Blog – Repstor

Structure and routine: the antidote to stress and chaos – and the key to effective matter management for corporate legal teams

The ability to default to agreed rules and standards can be reassuringly grounding, maintaining order and control when usual business conditions and processes have been disrupted. And now, more than ever, corporate legal teams are realising the importance of formal structure in matter management, especially where colleagues may be working off site.

The calming order of consistent filing practices

Where previously lawyers have self-governed, looking after their own work and logging developments in their own way, a more standardised and systematic approach encourages professionals to record matter activity and to file emails and documents in a more formal and consistent way.

This has all sorts of operational benefits for the whole team – as well as for business clients. As long as it is made easy and intuitive for lawyers to record matter status information and file the latest correspondence and documents properly as they go, legal operations will be able to monitor progress – and professionals will be able to locate and pick up each other’s work more readily as and when required.

This contrasts with common ad-hoc methods which typically see individuals each recording information in their own way in their own folders – on their own local hard drive, within their email account, or somewhere on a shared drive (not always immediately discoverable if each lawyer uses their own filing protocol, and if remote access depends on a cumbersome VPN connection). This haphazard behaviour often sees lawyers having to set aside three hours on a Friday to catch up with filing, and trying to decipher their scant notes to report back on matter progress at team meetings.

Capitalising on existing investments in Microsoft 365

So what is holding teams back from formalising and streamlining matter management – something that can substantially hamper their productivity and efficiency?

Well, historically, corporate legal teams have felt badly served by IT solutions. Any systems with a legal leaning have tended to be designed predominantly for private law firms. More generic document management systems, on the other hand, have failed to cater for the specific demands of a legal setting. Although Microsoft SharePoint may have been readily available within the organisation for instance, without the right IT support in-house legal teams may have struggled to know how best to incorporate the repository as part of matter management.

But these barriers no longer apply. Repstor, a Microsoft Gold Partner, specialises in optimising Microsoft 365 for legal use – particularly in end-to-end matter lifecycle management. Using a secure, proven, cloud-based software platform that most organisations have already invested in, we help corporate legal teams standardise and transform the way they log, manage, store and access their work, whatever their location.

This means that they can perform at their most productive wherever professionals are.

Reducing resistance

As recording and filing become instinctive and ‘in stream’, and matter archives become pooled, professionals are able to look up previous case files for precedents – and to save reinventing the wheel. If a lawyer isn’t available for whatever reason, a colleague with access rights can call up the latest files, notes and email correspondence, to check the current status of a matter and, if appropriate, progress it in their absence. At a time when colleagues are not conveniently within ear shot at the next desk, easy look-up and the means of intuitive, ad-hoc collaboration matter more than ever.

When Eversheds Sutherland adopted our technology, making Microsoft 365 and Outlook its default platform for matter management, it found it was saving an hour of fee-earner time per day, just from chasing matter updates, finding the latest versions of documents, and switching between different systems to get the job done.

Legal professionals have found the Repstor/Microsoft 365 approach to matter management ‘transformational’, according to the company’s Legal Operations Manager. Today the company has 800 open matters being handled through the system, and lawyers are marvelling at how they ever coped without it.

Adding visibility for the business

Business clients benefit greatly from systematic matter management, too – especially where they have access to self-service portal and/or automatic notification system which updates them on the evolving status of a matter (with the added benefit that lawyers no longer have to service routine queries). Reporting is made effortless too, as metadata about matters is captured continuously across the lifecycle of an engagement.

A further considerable benefit of going down the Microsoft 365 route is that the platform is being updated all the time with the latest technology advances – including artificial intelligence and workflow automation – so as a choice for matter management it is reassuringly futureproof.

We recently delivered a short webinar ‘Transforming Legal Operations with Microsoft 365’ featuring a presentation by IATA’s assistant general counsel, Dane Clapson. Catch the webinar on demand here

Leigh Smith, Principal Consultant, Corporate Legal, Repstor

Scheduling Teams file administration: maintaining the authority of the main system of record

Teams is a natural hub for collaborating on client engagements, projects and legal matters. This is fine as long as important dialogues and updated documents are routinely filed back to a central repository providing a ‘single source of truth’. Here’s how to achieve that.

I’ve noted in previous articles about Teams that, if companies can establish reliable integration with their chosen systems of record or document management system, the Microsoft platform becomes a very powerful workspace. It can now be a space where client engagements, projects or matters can be discussed and progressed very efficiently, irrespective of where co-workers are located.

