Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1480787
41 I L T A N E T . O R G • What news themes and topics generate the most clicks? • What groups of users are most and least engaged with the intranet and why? • How many clicks does it take our users to find the information they're looking for? #5 – Your intranet isn't fully integrated with back-end systems Having an intranet fully integrated with CRM, financial and document management systems has become a business basic in legal. The main value proposition of an intranet is to help users find important information easily. If the information isn't there or is only partially available, it's difficult for users to do their jobs. All major back-end legal platforms expose APIs that make integration easy. This wasn't always the case, but it is today. Exposing your line of business system data through client and matter pages gives timekeepers a single pane of glass to view the data they need to work productively. Matter pages like the one below provide a consolidated view reducing the need to switch back and forth between systems to get a complete picture of activity. #6 – Your enterprise search solution isn't fully integrated with back-end systems While intranets usually provide easy searching, enterprise search really is a separate solution. As discussed above, intranets must enable easy access to information, and effective searching is a key piece of that puzzle. Enterprise search initiatives used to be big expensive projects. However, search platforms have become somewhat commoditized in recent years with robust offerings from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other major players in the space. Platforms like Microsoft's Azure Cognitive Search offer artificial intelligence and machine learning features out of the box. AI enrichment, for example, enables capabilities like document and image cracking, which crawls and indexes any text contained therein. There are also ways to expose the native search capabilities of your document management system via an API call from your intranet in real time. This reduces the need for third-party solutions to recrawl and index your entire DMS, which is always a heavy lift. Firms have several quick, low-effort options to expose search capabilities to users that don't involve recreating a search index your DM platform already built and manages.