The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/448505
PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGA ZINE OF ILTA DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT Microsoft has stated there are no plans for storing content outside of SharePoint or Exchange, so in order to fully embrace the Matter Center product, a law firm or legal department would be using SharePoint as their DMS. The legal vertical has some of the most demanding DMS requirements of any industry, and there are questions about how well SharePoint will scale in response to the heavy legal workload. Large law firms have tens of millions of documents and can have several versions of each one in their DMS. Matter Center and SharePoint must handle a document payload of that magnitude to be considered for midsize and large firms. Many of the law firms that have managed to make SharePoint work as a DMS have also leveraged third-party tools to help make the platform viable. Handshake and Epona have already announced support for Matter Center, and others are sure to follow. OFFICE 365 INTEGRATION Because Matter Center is integrated with Office 365, users will have the ability to leverage all the collaborative features the platform offers, including workflows, simultaneous co-authoring of documents, the ability to "follow" content and integration with Yammer, OneNote for Business and Lync. Law firms historically have not been early adopters of new technology, and several aspects of Office 365 might fall outside of a firm's comfort zone, such as Yammer's enterprise social network features. It will also force firms to decide how ready they are to embrace the cloud. Those who were able to attend SharePoint MVP Scot Hillier's keynote at ILTA's 2014 SharePoint Symposium heard the message that Office 365 will replace on-premise installations of SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, etc. over time. The discussion among thought leaders in the 36 FEATURES About the Author Ted Theodoropoulos is the President of Acrowire, an IT consulting firm specializing in technology solutions for legal services. After 10+ years in several positions with companies ranging from Microsoft to Bank of America, Ted pursued his passion and business full-time, driving tangible business results through technology. Acrowire increases productivity and eliminates inefficiencies, ultimately accelerating firm growth through SharePoint development, software development, business process improvement, virtualization and cloud services. Contact Ted at ted@acrowire.com. which allows a user to attach multiple documents from different locations and send them through a OneDrive link directly from Outlook. This experience differs from the way a user would attach documents from different locations on their local hard drive or a network share. The interface for the Mail Cart uses a shopping cart paradigm, so users can add documents from different locations without opening multiple dialog windows as they would with traditional email attachments. Sending a collection of documents as a link rather than as email attachments will keep unnecessary network load off the mail servers and facilitate collaboration when the email is intended for multiple recipients. Anyone familiar with the product marketplace knows that none of these capabilities are new. What is new, however, is the ability to present them to the end user in a way that feels like native Outlook without plug-ins. http://blogs.office.com/2014/08/18/boost-law-firm-productivity-matter-center-office-365 SharePoint 2013 introduced a very useful feature called a Hover Panel, which allows users to preview a document by hovering the mouse over it in a list of search results. This feature eliminates the need to download and open a document just to get a quick look at the contents. Matter Center leverages a Hover Panel natively in both Outlook and Word to help the end user narrow down search results. This approach will be a significant productivity booster, since navigating between documents and matters efficiently is at the core of what Matter Center brings to the table. Message Search (e.g. matter name, matter id, keyword) Drag and drop items to folders on the right: Items Folders Cycle patent.docx Filing Post Filing Pre Filing Documents for Cycle Patent m... You can also drag and drow files from your desktop. Matter Center Beta Cycle patent.docx (15 KB)