This integration is important to close the content management loop. It helps ensure consistent and compliant filing – so that the latest documents and relevant discussions are easy to find again, and so that there is no confusion over the current status of the client work.

Repstor for Teams™ supports all popular scenarios for professional services content filing, and for core systems integration. If organizations want to default to Microsoft and Teams for all document management (for legal use, for instance), we can support that and keep everything organized, traceable and compliant. But if the priority is to maintain consistent use of an existing system of record, while benefitting from the easy everyday usability of Teams, here’s how we can help maintain information compliance – without this becoming an administrative burden for users.

Flexible control

Rather than discouraging people from storing documents in the Files area of Teams, we make it possible for co-workers to keep documents there while they are working and collaborating in Teams, while making sure that content is saved off to the main system of record automatically. We provide a range of controls so managers can determine whether this happens immediately, every hour, or once a matter or engagement comes to an end. These flexible controls mean that knowledge workers can operate in a way that’s convenient and easy for them, but without creating longer-term information management issues.

Housekeeping

We also provide the ability to schedule the clean-up and deletion of Teams-based content, so that documents and message threads do not linger indefinitely in redundant ‘teams’. Again, this enables greater freedom for colleagues to be productive and efficient in their work, without the worry about information housekeeping when the given client activity has ended.

Synchronization

When new documents are created and added to the core system of record or document management system, Repstor for Teams makes these readily discoverable in Teams. Thanks to the deep integration we provide between Teams and back-office records, we make it easy for authorized members of a current team to search directly for any content linked to a current matter/engagement/project, and bring it through to the current team area for discussion or editing. Importantly, we close the loop here too, ensuring that any updates to those documents that are made in Teams are reflected in the main system of record.

Filing relevant chat threads

In addition to any documents held in the Files area of Teams, we also provide easy controls to enable significant chat threads to be captured and stored to matter or engagement-related records.

Again, these controls can be adapted to suit each organization’s particular needs. Repstor for Teams can extract entire topics that are deemed to be important, or look for threads that have been tagged as something to be saved. This selective conversation capture ensures that peripheral chats with no value are not stored.

Once a topic or thread has been tagged as important and ‘to be saved’, any additions to that conversation will be saved automatically. This is all transparent to participants, so they know a particular conversation thread will be captured and stored.

By providing flexible, automated controls like these, Repstor makes it easy for professional services teams to work in the way that feels the most natural to them, wherever they are, while maintaining information compliance continuity.

Microsoft Cortex paves the way for AI-enabled knowledge management

If ever there was a reason to swap legacy legal document management systems for mainstream Microsoft 365-based matter management, this is it.

The potential for artificial intelligence, and machine learning in particular, to transform enterprise content management has been clearly identified. And no sector stands to gain more from this capability than the professional services world, which is so closely bound with hefty and complex documentation. So it was amid great anticipation that we welcomed the recent unveiling of Microsoft Cortex.

Project Cortex is a suite of new Microsoft AI tools, designed to analyse content created across the Microsoft 365 platform, and shared across teams and systems – to form an on-demand ‘knowledge network’ across the enterprise which is organised and updated automatically in connection with common topics. (It also offers the facility to automate processes based on content discovered and extracted from incoming documents, with the potential to save busy knowledge workers a great deal of time scouring files for the critical information they contain – something I’ll cover in my next blog.)

AI for all

For the professional services world, and for legal teams in particular, the arrival of Cortex is potentially transformational. Up to now, AI-based tools for legal teams have tended to be expensive, niche products designed for specific tasks such as automated contract assembly or document content analysis. But now that Microsoft is championing AI-based content services, richer and more diverse capabilities will come with reach of entire enterprises, potentially spanning multiple use cases -including all kinds of legal applications. And it’s these legal uses cases that Repstor will be homing in on and making easy and intuitive for busy professionals.

So what can we expect in the way of improved knowledge management?

With Cortex, any client or matter-related content or information created or passing across the Microsoft 365 platform will be able to have AI techniques applied to it – so that it can be identified, categorised and discovered more readily, via smart automation.

This isn’t just about content itself, but about the wider picture – for example identifying the relevant people working on a particular client matter, the experts in a particular field, and/or the key documents linked to a given topic.

Powered by the Cortex AI tools suite, Microsoft 365 will be able to distil themes and key attributes from email, documents and teams activity to determine distinct topics and important materials and information linked to them, drawing all of this together so that it can be found instantly. Better still, teams will be able to guide Cortex in its learning so that it becomes more accurate at determining what’s important, or the topics to which materials and experts are linked.

