Deployment
On-premises or cloud. Subscription or perpetual license.
Most jury management software is sold one way: cloud-hosted, on a subscription. EmpanelJMS is available on your terms — hosted by us or installed on your own servers, purchased as a subscription or licensed outright.
Two deployments, one platform.
The software is identical. What changes is who owns the hardware, who patches it, and where juror records physically live. Neither option is a reduced version of the other, and neither costs you features.
Cloud-hosted by IJS
We host, patch, monitor, and back up the system on dedicated U.S.-based infrastructure. Your court needs nothing but a browser. Updates, certificate renewal, disaster-recovery testing and availability monitoring are ours to manage.
Best when the court has limited IT staff or prefers to keep infrastructure off its own books.
On-premises, on your servers
EmpanelJMS installs on hardware your county owns and controls, inside your own network. Juror data never leaves your infrastructure. You keep custody, your IT department keeps its existing backup and security posture, and we support the application the same as any hosted installation.
Best when policy, statute, or a security review requires county-controlled data, or where an existing data center is already in place.
The choice is yours, and it is not permanent. Courts that begin on-premises can move to the cloud later, and courts in the cloud can bring the system in-house, without changing platforms or losing history. Tell us your constraint and we will tell you plainly what each option involves.
How you buy it is a separate decision
Where the software runs and how your court pays for it are two different questions, and jury software is usually sold as though they were one. EmpanelJMS is offered both ways.
Subscription
An annual fee covering the license, updates, and support, with no capital outlay to get started. It keeps the cost in an operating budget line rather than requiring a capital appropriation.
Because a multi-year subscription depends on funds being appropriated each year, our agreement includes a non-appropriation clause: if your county does not fund the next fiscal year, you can end the term without penalty. That is standard for government buyers, and we do not treat it as an exception.
Perpetual license
The court purchases the software outright and owns the right to use that version indefinitely, with an annual maintenance fee covering updates and support. This suits a court with capital funds available now, or one that cannot add a recurring line item to its operating budget.
It also changes the risk picture. A perpetually licensed court is not exposed to a renewal it cannot fund, because the software it bought keeps running. For courts that want that assurance in writing, source code escrow can be arranged as part of the agreement, with release to the county on defined events such as the vendor ceasing operations.
The two decisions are independent
Hosting and licensing are not locked together. A hosted system can be licensed outright, and an on-premises installation can be bought on an annual subscription. Whichever combination fits your budget and your IT policy, tell us and we will quote it. What we will not do is force a purchasing model on you because it is the only one we support.
Why a county might require on-premises
The reasons are rarely about technology. A county IT policy may prohibit resident data leaving county-controlled infrastructure. A state statute or records-retention rule may require court records to be held on government hardware. A security review may have concluded that juror personally identifiable information should not sit with a third party. Or a county may simply have a data center it already runs well and sees no reason to pay someone else to duplicate it.
None of those are unreasonable positions, and none of them should mean a court is stuck on software from 1998. That is the practical effect of a cloud-only market: the counties with the strictest data policies end up with the oldest systems.
What on-premises actually requires of your court
A Windows server your IT department provisions and maintains, SQL Server, and a network path for jurors to reach the public-facing components. Your IT department applies operating system patches on its normal schedule and keeps the system inside its existing backup and disaster-recovery posture. We support the application itself the same way we support a hosted installation, including updates, defect fixes, and the same people answering the phone.
What it does not require is a dedicated administrator. Day-to-day work — adding a location, changing a notification schedule, adjusting pay rates, editing a summons template — is done by court staff through the application, not by a developer or a database administrator.
Moving between them later
The decision is not permanent. Courts that begin on-premises can move to the cloud, and courts in the cloud can bring the system in-house, without changing platforms and without losing history. It is the same application and the same database schema, so a migration moves data and configuration rather than rebuilding them. Courts change IT policy, budgets change, and a deployment decision made this year should not lock a court out of a different decision in five years.
Tell us the constraint you are working within — a policy, a statute, a security review, or a budget line — and we will tell you plainly what each option would involve for your court. If the honest answer is that hosted is simpler for you, we will say so.