Digital White Papers

31 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER OFFICE 365 Using Office 365 as Legal DMS All members of a group get: » A mailbox and calendar » A planner (a very sophisticated task list) » A OneNote notebook » A SharePoint site collection Providing centralized content allows users to have conversations stored in the group email mailbox, schedule appointments that all group members can see, create, assign and track tasks inside the group planner; utilize OneNote notebooks for notes, audio and video, and email directly from Outlook in an indexed and searchable manner. Most importantly, users can store files inside the SharePoint site collection. Extending Groups for Use as a Document or Matter Management Solution Considering all that Groups brings to the party, it is natural to consider how it could be used for your document/content storage solution. The immediate cost benefits to leveraging Office 365 as a document management system (DMS) solution are clear, but where do you begin? By default, anyone can create an Office 365 group using Outlook, but this is not how you want the process to work; your firm needs governance over the process and systemic design and controls in place. Fortunately Office 365 gives you broad control over both who can create a group and what is deployed and accessible for them by running a PowerShell script. The process for proper deployment of a group begins with understanding how your enterprise organizes its work product. Typically law firms and corporate legal departments organize work around maers. Emails and documents related to the maer must be filed with the rest of the maer knowledge on a file share or in a DMS. Using a maer-centered Office 365 group, we can utilize the SharePoint site collection as a DMS. This use of Groups will render older, legacy systems which require multiple platforms and third party integrations obsolete — costs, ease of deployment and end user satisfaction will drive the firm to the more integrated and modern Office 365 platform. Conforming Groups through Provisioning Firms need to create Groups in a replicable and consistent manner for firm-wide use. Microso provides an easy way for single users to create Groups but not for larger scale production, so you will need to utilize a provisioning service to properly deploy Groups for firm-wide utilization. This does not differ from any other professional-grade DMS, including legacy systems. When using an automatic provisioning service to create Groups, you will need to give the service the usual relevant information like maer code and name, client code and name and perhaps even maer type. This information is required for text fields level data, infrastructure and best practice content database design. A best practice is to have a provisioning service that gets this information from a financial/practice management system such as Aderant, Elite, Clio, etc. If your firm does not use such a system, best practice provisioning services can also utilize the Microso Maer Center or poll data from many exported data sources. The provisioning service will be the starting point for a new maer, whether or not it is an end-user-friendly service such as the The process for proper deployment of a group begins with understanding how your enterprise organizes its work product.

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