Boosting Productivity for Legal and Business Professionals
Microsoft’s Corporate, External, & Legal Affairs (CELA) group developed Matter Center for Office 365, a SharePoint-based document management and collaboration solution. It takes advantage of the enterprise content management capabilities of the SharePoint platform, and offers many additional benefits through the Add-ins in Outlook and Word. This allows the solution to quickly create, find and store documents on predefined projects or matter sites.
Matter Center makes it easier to organize files by matter, find documents, and collaborate on work product without ever leaving Microsoft Word or Outlook. Because Matter Center works with Office 365 and is built on an enterprise-grade cloud platform, these productivity gains can be realized while also reducing risk and cost.
Microsoft CELA has been working closely with partners to improve and augment the solution, and a few partners have implemented or extended Matter Center. Visit our blog post for thoughts on Matter Centers from our partners and information about these deployments. To find out more details regarding our partners and their solutions, visit our Partners page.
Matter Center is being used internally at Microsoft and has generated a lot of interest from other partners and firms. The CELA team is excited to announce we have made Matter Center available broadly through open-sourcing via GitHub. Our team is committed to ongoing contributions as an active member, along with the community, to the solution and its roadmap through Matter Center GitHub repository. In the repository, you will find the full source code, deployment guidance, and additional documentation and resources to help get up and running with Matter Center in your own environments. We have identified several areas of contribution that we welcome from the community to ensure Matter Center meets the needs of customers globally. Partners should use this opportunity to package Matter Center with existing solutions and provide client support service to extend their business.
How Matter Center Benefits Legal and Business Professionals
Matter Center gives legal and business professionals secure access to the information they need – anywhere, anytime, and from any device.
Increase productivity and reduce cost
Matter Center helps reduce the amount of administrative resources needed to support a document management system, enabling legal and business professionals to spend more time working on their cases. Legal and business professionals can securely collaborate, both internally and externally by simultaneously on their documents with other attorneys or clients, and easily track changes with automatic version control. They are able to do more, faster.
Robust matter and document search
Legal and business professionals deal with extensive amounts of information, and Matter Center allows them to easily search and find matters and related documents directly within Word and Outlook. They can track or pin frequently used matters and documents.
Secured access and permission controls
Matter Center automatically applies document attributes, permissions, and version control. In addition, internal and external team members or clients can be granted or excluded access to a matter and its associated documents, thereby reducing the worry about data leakage.
Briefcase in the cloud
Matter Center harnesses OneDrive for Business, providing 1 TB of individual storage which automatically synchronizes personal work documents so they can be accessed online and offline from any device.
Benefits for IT
Matter Center offers a way for IT to maximize the ROI on your existing Microsoft infrastructure with enterprise-grade security, management, and administrative controls.
Maximize ROI on existing IT investments
Adding Matter Center to existing solutions such as SharePoint Online and Exchange Online helps realize greater returns on Office 365 as a productivity suite.
Built on an enterprise-grade platform
Matter Center is powered by Office 365, which includes
enterprise-grade security, management and administrative controls, and is compliant with multiple industry standards. Permission control and taxonomy are centrally managed
and applied automatically, which reduces risk of exposure and cost
for IT.
Higher-adoption rates
Matter Center has an intuitive interface, simplifies processes, and can be accessed directly from Microsoft Office Outlook or Word add-ins that most legal and business professionals use every day. It satisfies the productivity needs of our legal and business professionals while reducing training and support efforts from IT staff.
Partners page to learn more about how you can take advantage of Matter Center through our network of partners.
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