Exponential efficiency gains

For legal teams under pressure to be more productive and contribute more directly to the business, Microsoft’s new smart knowledge management capabilities will save substantial time spent looking up related email threads; previous matters or contracts; or legal experts involved in similar or adjacent cases.

Although Microsoft may not have specific credentials in legal content management, this is where Repstor comes in – bringing the best of proven, mainstream, Microsoft IT to the intricacies of legal matter management. Put another way, we enable legal teams to benefit from the billions upon billions of dollars that Microsoft has invested in the latest, smartest and most secure content management, collaboration and business productivity software.

Content technology analysts such as Gartner are hailing Microsoft as a visionary leader in the field. It is no coincidence that Microsoft has invested billions and achieved industry leading set of patents on AI. Repstor has fairly exclusive access to ongoing plans for the platform too, as an official Microsoft content services partner. This, coupled with our deep legal sector expertise, positions us perfectly to bring AI to bear where it really matters. So watch this space.

Accounting 2020: accelerated digital disruption gives way to new national growth opportunity

Digital disruption in accounting: it started with cloud-based accounting software; received a boost from government digital tax initiatives; then COVID-19 came along to compound the imperative – for accounting firms to become more digitally advanced in their operations. This, in turn, is going to pave the way for huge, irreversible change for the industry – something firms need to be ready for, while it still presents an opportunity for them to differentiate their services in new ways.

Accountancy Age has been charting the acceleration of digital transformation across the sector since the arrival of COVID-19, noting the growing sense of urgency for firms to update their capabilities.

This is not just because clients expect it, or even that the current climate demands it. The wide-scale acceptance of digital ways of working also presents an opportunity for accounting professionals to think about what they do in new and innovative ways.

A new era for accounting

Post lockdown, accounting firms and their clients have realised that remote collaboration works perfectly well and saves everyone a lot of valuable time. This realisation, coupled with now-widespread familiarity with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, has set new expectations about how accounting work should be managed in future.

For clients, it is a relief not to have to keep track of paperwork as digital records become the norm. When they can submit documents online at their own convenience, knowing the details can be retrieved and reviewed at any point (via a client portal, for instance), there is new efficiency and peace of mind. No one likes meetings, especially if they are paying for the time involved.

For accounting firms, advanced document and process digitisation makes it possible to improve margins, as professionals are able to recoup time previously spent attending client meetings or chasing paperwork.

Moreover – and this is the exciting part – they can start to think about growing the business geographically.

Location no longer matters

In a post-COVID world there is no reason why a small firm in Leeds couldn’t go after business in Hertfordshire. If everything can be done very efficiently at a distance, location ceases to matter.

But this is where firms need to be clever. As physical boundaries dissolve, competition between service providers will soar – and it will fall to each firm to find new ways to differentiate its services. At one end, this is likely to include driving costs down through new process efficiency, enabled via automation and client self-service (eg letting clients upload their own documents or retrieve their own records). At the other, opportunities will be linked to smarter analytics and new value-added services.

It’s why we’re seeing such a surge of interest in Microsoft 365 as a default platform for organising and running accounting operations.

Invest where the innovation is

Microsoft 365’s core functions and means of navigation are already familiar, comfortable and used every day by almost everyone – including clients. So, rather than spend a fortune on special software to support digital reinvention, accounting firms can simply meet clients where they already are.

There’s so much more to Microsoft 365 these days, too – and Microsoft is enhancing and adding to the platform all the time, with the very latest technology. Beyond Outlook, SharePoint and Teams, tools like Cortex, PowerBI and Power Automate make it possible to streamline and optimise workloads. For an accounting team, the ability to rapidly retrieve the details of any clients advised on previous HMRC updates could allow professionals to proactively target these accounts next time there’s an update to tax requirements, for instance.

Repstor can provide direct integration with existing business systems, providing vital links with existing document and information sources, so these are readily discoverable from within Microsoft 365 applications. By helping professional services firm move from costly, bespoke or ‘best-of-breed’ solutions to this powerful, extensible and commonplace platform, we help them take advantage of the billions of R&D dollars MS has invested in it – to transform the way they work, compete and win.

