why microsoft's matter center...

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.

FEATURES


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 [email protected].

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


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 [email protected].

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 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