The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/230349
Ted Theodoropoulos is the President of Acrowire, an IT consulting firm specializing in technology solutions for legal services. After 10+ years in several corporate positions ranging from Microsoft to Bank of America, Ted pursued his passion and business full-time, driving tangible business results through technology. Contact Ted at ted@acrowire.com. A NEW LEVEL OF SEARCH SharePoint 2013 hosts a variety of new features that provide significant value to the legal profession. New capabilities in the way we organize, share, discover, build and manage content have been developed. While not every new feature is perfect, this release will add significant value to the overall user experience for most firms. Without a doubt, the improvements to search and the new collaboration tools are the most impressive enhancements to SharePoint 2013 in a legal context. "Intent-driven search" was a term popularized by Yahoo in the early 2000s as a way to provide users a method of focusing their search results without the complexity of an advanced search interface. SharePoint 2013 has adopted this approach and now offers a much more robust platform for searching internal and external content. Additional improved search features include: Analytics: Analytics are now a part of SharePoint 2013, having a direct impact on a user's search results. These integrated analytics create more relevant search results as the platform learns user intent based on prior search behavior. Search is now a fully customizable experience providing suggestions for related documents, sites and even people that the user might also want to follow. FAST Integration: In 2008, Microsoft acquired the company behind FAST Enterprise Search and offered the technology as an add-on to SharePoint 2010. FAST provides search capabilities to a wide variety of sources such as websites, file shares, Exchange folders, Lotus Notes, etc. The technology underlying FAST has been seamlessly integrated into SharePoint 2013, bringing new search capabilities to the end user. Unlike SharePoint 2010, this technology comes at no additional cost. User Experience: The search user experience has been enhanced with: • Hover panels, which enable users to preview content directly from the browser Peer to Peer 65