Dan Bennett, head of Mobile Services for the Americas at Thomson Reuters, talks about how customers are using ProView, how the market has been responding to ProView and how it complements the use of books and electronic legal research.

Read more.

I remember a couple of years back, Rick King and I were asked this during a presentation and came up with radically different answers. It’s an important question. For example, if you believe that ubiquity is around the corner, then offline support in our products is purely temporary and we shouldn’t invest in something that’s so hard to get right.

Visiting TRGR the other week, I was asked this again and concluded my answer hasn’t changed. Rick, of course, ever the optimist, thought it would be a couple of years. I, on the other hand, am more of a pessimist. First of all, what do we mean by ubiquitous?

In my view, there are a several layers of ubiquity: (more…)

At Thomson Reuters, we strive to help our customers improve their productivity and enable them to deliver better client service. Over the past several months, we have advanced this objective by introducing and updating numerous mobile products and apps so our clients can access their legal information and tools anytime, anywhere.

As legal professionals’ workflow becomes increasingly mobile, it is important that we are able to provide our customers with best-in-class platforms that enable seamless computing regardless of whether they are in their office or on a portable device. (more…)

Providing a view into the private world of a sitting judge on one of the highest benches, and in one of the world’s most famous cities, Judge Frederic Block gives a personal account of his experiences with controversial legal topics such as the death penalty, racketeering, terrorism, discrimination and foreign affairs in his new book. In DISROBED: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge, Judge Block illuminates this sometimes mysterious branch of government, sharing a behind-the-scenes look into his life and some of the trials of a federal court judge.

The federal bench is presided over by men and women who adhere to the traditional standard of judicial lock-jaw where nearly all of the communication outside of their courtroom is through formal written opinions and scholarly journals. Judge Block breaks that mold by taking readers on his own personal journey to the bench, a journey riddled with political potholes, and bares some of the most intimate details surrounding several landmark cases of our time. (more…)

We’re proud of the outstanding contributions our employees make to Thomson Reuters, so we asked them to share their stories about their work, their teams and their colleagues.  Whether supporting customers or colleagues, or managing our systems and information our employees put the right information in the hands of the right people so our customers can achieve amazing things. Each week we will feature one of these stories to show their passion, collaboration, creativity and how they drive our business forward.

In my role as Asset Owner for Mobile Products at Thomson Reuters I work on a lot of exciting and innovative projects.  One project that has inspired me is ProView. It is a truly global project which gives me the opportunity to work with people from across the organization and around the world, people with whom I normally wouldn’t work.

ProView is our new eReader application which received a warm welcome at the 2011 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conference. ProView allows users to access Thomson Reuters eBooks anywhere, anytime. Check out this blog post to learn more.

Behind every successful product there is a dedicated team of people making it possible. In this case, my colleague Aaron Cooper and I played critical roles in ProView’s success.

As the User Experience (UX) Manager, Aaron leveraged best practice and customer understanding as he iterated definition of interactions, accessibility, branding and other aspects of the experience.

I embraced the go-to role for requirements, working with all the parties involved to ensure the ultimate solution matched their customers’ business needs.

As a result, unlike many of our competitors who deploy standard eBook format (more…)

We hope you’ll find time to stop by the Thomson Reuters ProView booth at ABA TECHSHOW CHICAGO (March 29-31, 2012) to demo our new professional-grade iPad app. Now you can access your go-to books as eBooks on your iPad. Join us to see how.

We’ll be hosting a “lunch and learn” to demonstrate its exciting functionality. While there, you can register for a chance to win an iPad 3

 

With ProView, you can:

• Add your own notes and highlights to the content; all your annotations automatically transfer to every new edition of your eBook
• Link to controlling authority on WestlawNext
• Copy and paste text into any other application or document.

Try eBooks free: Download sample titles today.

See all available titles.

By Dan Bennett, VP of Technology, Thomson Reuters

One of the underlying premises of ProView, Thomson Reuter’s eBook platform, is that unlike the other eReaders, we’ve designed it from the ground up for professional content. Books for professionals differ in several key ways:

• More complex mark-up: complex tables of taxation rates, many levels of indentation
• Read non-linearly: our books are reference aids, there to answer a question, with a few exceptions, not to be read cover to cover
• Much larger: books in excess of 3,000 pages are the norm

While the first two are fairly easy to demonstrate we’ve always wondered if ProView works better than the others with large books. Thanks to some great work by Thomson Reuter’s Scott Daup, we now have an answer!

Scott rolled up his sleeves and developed a prototype ProView epub converter. As a result, they are able to directly compare ProView app performance with consumer eReader software running on the same device.

We chose two of our larger titles: Westlaw’s Florida Rules of Court Volume 3 and Carswell’s Practioners Income Tax Act to compare.  The titles vary greatly in composition: The court rules are generated from our Novus document repository/search engine and comprise very small documents with exceptionally clean mark-up. By contrast, PITA was generated from source SGML with more challenging mark-up and larger document sizes.

We chose two large and popular eReading iPad software applications to compare against ProView. We’ll call them Commercial eReader software I and II.

In general, software II did a much better job than C software I with the large book: the UI was far more responsive and actions complete in a reasonable amount of time. However, this comes at a cost: a rather lack luster UI and very poor search.

While we have some work to do on some aspects of UI performance, how can ProView be so much faster for some operations?

1. We chose not to constrain ourselves to the ePub format. This allows us to do some server side pre-computation: the resulting maps are shipped along with the book and utilized by the app.
2. We have much worse test cases to work with, and the team have done excellent work in optimizing the app.
3. Our secret weapon: Novus: the teams in Eagan and Bangalore did a great job  cramming a full query parser and search results logic into an iOS library. We’ve built this into the ProView app.

The Novus team are now hard at work on delivering libraries for Windows, Mac and Android that they’ll use for upcoming ProView releases on these platforms.

Watch the ProView background video.

This week we announced the Australian launch of Thomson Reuters ProView, the new professional eReader platform.  The 2012 Tax and Law Annuals are the initial Australian titles available on ProView, marking a significant step forward in the delivery of legal and tax information for professionals.

Thomson Reuters ProView is the first platform for eBooks that was built from the ground up specifically for professional use. It allows the delivery and use of specialized Thomson Reuters content and tools anywhere, anytime. ProView includes professional-grade features such as full-text Boolean search, and updating of content as new editions become available, including automatic transfer of notes and annotations.

The ProView iPad app can be downloaded free at the Apple App Store, letting users take full advantage of the power, flexibility and portability of Thomson Reuters ProView.

Read the full press release.

Thomson Reuters ProView, the new professional eReader platform, is now available as an app for the iPad with Rules of Court for New York, Texas, Florida, Ohio and Illinois as initial titles, as well as a selection of professional development titles. Additional titles will be available in coming months.

ProView, provides a first-of-its-kind professional-grade platform for the delivery and use of specialized Thomson Reuters content and tools anywhere, anytime. The ProView iPad app can be downloaded free at the Apple® App Store, letting users take full advantage of the power, flexibility and portability of Thomson Reuters ProView. Rules of Court for New York, Texas, Florida, Ohio and Illinois, as well as other titles, can be purchased online at the Westlaw Store or through Westlaw sales representatives.

Learn more about some of ProView’s useful features here.