Peer to Peer Magazine

10 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2016 BEST PRACTICES 5 Questions To Ask Before Implementing Matter Center for Office 365 5 Questions To Ask Before Implementing Maer Center For Office 365 Maer Center for Office 365 is a great development, but before you get too excited, there are five critical questions derived from real-world experience that your organization needs to ask before jumping in. Is Your Organization Ready To Embrace and Invest in Office 365? Maer Center is powered by Office 365; most of the features that make it so compelling are Office 365 features and capabilities. Maer Center is more valuable to organizations if they already use as much of the underlying platform as possible, meaning recent versions of Office (such as Outlook and Word 2016), Exchange (Exchange Online) and Skype for Business. Most enterprise customers are moving to Office 365 or taking advantage of the platform. It is common for legal departments to be taking steps in that direction at the broader organization level (although maybe not as rapidly as the department desires). This is important because understanding the timeline of key workloads will have a big influence on your Maer Center planning — and in determining if Maer Center would be a good fit. Many law firms currently use SharePoint to power their intranets, extranets and portals. Intranets built with Office 365 oen work beer on mobile devices, making it more accessible from anywhere and ensuring it continually receives new features and updates based on the innovations Microso is adding into the service. An Office 365-powered intranet is more compelling than a traditional one because of the improved experiences and capabilities for communication, collaboration and social interactions. Here are examples of the benefits of an intranet powered by Office 365: » Set your videos to open from the Office 365 Video Portal, which dynamically encodes and adjusts so video size and resolution fit your users' devices and bandwidth 1 Microsoft's Office 365 Matter Center is a document management and collaboration solution created specifically with law firms and legal departments in mind. Many customers are already experiencing how Matter Center helps people work anywhere, anytime and from any device, and some have begun to see greater possibilities with a little well-planned development effort on Office 365 or within Office 2013/2016 using add-ins and Azure (the code and solution are updated regularly on GitHub). by Richard Harbridge

• Cover