After falling in love with DevonThink Pro Office years ago as a solo attorney, I implemented DevonThink as the central document management application for all of the attorneys at my current law firm. Today, myself and the other attorneys at my law firm discussed DTP during our lunch and I gave a demo overview of DTP3. I very much would prefer Three Pane view to return as an option (even if it does cause a loss of screen real estate)…but I think I could adapt. However, the other attorneys in my office decided to indefinitely delay purchasing DTP3 licenses for all attorneys and staff until something similar (or the same) as Three Pane view is added in a future release.
Everyone loved the new look of DTP3 and found the other new features very compelling (especially the Inspector pane). However, It appears that all of the attorneys in my firm use Three Pane View 99% of the time in DTP2. The less tech savvy don’t want to change their workflow (it is not a question of wanting DTP3 to “look” the same as DTP2, but rather that there are many standard workflows that cannot be replicated without Three Pane View as an option). Top issues mentioned during our meeting (i) inability to select multiple folders or subfolders at the same time in the Sidebar of DTP3 and see all files contained in said folders; (ii) right-clicking on Sidebar folders in DTP3 provides far fewer options compared to Three Pane view in DTP2; (iii) Sidebar in DTP3 does not allow for keyboard navigation between folders.
I showed the partners some of the work-arounds I have read about on this thread to get some of the Three Pane functionality…some thought that was sufficient, some thought that it was confusing, and everyone thought that it would be nearly impossible to teach our paralegals and assistants to use the work-arounds in DTP3 to get similar functionality as Three Pane View in DTP2.
Someone pointed out that DTP3’s view settings are basically the same as Finder’s view settings…this was noted as a bad thing…one of the reasons we migrated the entire office to DTP3 was because of the view limitations in Finder (selecting multiple folders at the same time to see contents of said folders is impossible in Finder, but is possible in DTP2 Three Pane).
In any event, I will keep an eye out for future updates to see if DTP3 eventually implements features that allow users to use the Sidebar in a way that provides most or all of the advantages of Three Pane View in DTP2. Either that, or perhaps simply adding Three-Pane View back as a view option in DTP3. The firm is more than happy to pay top dollar for good software, but the Three Pane View (or something with all of the same benefits and functionality) caused the partners to delay upgrading at this time.
Again, love almost everything about the updated DTP3…and will likely buy a license for my home computer (mostly media organization).
Thanks, Patrick