The primary reasons for considering Time Matters Enterprise relate to how your firm is using or intends to use Time Matters Professional.  Time Matters Professional is a wonderful program and I am always amazed at the amount of data that it can handle across a network of many users.  Nevertheless, there may come a time when the Professional Edition is not delivering the speed or performance that you would like from your database.  For many firms, this critical mass is reached when they decide to implement the full e-mail functionality of Time Matters.

E-mail has drastically changed the way we do business.  For many of us, it has become our primary method of communication, replacing the telephone.  The number of e-mails each of us receive on a daily basis continues to grow and it is not uncommon for people to receive more than one hundred.  Multiply the number of daily e-mails by the number of Time Matters users at your firm and you will see how great a strain e-mail can place on the database.  Yes, there are ways to prolong the moment of truth (See Tom Rowe's excellent paper entitled Eliminating E-Mail Overload with Time Matters E-mail) but, eventually, e-mail is going to turn your Time Matters Professional cheetah into a overweight housecat.

Professional is a file based database.  A single data file on a server is accessed by many computers at once.  Each workstation accesses data by reading directly from the main data file.  Enterprise uses a different approach to handle data.  First, the database resides in a powerful Structured Query Language (SQL) database.  The result is higher capacity and increased efficiency.  Enterprise resides on the SQL Server and each workstation sends commands and requests to the server.  The SQL Server intelligently sends back answers to the commands and requests rather than each workstation independently processing its own data needs.  Instead of reading through thousands of records to find the ten matching its search criteria, the workstation merely sends a request for search to be performed.  The SQL Server processes the request and very quickly sends back the ten records.

The result of these technical differences it that Time Matters Enterprise is much faster and much more powerful.

A real world analogy might be your firms filing system.  If everyone in the office has access to the files, the risk of misplacing a file is much higher and the task of keeping track of files much more difficult.  Users may forget to return a file or lose one.  On the other hand, if a single file clerk monitors and retrieves the files, as well as provide the specific information the user without the file ever leaving the room, there is less likelihood that a file will be misplaced or damaged.  If you add to this the fact that the file clerk can handle a vast number of files at once, you begin to understand the power of Time Matters Enterprise.

Unfortunately, superhuman file clerks do not work for free.  You must make an investment to realize the benefits.

In order to implement Time Matters Enterprise you must provide the framework for it.  Thus, there is an additional hardware and software cost involved.  While I do not recommend it, if you have fewer than twenty-five users, it is possible to run Enterprise on a simple Windows 2000 or XP workstation rather than a full blown server.  However, in most cases, a server computer running Microsoft SQL Server 2000, PostgreSQL or Oracle is required.   The server and the SQL Server software may cost several thousand dollars.  In addition, Time Matters Enterprise is double the cost of Professional, although Time Matters will allow you to upgrade for the difference in cost between the two products.

Don't let this discourage you.  Other than the Enterprise software, you might have everything you require to run Enterprise.  SQL Server 2000 was included with Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 or the Premium Edition of Small Business Server 2003.  If you do not already have one of these network operating systems, perhaps it is time to consider upgrading. 

Still not convinced?  In my opinion, in the long run, Time Matter Enterprise will save you money even if you have to have to purchase a new server in order to run it.  First, any database downtime you are currently experiencing will be dramatically if not altogether eliminated.  Second, if you are currently operating separate case management, document management and e-mail systems, you will see significant cost savings when you consolidate all of them into Time Matters.  If you are considering purchasing all of these separately, the decision is even easier.  Why spend hundreds of dollars per user on document management software, configuration and training when you can use Time Matters Enterprise to do the same thing for a smaller additional cost?

Think about it.  How much is it worth to have a complete solution to your data needs - one program for calendar, contacts, case information, documents, notes, e-mail and everything else?