PowerCase Deployment

Investigations come in all shapes and sizes, and what starts as a simple one man enquiry can quickly become a large scale investigation involving hundreds of analysts and investigators. It is important that your investigation management software is able to support your work across the very different requirements for these types of cases, whilst still allowing you to easily scale up a case that starts small and grows in importance.

Powercase has been developed to get the best of both worlds – as far as possible to keep the requirements for installation and configuration as simple as possible without compromising on the system’s ability to support hundreds or even thousands of users.

Powercase for small teams

When you have a small team of investigators it is important that you don’t have to waste time keeping your investigation software up and running – you need it to be up and running quickly and you need it to be always available. The Powercase database installation is fully scripted so that if you don’t need to care too much about exactly the best possible server configuration, you can just setup the database server from a single script. Alternatively you can buy one of our ‘Briefcase’ configurations which give you a fully configured virtual Oracle server which you can just run straight out of the box. And our dedicated service and support team are always available to help should you have any problems or questions about the best configuration for your organization.

Once you are up and running, we want to make sure you stay that way! Powercase was designed as an enterprise grade application where unavailability of the software is not an option. Many years of operation in very large deployments means that we are confident that the software will cope with anything you can throw at it.

As a small team you never have enough time or resources available, so it’s important that your people can get started using the software as quickly as possible without too much need for training and familiarization. To help solve this problem Powercase provides features like the Offline Data Entry forms, which allow anyone to enter data into forms for submission into Powercase, without ever having to login to the system directly. And the look and feel of the forms can be changed to match that of documents your users are already familiar with. If your investigators spend much of their time out in the field, the Offline data entry forms provide a simple way for them to keep the system updated without the need to provide full remote access for the system

Powercase for large teams

When working with large teams of investigators and or large numbers of cases and records, many simpler systems just can’t cope. You need to know that the system will not grind to a halt, or even worse, lose or corrupt data when confronted with hundreds of users requiring simultaneous access to their case data. Powercase was originally designed as an enterprise level system, and data integrity and scalability are built into the very foundations of the product. Case data can be split across multiple database servers to spread load, and the entire database structure is configurable to allow you split data storage for cases across multiple database server disks. We use Oracle database technology to provide the best possible performance and our new SOA architecture means that potentially long running jobs such as binder generation can be hosted on completely separate servers. Powercase has been operationally proven in environments with hundreds of users and historical case data including millions of records, and is trusted to deliver accurate and complete information for building cases under the intense scrutiny of the full legal process.

If you have to manage a large and distributed team, it is a constant battle to make sure that everyone is being utilised as well as possible. Powercase provides a complete role and action management system to make sure that you can see at a glance what activities are under way, and keep everyone aware of what they need to do next. It can also be difficult to make sure that everyone has access to the system when they may spend most of their time in the field, but Powercase allows users to submit data entry forms via a secure web service even if they don’t have full VPN access. And you can configure the same web server to automatically roll out changes to the offline data entry forms without the users needing to come back into the office, using Microsoft ClickOnce technology.