Microsoft Teams isn’t just for collaboration: It’s the ideal everyday workspace

Teams ‘companion’ products that focus solely on information compliance are missing a trick. Getting the best from the platform means setting it up in a way that feels natural and helpful to users, so that it becomes a one-stop desktop and dashboard for entire workloads

As I’ve noted in recent blogs, use of Microsoft Teams has proliferated beyond all expectation especially since March. The platform’s ready availability, intuitive ease of use, and inherent compatibility with other everyday Microsoft 365 tools, have made it an instinctive way of bringing together a diverse range of dispersed people to work productively in perfect synchronisation.

To prevent associated information chaos, Repstor and others have been promoting solutions that help bring content management under compliant control. For legal firms and professional services providers, freedom to collaborate is a mixed blessing. Without appropriate levels of security, and without systematic filing and traceability, there is a risk of sensitive content finding its way into the wrong hands, for instance. Critical updates to the status of content, or of client accounts, could be missed, too. Fortunately, with the right solution, these issues are easy to address.

A single point of coordination for all client work

Firms’ optimisation of Teams should not begin and end with compliance, however. Teams is not just a collaboration tool: seeing and treating it as such is to massively underestimate its potential. When Forrester sought to quantify the benefits of Teams, it noted that many of the savings associated with using Teams were linked to people having everything they needed available in a single space – or, more specifically, the reduced need to switch between different applications to look for information needed to complete tasks:

Forrester found that information workers save more than one hour per week by not having to switch between applications. “Access to third-party and line-of-business apps inside Teams from any device benefits all workers, especially remote workers,” it noted.

We go further – so your people don’t have to

Making Teams work harder and deliver more for legal organisations and professional services providers is our priority at Repstor. We tick all of the compliance, security, lifecycle and content management boxes that information managers require too of course – but we go much further.

We strongly believe Teams has the power to transform the way professionals work on client engagements and legal matters, by acting as the coordinating central window to and control panel for all of the work involved. We facilitate this by providing direct integration with existing systems of record, as well as practice management and resource planning systems – plus other time-saving Microsoft 365 tools like Planner.

We also make it easy for organisations or specific departments to customise the way Teams looks and feels – and provide intuitive dashboards that help pinpoint teams quickly by client or activity.

The great thing about Teams is that its use is already almost universal, so convening everyone on the same platform and coordinating the way they work has never been easier, or more affordable.

The challenge now is not to limit what professional service providers and legal firms do with it.

Discover more

We have demostrated the unique capabilities of Repstor for Teams and provided some handy ‘tips from the field’ in our previous practical, bite-sized webinars – to watch these on demand click here

Reinforcing business continuity post COVID: lessons professional services firms have learnt

There is nothing like a global pandemic to test organisations’ business continuity plans, and when whole countries locked down almost overnight earlier this year, it exposed the gaps in their provisions – something I touched on in my last blog.

How well-equipped were staff to work from home, in reality? How easy was it for them to access the latest client and engagement/project/matter information, collaborate and maintain productivity, when whole teams were dispersed suddenly?

While some were quick to improvise, many professional services firms were caught on the hop. Not all staff had laptops; nor secure access to files stored at the office. Many had to resort to workarounds to pass files back and forth in order to progress client work. All the while, IT departments and information compliance teams have had the huge headache of how they might bring everything back together if and when ‘normal practice’ resumes.

As that process begins – as businesses continue to reopen, and managers map out a post-pandemic workplace (which supports social distancing, and caters for those team members with underlying health conditions/who may be shielding vulnerable people at home) – firms are looking with a new sense of purpose at where their business continuity provisions fell short and how to plug any gaps.

Speed matters

BUT this is not a time to map out ambitious IT projects with two-year timeframes. As the COVID lockdown highlighted, successful adaptation is about speed – and Repstor, harnessing the familiar MS 365 tools people already use every day, is perfectly geared up to facilitate this.

When Kari Vislosky, Canada’s VP of People Solutions at Baker Tilly, recently reflected on the rapid transition towards remote work during lockdown, she described it as an exercise in ‘getting the job done’ – in contrast to the usual process of assessing all the options from every angle. In the light of COVID, she notes, the firm will be reviewing its relationships with technology.

Baker Tilley is far from alone in this, something we’ll come onto in our next article – a reflection on the accelerated digital transformation and platform consolidation efforts the pandemic has inspired.

Ask the Microsoft Teams Experts: What steer should we give our people on using the Files feature in Microsoft Teams?

Since working remotely during the lockdown, our people are using Teams more ambitiously by the day, but from an information governance perspective we’re becoming concerned about what happens to all the content that’s being stored in the Files area. How can we make sure this doesn’t conflict with or supersede the documents and information held in our central systems of record?

