Linex Systems: Current Awareness Monitoring Simplified
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

Abstract

If your role includes seeking, reviewing and culling information to be shared with others, this Current Awareness Management tool from Linex Systems may be worth a look.

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If your role includes seeking, reviewing and culling information to be shared with others, this Current Awareness Management tool from Linex Systems may be worth a look.

Their online technology allows users to aggregate, analyse and distribute a diverse set of digital sources. The information can then be exported and shared via emails, newsletters, RSS feeds, viewed online or even centralised in a Micro SharePoint site if available.

A number of things about this product make it attractive. It not only can monitor many public sources such as websites, articles, RSS feeds, and alerts, it also provides the ability to share information from subscription sources such as LexisNexis and Law360.

Secondly, while the system does include some "out of the box" sources, users can choose sources for their own particular needs. This is the key to the product and allows users to distribute the most customised, pertinent and targeted information to others in a timely manner.

Thirdly, via a specific Linex email address, the product provides a means to share email subscription content from such things as electronic newsletters along with all the other information amassed.  

The primary audience for this product consists of law firms and professional service companies, but many corporate clients and consultants are also customers. Information professionals, librarians, business development and CI practitioners often manage multiple information streams. They find that the system eliminates the repetitive and redundant tasks sometimes associated with daily monitoring.

As a leading aggregator of legal and business information, Linex has customers  worldwide. Content is primarily from the UK, Australia and the US, although sources and content from any type of online source, wherever it is in the world, can be added to a personal library of sources.

Initially, I found the functionality of the online interface, along with some confusing terminology, to be a slight barrier to my grasping the value of the product. A soon-to-be added Knowledge Base, and what I saw as excellent options for customer support, will likely mitigate that concern.

One of their clients has coined the term "Linexable" because they software has become so firmly entrenched in their culture. I think this alone should make it worth a look and possibly a demo.

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