Microsoft has created Matter Center for Office 365 to showcase how Office 365 and other Microsoft technologies can be used to store and collaborate on the documents and emails that relate to Matters for a legal department or law firm.
A Matter Center for Office 365 site and its document libraries and folders display nicely in the tree-view of an Office 365 tenancy that is provided by MacroView DMF and MacroView Message. The screen shot below shows an Acme Matter Centre site, with a library called Matter 1001 that contains a number of folders, including an Emails folder. MacroView is displaying the Emails view of this Matter library, and displaying a formatted preview of a selected email.
MacroView DMF running in Outlook, displaying emails that have been saved in a Matter Center by dragging and dropping.
By double-clicking on the item for an email (or right-clicking and choosing Open) you can retrieve that email from the Matter Center and have it opened in Microsoft Outlook on your PC. The email will be exactly as it was when it was saved, including any attachments. You can then reply or forward in the normal Outlook fashion.
Saving Emails to a Matter Center for Office 365
MacroView DMF and MacroView Message let you drag and drop to save emails to a Matter Center. You can save multiple emails in a single drag and drop action. As part of the save, MacroView DMF / Message automatically records the attributes of the email(s) in metadata columns that are standard in a Matter Center. Other metadata such as Matter ID, Matter Name, Client ID, Client Name, Practice Group and Area of Law will also be recorded automatically.
The MacroView software stores the saved emails in MSG files and automatically names these files to prevent duplicate copies of any one email in any one area of the SharePoint document store. Depending on configuration, the saved emails are either marked as Saved to SharePoint or deleted from the Outlook folder.
Zero Profiling Helps with User Adoption
The MacroView software does this saving and auto-recording of metadata without prompting the user. In other words, the metadata capture or profiling dialog is NOT displayed. This is the case even when the Matter Center for Office 365 libraries contain only the out-of-the-box Matter Center content type.
This zero-profiling experience is familiar to users because it is what happens when they drag and drop to save emails from their InBox to a private or public folder in Outlook. Feedback from MacroView DMF / Message customers is that this zero profiling approach is a major positive for user adoption of SharePoint as the way of saving and managing emails. It also helps to improve user adoption of Matter Center.
Beyond Matter Center for Office 365 – MacroView Case and Matter
Many legal Department and law firms find Matter Center for Office 365 useful for collaborating on documents and emails, but that there is a significant gap between the DM functionality provided by Matter Center for Office 365 and the functionality that they are expect based on experience with a traditional DM system. MacroView Case and Matter plugs that gap, while still allowing use of Matter Center for collaboration.
MacroView Case and Matter uses SharePoint to store and search for documents, but it allows users to perform the full range of DM tasks while they continue to work in familiar applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Reader. MacroView Case and Matter is designed to provide the DM functionality and user experience that legal users expect based on their previous experience with systems such as iManage WorkSite and OpenText eDocs. This includes:
- Excellent integration in Microsoft Outlook.
- Consistent experience across Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat and Windows.
- Powerful metadata and content-based searching direct from Outlook, Word and other familiar applications.
- Comprehensive metadata handling, including excellent support for automatic metadata capture.
- Drag-and-drop saving, moving and copying of documents and emails.
- Documents numbered sequentially across the whole document store.
- End-users can easily specify document-level security.
- Familiar options for versioning and saving as new document on closing a document that has been edited in Word or Excel.
- Efficient navigation across very large document stores.
- Convenient access to compliance features such as legal holds and in-place record declaration and to the audit history for a document.
- Support for creating new documents, with automatic saving and profiling.
- Right-click creation of new Matters and archiving of existing matters.
MacroView Case and Matter provides a tree-view display of the SharePoint document store, which can include Matter Center sites hosted on Office 365 in addition to document stores implemented using on-premises SharePoint Server. You can drag and drop to copy or move documents and emails between the on-premises document store and the Matter Center.
You can drag and drop to save one or multiple emails to Matter Center libraries and folders and also to libraries, document sets or folders in an on-premises SharePoint Server. Either way, the emails can be automatically, without prompting the user for metadata.
In a nutshell, MacroView Case and Matter allows Matter Center for Office 365 to be used as part of a complete legal DM solution.
Next Steps
Contact MacroView for more information about our solutions for document management, email management, document drafting and automated document assembly.
