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PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA
Why Microsoft's Matter Center
Matters
What is Office 365?
Office 365 is more than a product — it is a brand name that encompasses a collection of products and services that Microsoft bundles on a subscription basis. Some of these products are traditional software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Other parts are cloud-based, such as OneDrive for Business. Microsoft recently announced this service would provide an unlimited amount of file-based cloud storage for each user. Office 365 is available at several configurations and price points. Hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Yammer are available in higher-end packages, as are tools for compliance, e-discovery and business intelligence, plus services such as spam filtering.
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The legal document management system landscape has not changed much
in the past 10 years. The major players
introduced a few new features and plenty
of bug fixes. Some cloud-based vendors
have seen moderate success and seem to
be gaining momentum. There was some
stir about SharePoint 2010 being a possible
candidate to dethrone those major DMS
players, but it never saw widespread
adoption. Even firms not completely satisfied
with their DMS felt they had no better
option, and that it would take a significant
change in the market to make them consider
a DMS replacement. That’s why the big news
from ILTA’s 2014 conference in Nashville was
Microsoft’s announcement of their own DMS:
Matter Center for Office 365.
Matter Center is a document
management system built on top of
SharePoint and Office 365. This is Microsoft’s
first product geared specifically to the legal
vertical — a niche it had previously left
to partners. Ultimately, Matter Center is
designed to replace the traditional legal DMS
with a solution that tightly integrates with
the growing variety of Office 365 applications
and services.
At its core, Matter Center leverages
SharePoint to handle its back-end search
and storage, and it provides a matter-centric
interface for the front end. Users can save
and retrieve documents and email, much like
with any other commercially available DMS,
but Microsoft has seized the opportunity to
offer functionality that meets the needs of
today’s legal market.
TECHNICAL OVERVIEWAt press time, Matter Center has only been
provided to select partners and clients, so
technical details are still scarce and subject
to change. Matter Center is not a standalone
product and has several key integration
points and dependencies: SharePoint 2013,
Exchange 2013, OneDrive for Business
and Office 2013 (including Word, Outlook
access, but the cloud app controls in Word
and Outlook could lose some degree of
functionality without cloud connectivity.
WORKING WITH MATTER CENTERPart of Microsoft’s marketing around Matter
Center is that it grew out of the needs of
its Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) group.
While this message should underscore the
idea that the product is built for lawyers,
it also brings up the point that lawyers in
a corporate setting work differently than
lawyers in a law firm. Depending on the area
of law in which they practice, an attorney
can have hundreds of open matters at
one time, needing access to all of them.
Consequently, there has been debate as to
whether Matter Center’s user interface is
aligned with the needs of today’s law firms.
Microsoft has steered away from listing
matters in Outlook’s left-most pane, where
users are used to seeing them listed with
their email folders. Instead, they have opted
to use a grid layout which might not lend
itself well to the traditional hierarchical
client-matter structure.
Instead of merely mimicking the
interface of the major DMS players,
Microsoft has elected to change the
paradigm entirely. Filing an email, for
example, takes place in the same pane as the
content of that email, rather than via drag-
and-drop or a right-click menu option. These
kinds of changes might require retraining for
existing DMS users. In a conversation with
John Anderson, Chief Information Officer at
Shook, Hardy and Bacon, he described the
iterative process through which Microsoft
collected feedback from half a dozen law
firms over the last several months to refine
the user interface. Anderson is confident that
“while the user interface is a departure from
the past, it will be a welcome change from
the conventional approach.”
Another interesting feature of the
Matter Center interface is the Mail Cart,
About the AuthorJoe Davis is the Applications Manager at McCarter & English, LLP. He has spent 15 years in legal IT, the last
eight of which have been in his current role. Joe is a member of ILTA’s Enterprise Content Management
Peer Group Steering Committee, and he recently published an article titled “Five DMS Changes for the
Next Five Years” in ILTA’s ECM white paper. Joe received an MBA from NJIT. Prior to his IT career, Joe was a
teacher, an entrepreneur and a DJ in a flea market. Contact him at jdavis@mccarter.com.
and OneNote). In order to run Matter
Center, your firm will likely need all these
products, with at least some portion of
this infrastructure running in Office 365.
Microsoft has committed to supporting
hybrid environments with Exchange and
SharePoint on-premise, but it is not yet
clear what other parts of the infrastructure
can be run on-premise and what must run
in the cloud.
The front end of Matter Center offers
a significant departure from Microsoft’s
traditional approach. Nishan DeSilva, Senior
Director of Technology and Strategy at
Microsoft, says: “We are running our entire
Matter Center solution today with no code on
the desktop so we can be cross-platform and
we can write on any device. With the way we
are looking at innovation and how we want to
evolve, we feel very confident that this is the
future.” Microsoft is quick to point out there
is already a native iPad app, and an Android
app is in development.
THE “CLOUD APP” MODELPrior to Microsoft Office 2013, extending the
capabilities of any Office product typically
involved using add-ins (sometimes referred
to as plug-ins), which were installed on each
user’s computer. Matter Center uses the
cloud app model to extend Office rather than
add-ins, leveraging the same underlying
technologies used to build Web applications
such as HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
Apps like Matter Center have a very light
footprint because they do not install directly
on the user’s computer. Instead, they run in
the context of a browser control, so they can
be maintained and updated easily. This will
go a long way toward avoiding the “blame
game” sometimes played by vendors when
troubleshooting issues.
