Knomos FAQ

What is Knomos?

Knomos is an application based on standard Web technologies for the knowledge and workflow management of law professionals. Knomos is the name of the related Open Source project, founded and managed by Studio Legale Sutti , as well as the trademark registered by its English operation, SLS Ltd., to identify it.

Who can profit from adopting Knomos?

Knomos is primarily intended for medium-to-large European law firms, but can can be easily put at work by legal boutiques and sole practitioners; firms of patent attorneys, notaries public, commercialisti, Steuerberater, Fachanwälte; in-house counsel departments, set of barrister chambers,  etc., anywhere in the world. In addition, its very design makes it ideal for adoption by law firm networks and alliances, multidisciplinary partnerships, or by extranets established between a law firm and its correspondents and clients, or again between a counsel department and its panel of pourveyors of legal services. Lastly, one might install it on its server(s) to offer commercial Knomos-based ASP services to final users over the Internet. Since Knomos leaves it entirely to the user to define and implement jurisdiction- or profession-specific rules and procedures, it is not bound by the relevant limits. On the other hand, the support of a growing number of particular needs is provided out-of-the-box (e.g., the billing of legal work according to the Italian National Lawyers Tariff).

How much does it cost?

Knomos is released, without any explicit or implied warranty by any party as to its features or functionality, under the General Public Licence, and accordingly can be downloaded, copied and installed freely , subject to the terms thereof. These terms include your obligation to release under the GPL any derivative work based on Knomos. They does not prevent you, however, from developing closed-source software which interacts with Knomos, or to sell services related to its deployment, certification, maintenance and administration. In this respect, final users should profit from the ability to obtain such services from any internal or external computer-literate personnel, rather than face monopolistic prices often applicable by the original developers of commercial software.

What exactly does Knomos offer?

See the page on Knomos Mission and that on Knomos Features .

Is Knomos a Linux applications? Is one required to adopt OpenOffice.org? Can one use it with Microsoft Internet Explorer?

Knomos, on the server side, is based on modules which are available on most platforms (and can even be replaced, with varying degrees of difficulty), including Microsoft Windows,  most flavours of Unix, Apple Macintosh,  and IBM OS/2. On the client side, a Java-enabled browser supporting the latest standards is all that is required, whatever might be the hardware and operating system on which it is running. See the page Knomos Requirements for more technical, up-to-date details.
Moreover, all kinds of documents and data can be stored and managed by Knomos. Only if you want to profit from its ability to merge its data with pre-defined standard texts and forms,  you must be aware that the output generated is currently in the new standard Oasis text format, which is currently used as its own internal format by the last versions of Sun Staroffice (commercial, available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris), OpenOffice.org (Open Source, available for most platforms),  and K-Office (Open Source, available for Linux). If you are not interested in this feature, you need not care about that. If you are, you can easily pick or download one of those products, which are all able to convert the Oasis format into RTF,  HTML,  ASCII, or that of several versions of Microsoft Word. Or you may eventually decide that any of those Office suites is already perfect for your needs.

What can one do with the databases generated by other vertical software already in use?

Knomos internal data structures are obviously open to inspection, and can be easily adapted to the needs and habits of most users, with very little compromise, if any. The difficulty of a conversion or import of your existing data, in order not to re-input them when switching to Knomos, exclusively depends on the software you are currently using. In particular, if it is commercial software and no assistance is provided by its developers, some basic "reverse engineering" might be required, unless a conversion from the same application to Knomos has already been performed by your service provider. This is one reason why we offer in this site links to companies having already obtained such experience , at least with a number of popular commercial products. You might however already have appropriate human resources in-house to perform such conversion, or may  prefer to make use of your current IT service providers. Ideally, we hope that a few tools performing such conversions automatically or semi-automatically will eventually be released.

What about usability and learning curves?

Great efforts have been invested to conjugate the flexibility and power of a feature-rich, sophisticated  product with simplicity. The way you control and navigate Knomos is in general by no means different from that which is applicable to Web surfing, and is dictated for the rest by the browser you have choosen to adopt. An utmost care have been devoted to the definition of defaults, and to a cascade inheritance of choices already made. For example, you can change user privileges or hourly rates in almost any conceivable way at any level, but essentially you need not do anything about that which is not required by specific needs. The same goes for records and fields pertaining to each single matter or party, or billing methods, which may or may not be significant in your kind of organisation. Basically, if you do not need a feature, you leave it in peace, and it keeps out of your way. When you later decide that at the end of the day you might be interested, the program is happy to accomodate your wish to start using it.

How can one obtain assistance and support for Knomos-related needs?

Knomos has a number of forums, which are hosted by Sourceforge, where users can discuss the product, compare their experiences, and may obtain assistance from other users on a free, reciprocal basis, and occasionally by its developers. Given that no secret know-how or closed-source code is contained in a typical Knomos setup, you can also find rather easily somebody who be able willing to look into your problem - possibly for a price. In addition,  a number of companies make it known on this site that they are available to do so for you, by listing themselves amongst Knomos Service Providers .

What about performance?

The single, most important factor affecting Knomos performance is the available bandwith. Of course, this is not an issue within a Ethernet LAN, but in any scenario of full-day teleworking or multi-office use it is recommended that a broadband connection be available (say, xDSL-, WiFi-,  or UMTS-level). Secondly,  Knomos servers profit from fast, huge disk subsystems. Any current or recent hardware which be reasonably proportioned to the average number of concurrent users you have is however more than adequate. In fact, Web-like applications are inherently much more efficient than the remote use of any traditional Windows client-server programs through terminal services.

What are plans for the future of Knomos?

The best guarantee for the continued development and support of Knomos is that it has been created and is used by an existing, substantial law firm, and is being adopted by a number of other practices, some of which will contribute new features and modules. While especially in the field of vertical software commercial developers may go out of business, switch to other markets, or simply decide to freeze existing products to concentrate on other projects,  Knomos is a mission-critical ingredient in the life of those who manage its evolution. In this respect, several improvements and additions can be expected in the upcoming months and years,  starting with nationalisation in additional languages and support for various European tariff-based billing methods. Additionally,  further development being led by lawyers and law firm managers,  attention is being paid to features which may be of help  with regard to compliance with  rules such as those pertaining to personal data processing in the EU, or to quality systems based on ISO 9001-2000 rules, or to ethical rules applicable to legal professions.

How can one contribute to the success and further development of Knomos?

First, by adopting Knomos and making it known , on this site and/or your own, thus contributing to the visibility and reputation of the project and to the establishment of a healthy ecology around it. You are also welcome to participate in Knomos forums, and - needless to say - to its further development. If you are not a programmer, you may still contribute by offering a little time, perhaps originally invested for your internal use,  to the develoment of Knomos documentation and of new language versions of either the user interface or  the documentation itself. Lastly, all users of Knomos are deeply grateful for any bug or mistake which can be fixed and corrected thank to your pointing it out through the forums - in your own interest.