minor risk of a temporary loss of service. Luckily, ISP outages are rare these days, and becoming more rare all the time

It is well settled in the computing industry that traditional enterprise software is in the waning afternoon of its lifecycle. On-demand computing gives you the opportunity to have access to, and enjoy the benefits of, powerful, complex, enterprise-strength software without requiring you to invest large sums of money in hardware, software, installation, training, and maintenance. The on-demand model affords you instant access to the latest edition of the software and its features anytime, anywhere. The monthly charge is merely $99 and can be cancelled at any time. This model is here to stay in many industries already. And we believe the legal technology sector is particularly ready for it. So important is this trend that Merrill Lynch has formed a tracking index for on-demand computing. And IDC, Forrester Research, and several other respected analysts are actively covering and forecasting the paradigm shift that is already occurring in the delivery, deployment, and maintenance of commercial software. Companies such as IBM and Salesforce.com are delivering the promises of on-demand computing now, and we believe we are the company that will deliver on it for the legal profession.

QShift requires only that you have the latest edition of Microsoft Windows-2000 or XP, or Microsoft Office 2000, XP, or Word 2003-the Microsoft .NET Framework, version 1.1, Internet Explorer 6.0+, and a reasonably high-speed connection to the Internet (128Kb and up-QShift is very happy running across a 256Kb uplink). The good news is that we know from research that a majority of you already have Windows XP or 2000, and nearly everyone has either DSL or cable Internet access today-more than enough "channel" to push QShift's "computing across the Internet" capabilities. You need to make sure you're running the latest Service Pack for your release of Windows XP or 2000 and that you have loaded the .NET Framework (1.1) upgrade. Doing so not only ensures that your machine is ready for the rigors of using the commercial Internet for productive client work, it also means you are the most secure. If you don't have .NET already loaded, don't worry: It is available during the QShift installation process, or from Microsoft.com directly.

Ixio has more good news on this front. As a Microsoft .NET technology partner, Ixio can provide the .NET Framework software during the installation of QShift, or you can download the .NET Framework from Microsoft.com directly. See Microsoft's site (www.microsoft.com), where you will find easy-to-follow instructions for (a) checking your .NET readiness; (b) downloading the software; and (c) installing the update. And once you've installed the .NET Framework, you will have instant access to hundreds of "web services" and Internet services to improve the capabilities of all of your Microsoft Office tools and other third-party .NET-ready products and services-not just QShift.

The .NET Framework is a prerequisite to an on-demand computing world. Once you've downloaded and installed it, that step is done. And .NET is free. Moreover, thereafter, any upgrades, repairs, or fixes are available through an update service that automatically runs silently and out of the way in the background while you carry on with productive client work. The same is true for the QShift client. As we discuss in other FAQ answers, QShift is a powerful Internet client application that far exceeds the capabilities and intentions of a web browser. All on-demand services will require a client interface running local to your computer, PDA, mobile phone, etc. QShift is one of the first. Like .NET, once you load it, you're done.

To be clear, periodically we may ask you to download the client again in order to provide you with significant upgrades and new features. Typically, QShift will have a "live update" feature (like other Internet software managed by Windows Update, or your anti-virus software). The software will dynamically update without any effort on your part. The next time you log in to the QShift service, you may see new or improved functionality. Of course, updates to the functionality provided by the Ixio servers won't affect your PC or demand any action from your use of QShift at all.

No. On-demand computing is very different from "ASP." An ASP service actually provides a "hosted" application in its entirety, delivering the user interface exclusively through a web browser and, optionally, some downloaded Java or ActiveX applets. On-demand computing differs because there is an intelligent partitioning of the services: putting the user interface capabilities and local integration with other applications and services (such as Microsoft Word) on your local machine, and distributing the "heavy lifting" of analytics, database management, and other compute-intensive processing requirements on a secure server across the Internet cloud. And an ASP service is essentially a glorified time-sharing computer service-leveraging the ease and convenience of the World Wide Web-whereas on-demand uses extensive distributed computing-sometimes incorporating the services of several different resources spread throughout the network-to deliver information compiling, processing, and presentation to wherever you are, whenever you need it.

If you know our pricing, you realize the tongue-in-cheek nature of this question. The ROI is the whole point of why we did this. Our CEO calls it the 20-Minute ROI and it works like this: Suppose you're billing the national average of $300 per hour. If you can save just 20 minutes a month using Word fortified by QShift to draft client documents, then it has already paid for itself that month. And as soon as you have saved 4 hours of billable time using Word powered by QShift, you've paid for the QShift subscription for the entire year. Case closed.

The .NET platform is the stepping-stone to integrating the Internet into everything we do with computers, communications, and transactions in a digital age, and this platform made it possible to integrate QShift seamlessly with Microsoft Word.

If you remain committed to the traditional enterprise software model, don't worry-Ixio can still help. Aside from wanting to offer you our sermon about the end of traditional software installations, as we know them, we can and will offer you-if you absolutely insist-an enterprise edition of QShift to run internally on your own network. This is possible because the QShift on-demand computing architecture is based on TCP/IP network protocols and services. Of course, that is the foundation of the Internet, but it's also most likely the backbone of your internal local area network. Therefore, we can offer you QShift servers locally on your network, and QShift clients, rolled out to all of your lawyers, paralegals, and law clerks. For a sufficiently large firm, the decision can "pencil out." If you are interested in an enterprise network installation, contact sales@ixio.com with your inquiry.