Peer to Peer Magazine

20 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2017 BEST PRACTICES Plug and Play and Succeed: Integrated Adaptive Legal Maer Management Salesforce.com AppExchange was a precursor to the modern App Store made popular by Apple. Salesforce. com made its API very accessible, which richly rewarded customers with the ability to extend the Salesforce.com product to suit their needs. Salesforce. com's contact and calendar management, when combined with its enterprise workflow tools, provides an excellent foundation for modern application architecture. Selecting Applications, Staying Tightly Integrated Fragmenting functionality should not fragment practice data or affect workflow. Be careful by selecting applications designed to work well with other applications. Doing this will prevent workflow and data from becoming siloed by proprietary or obsolete technologies. The make-or-break point in the process will be the ability to bring these functional best-of-breed apps into a cohesive group of related parts moving in unison. This is why selecting a platform based on its ability to weave applications within a unified framework is important. Remember that the business processes within each division of labor will need solutions that best meet individual business needs. For instance, if an organizational unit touches more than a few dozen documents a day, ensure that aention is given to an industry-leading document management solution that accommodates current requirements but also projects continued growth for document storage and retrieval. In addition to the many practical benefits of using independent, best-of-breed soware applications, as opposed to all-in-ones, is the ability to spread your business liability across multiple soware providers. This creates healthy competition among vendors and keeps business goals agile. Integrated solutions will ultimately lead to lower licensing costs by needing to procure licenses only for those users interfacing with the integrated functionality. Plug and Play and Succeed As your firm embraces the future, you likely are looking for new, innovative technology to manage and exceed client demands. Forward-thinking legal and IT professionals should ask themselves: "Are we embracing modern technology? What could our firm do if more of our disparate systems worked together?" The answers lie in the ability to plug and play with integrated, adaptive maer-centric management soware. P2P with the efficiencies of project management. Decisions should go beyond the core requirements of maer management soware. Those needs are easily met by most vendors in the marketplace. Extend the technology evaluation to include flexible project management capabilities that afford knowledge workers an opportunity to utilize their talents. Finally, solutions should have the capacity to extend from within, while also integrating with other applications. Organizations should strategically select soware based on how well it meets the needs of their unique business model. Applications will be selected based on how well they fit specific functional requirements (instead of using an "all-in-one" application). The goal of fragmenting functional requirements into new best- of-breed applications is to create natural productivity enhancements by using soware specifically auned to staff 's functional responsibilities. Execution of the vision can be done incrementally or all at once. Stay focused on core requirements; implement those first. Make initial adjustments sooner rather than later. Sele into a comfortable groove and continue to evaluate new and improved integration capabilities. Loosely coupling the technologies will allow organizations to plug and play applications with great ease. Start with a Platform, Stay Loosely Coupled Modern soware is developed by combining independent applications built on top of commonly developed code. A good example is a Windows application. Within the Windows environment, Microso has already accommodated most of the infrastructure needed for an application designer's generic requirements. This allows the soware architect the freedom to focus on the discrete business requirement of the end user. Fast-forward 20 years; with the advent of cloud computing, soware architects now have a robust set of platforms to choose from. Many legacy maer and practice management applications use the underlying Windows operating system as their platform. Modern development platforms allow soware designers to start with business-level problems. The common, generic requirements should be satisfied by the platform. The most important aspect of the platform is the ability to seamlessly weave functional applications together in a way that suits individual needs beer than an all-in-one app. Some platform vendors know how to do this well. One of the most successful modern cloud- based development platforms is Salesforce.com. The The most important aspect of the platform is the ability to seamlessly weave functional applications together in a way that suits individual needs better than an all-in-one app.

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