While management and deployment
become simplified with the cloud app
model, external dependencies expose a
potential downside. OneDrive for Business
allows users to synchronize files for offline
PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENTMicrosoft has stated there are no plans for
storing content outside of SharePoint or
Exchange, so in order to fully embrace the
Matter Center product, a law firm or legal
department would be using SharePoint as
their DMS. The legal vertical has some of the
most demanding DMS requirements of any
industry, and there are questions about how
well SharePoint will scale in response to the
heavy legal workload. Large law firms have
tens of millions of documents and can have
several versions of each one in their DMS.
Matter Center and SharePoint must handle
a document payload of that magnitude to
be considered for midsize and large firms.
Many of the law firms that have managed to
make SharePoint work as a DMS have also
leveraged third-party tools to help make
the platform viable. Handshake and Epona
have already announced support for Matter
Center, and others are sure to follow.
OFFICE 365 INTEGRATIONBecause Matter Center is integrated with
Office 365, users will have the ability to
leverage all the collaborative features
the platform offers, including workflows,
simultaneous co-authoring of documents,
the ability to “follow” content and integration
with Yammer, OneNote for Business and
Lync. Law firms historically have not been
early adopters of new technology, and
several aspects of Office 365 might fall
outside of a firm’s comfort zone, such as
Yammer’s enterprise social network features.
It will also force firms to decide how ready
they are to embrace the cloud.
Those who were able to attend
SharePoint MVP Scot Hillier’s keynote at
ILTA’s 2014 SharePoint Symposium heard
the message that Office 365 will replace
on-premise installations of SharePoint,
Exchange, Lync, etc. over time. The
discussion among thought leaders in the
FEATURESAbout the Author
Ted Theodoropoulos is the President of Acrowire, an IT consulting firm specializing in technology solu-
tions for legal services. After 10+ years in several positions with companies ranging from Microsoft
to Bank of America, Ted pursued his passion and business full-time, driving tangible business results
through technology. Acrowire increases productivity and eliminates inefficiencies, ultimately accelerating
firm growth through SharePoint development, software development, business process improvement,
virtualization and cloud services. Contact Ted at ted@acrowire.com.
which allows a user to attach multiple documents from different locations and send them
through a OneDrive link directly from Outlook. This experience differs from the way a user
would attach documents from different locations on their local hard drive or a network share.
The interface for the Mail Cart uses a shopping cart paradigm, so users can add documents
from different locations without opening multiple dialog windows as they would with
traditional email attachments. Sending a collection of documents as a link rather than as email
attachments will keep unnecessary network load off the mail servers and facilitate collaboration
when the email is intended for multiple recipients. Anyone familiar with the product
marketplace knows that none of these capabilities are new. What is new, however, is the ability
to present them to the end user in a way that feels like native Outlook without plug-ins.
http://blogs.office.com/2014/08/18/boost-law-firm-productivity-matter-center-office-365
SharePoint 2013 introduced a very useful feature called a Hover Panel, which allows users
to preview a document by hovering the mouse over it in a list of search results. This feature
eliminates the need to download and open a document just to get a quick look at the contents.
Matter Center leverages a Hover Panel natively in both Outlook and Word to help the end user
narrow down search results. This approach will be a significant productivity booster, since
navigating between documents and matters efficiently is at the core of what Matter Center brings
to the table.
Message
Search (e.g. matter name, matter id, keyword)
Drag and drop items to folders on the right:
Items Folders
Cycle patent.docx Filing
Post Filing
Pre FilingDocuments for Cycle Patent m...
You can also drag and drow files from your desktop.
Matter Center Beta
Cycle patent.docx (15 KB)
PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA
peer topeer
WINTER 2014Issue 4 Volume 30
Peer to Peer Magazine is the quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association. Find out more at iltanet.org.
Read this issue on the go! A digital version is available for your tablet, smartphone and computer. Find more information online at iltanet.org/p2p.
ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS BOUCHER, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
WHY MICROSOFT’S MATTER CENTER MATTERS 32
I SEE, YOU SEE, WE ALL SEE WITH UC 44
LYNC | SOCIAL MEDIA | THE CLOUD | WEBSITE REDESIGNS | SURFACE | AND MOREMA
GAZIN
E
FEWER CONNECTORS
MORE CONNECTIONS
This article was first published in ILTA’s
Winter 2014 issue of Peer to Peer titled “Fewer
Connectors, More Connections” and is reprinted
here with permission. For more information
about ILTA, visit www.iltanet.org.
industry has shifted from debating if that transition will take
place to debating when it will take place.
When we discussed with John Anderson how the legal
industry has been hesitant to embrace cloud computing and how
that might affect Matter Center adoption, he agreed with the
notion that running SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, etc. on-premise
will soon be a thing of the past. He also noted that leveraging
the Matter Center in a hybrid model is an incremental step
toward the cloud, which could be beneficial. He also highlighted
the success of other cloud-based DMS vendors in legal, like
NetDocuments, as evidence that Microsoft is not alone in
moving away from on-premise solutions. Anderson also pointed
out that SharePoint is already a strategic platform for many law
firms including Shook, Hardy and Bacon, and leveraging that
existing investment for document management purposes is an
attractive proposition.
MOVING FORWARDThe ideas behind Matter Center represent the first significant
attempt at a DMS that does not hamper the functionality of
Office applications and mobility. The legal vertical should
be pleased — the major DMS vendors will need to be more
innovative in order to compete. It is still too early to tell how well
Matter Center will perform in real-world scenarios. There are
sure to be revisions before it is released to the public. Microsoft
is up against vendors who are well-entrenched in this space, but
it has the resources to deliver a quality experience. Applications,
services and document storage are moving to the cloud, and if
Microsoft has its way, Matter Center will be the best way for the
legal vertical to manage it all.
FEATURES
Check out more on why Microsoft’s Matter Center matters at mattercentermatters.com
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