Digital White Papers

22 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER OFFICE 365 Geing Ready: The Lowdown on Office 365 Compatibility of Office for every device or every time soware is delivered via a different delivery model. Does this affect whether your supporting soware is compatible with Office 365 in that instance? The answer is yes, it does. The downside of Office 365's fantastic flexibility is that the other, less flexible programs you may want to use with Office 365 could struggle to keep up. How to Respond To the Challenge In reality, most firms have developed a smorgasbord of supported soware over several years that add value when they work in concert with a Microso application or applications. Typically this will be soware, which compares documents, numbers paragraphs, files email messages, dials telephones or manages documents in a document management system. Some of these programs will have been developed in-house and some will have been bought from soware or legal soware vendors. Are they going to be compatible with Office 365? It probably depends on the specific instance of Word, Outlook, Excel or PowerPoint being used, which, as discussed, will vary by device and how it got onto the device. That might be an unsatisfactory answer, but at least it's accurate. What legal firm CIOs must do now is see this as an opportunity to revisit and renew their soware application estate. What To Do Now Perhaps the first thing that CIOs must do is accept that change is coming. Aorneys will increasingly expect to work on a range of devices, in a range of places, and at a range of times. Some firms might have adopted a particular model whereby they have immunity from the march of mobility, but my guess is they will be few and far between. For everyone else, Office 365 will undoubtedly help enable work anytime, anywhere and on any device. Having accepted the coming reality, the next thing to do is to make it work. Those firms that do will grab a certain degree of first- mover competitive advantage. They'll be ahead of the firms moving to an Office 365 model at some future date when it may become the only option that Microso provides. That probably won't happen for many years, but it will eventually. So how do you make Office 365 work for your firm? I suggest that the first thing you do is assess what supporting soware you have; then determine how, and if it's being used and how much you need to keep it. There's clearly no point in going through the pain of changing something that delivers lile value or is seldom used. For everyone else, Office 365 will undoubtedly help enable work anytime, anywhere and on any device.

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