If your law firm has moved or is planning to move to Microsoft 365 you’re probably well aware of the time and energy required to make that transition happen. Migrating to Exchange Online can be a massive project by itself because of how critical messaging is and how much infrastructure it touches. Moving SharePoint from on prem to online can be an even bigger project than Exchange if you have a heavily customized environment and choose to migrate a lot of content. Because of how much it takes to get to Microsoft 365, the fact is that you’re going to be there for a long time … possibly forever.
Microsoft 365 is one of the company’s most strategic platforms so new capabilities are being added every day. As such, you want to take advantage of as many of those new capabilities as possible. The best way to maximize Microsoft 365 capabilities is to give the platform access to your line of business (LOB) data. Building workflows in Power Automate becomes infinitely more useful if you can access your financial data, for example. You could build a workflow that says “when any attorney in the firm bills less than 80 hours in a month send an email to the practice manager to ensure that time keeper is logging hours properly”. Or you could build one that says “when any client has an invoice that exceeds 90 days past due create a task in Microsoft To Do for the lead attorney to inquire about payment status.” The possibilities are endless.
In addition to more useful workflows, you can also build low code applications with Power Apps using LOB data without the help of your IT department. Building a mobile ready app to handle new matter intake, manage PTO requests, request a new laptop, etc. is a piece of cake when you have access to the right data. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t provide an easy way to access that data out of the box. Exposing data from iManage, NetDocs, Aderant, 3E, and other law firm applications requires the deployment of a service to broker the information between those systems and Microsoft 365. You can ask your IT department for help doing that or you can look at solutions that provide those capabilities out of the box like Infodash.
Infodash is an innovative legal intranet/extranet platform that runs on Microsoft 365 and exposes data from all the back-end systems law firms use. Our product is designed to enable content owners to build intranet and extranet pages on their own without the help of IT. This enablement expands beyond just the intra/extranet by exposing LOB data to all the major Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, Power Automate, Power Apps, etc. Please schedule a discovery call with us to learn more here!