Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/37773
DELIVERING WORLD-CLASS EXTRANETS thousands of active extranets at any point in time with no impact on the IT department. You should plan on having this level of success within your firm and find ways to encourage it. • Future Needs. How your firm uses extranets today will be different from how they’re used one year from now (or sooner), and your extranet solution must be capable of accommodating your users’ ever- expanding requirements. For example, today your typical user might be an attorney that only needs a simple document repository on a merger and acquisition deal or a litigation case. In six months, that same attorney could very well be requesting an extranet with collaborative capabilities to permit the client to make modifications to the documents, version control, full security options in which some documents can be view-only (restrictions on downloading, printing or copying from the document), calendaring, and a custom closing checklist application that manages the workflow on the deal and ensures proper project management. The only difference is that the user has become comfortable with the technology and wants more out of it. If you didn’t choose a flexible extranet solution, you might not be able to accommodate these growing needs, or worse yet, your IT department might begin to suffer from resource constraints because you are consistently chasing these feature requests with custom development resources. The best extranet solutions offer your users the ability to create custom features with no software development required. This attribute permits your attorneys who have clients asking for special features — such as project management tools, case trackers, questionnaires, or contract management tools — to have one built by their paralegal within minutes or hours and with no software development resources required. It provides a firm with the ultimate flexibility to meet its diverse needs without having to invest additional dollars, time or IT resources. • Custom Branding. I cannot overstate the importance of marketing. Firms who maximize the benefit they gain from extranets use them to differentiate themselves. One of the ways that they do this is to make sure the look and feel of the extranet matches the look and feel of the firm’s public website, making the extranet an obvious firm offering. In addition, many firms will place a client login on the public website to make it easy for external users to find the login page of the extranet. This provides the firm with the ability to use its branded solution as a vehicle for differentiating the firm from other firms with which it might compete. • Document Management/Bulk Document Uploads. If your firm uses a document management system, your users will expect to be able to send large numbers of documents to the extranet directly from within the document management system or Windows file manager. If your extranet solution does not provide this, it will not be used effectively because your users will view the effort to upload documents to the system as too burdensome. • Custom Reporting. This is another requirement that most firms do not initially www.iltanet.org Portal Platforms 9