One of the most common concerns we come across as organisations embrace MS Teams is what new chaos this might create for established information governance models and default document management systems. Certainly, no legal department or professional services firm wants to revert to a situation where files are distributed all over the place, with no visibility or version control.

The good news is that Repstor enables the best of both worlds: the ability to harness all that’s good and exciting about the Files feature of Teams while preserving full information compliance at a core systems level.

Here are three quick pointers:

Embrace the Files feature: it’s a fantastic support for remote working.

Where co-workers are dispersed across distance, it may not be as easy to access and use internal document management systems as when everyone is in the office. But if everyone is using Teams, the Files area of the platform becomes a very useful default place for capturing and keeping all content that colleagues are working on or discussing – including attachments that have been added to chats. What’s more, Teams is optimised for remote working and for collaborating on/co-authoring documents – so it would be missing a trick not to take advantage of the facility. If the document concerned happens to be a huge file running to hundreds of pages, Teams allows for edits to be shared without the need to re-circulate every new version in full.

Any content that touches Teams is automatically stored in Files, so there’s only one place to look.

Anything routed to or through Teams leaves a footprint in Files – whether that’s an email circulated via Teams, or documents associated with a task in Planner (assuming Planner has been linked with Teams – something we strongly recommend). This makes light work of auditing, and of content reconciliation with central systems of record. That’s provided there is integration between Teams and core document management systems. This is where Repstor comes in.

Repstor software closes the loop, keeping content in sync.

The key to facilitating all of the above, while maintaining information governance, is to integrate Teams with established document management systems/central systems of record. Repstor’s software can ensure this, closing the loop so that the latest updated files are reflected back at base. Better still, we can enable this in a number of different ways – offering organisations maximum flexibility in line with their particular needs and circumstances.

I explain these options in our Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinars, part of a current series of short, practical sessions designed to help firms get the best from the platform. Sign up here to find out

Enhancing document & email management from within Outlook

Meet users where they are, using investments you’ve already made, by harnessing the latest Microsoft 365 capabilities for intuitive, compliant content interaction & management

For weeks now I have been singing the praises of Microsoft Teams and how so many businesses are successfully capitalising on it as their teamwork hub. At the same time we are cognisant that while so many are comfortable working in collaboration applications like Teams, there is still a set of users, who continue to be email focused and need access to all their information within Outlook.

For these businesses, they have realised that by asking users to open and move between multiple applications to find what they need, or to store a document where they’re supposed to, can have one of two negative effects. Either it slows productivity, interrupting the current flow of work. Or it prompts some level of resistance or even rebellion – users opting for easier workarounds, such as sharing the latest version of a document by email – causing content chaos.

One window on content, one familiar way of working

A very simple way to avoid workarounds or a drop in productivity is to make Outlook the front-end to wider content management – whether that’s in relation to legal matters, client engagements or some other form of project management.

Strong integration – between the tools that people use routinely every day and other document and information sources – is a great time-saver and compliance aid. If it’s second nature to call up and re-file content within the main application people use in their work and communications, there is no reason for users to do anything else. If, by extension, users can readily collaborate on documents using Microsoft 365 and automatically return the latest version to the central repository, why wouldn’t they?

This is about achieving information compliance by finding and empowering users where they are – without a sharp learning curve, or demanding that people change the way they work. It is also about making the most of existing investments – in both Microsoft 365, and in core document management systems – by blending the two and triggering preferred default behaviour that feels instinctive, easy and helpful to users.

It’s what we do

This is Repstor’s bread and butter, and it’s kept us very busy during the COVID lockdown as organisations have looked for quick and easy ways to enable deeper collaboration, both on- and offline, using tools they already have.

Learn more at our next bite-sized webinar

It’s something we’ll be unpacking at our next practical, bite-sized webinar: “Transform Email & Document Management in Microsoft 365 – Introducing new MS 365 features”, on July 2^nd 2020.

In this short, high-impact session, we’ll highlight new and meaningful capabilities within M365 for email and document management that users should be leveraging. These include improved version control and document comparison features, support for offline content access, and powerful search.

Via a quick demo, we’ll show how to expose these capabilities within the familiar Outlook environment and as part of workflow. We’ll also demonstrate how Repstor technology nudges M365 email and document management best practices, and promotes predictive, compliant filing.

See you on July 2nd.

Ask the Microsoft Teams experts: How far can we go with external collaboration workspaces?

Our employees are becoming quite adept at using Teams now, and want to go a bit further in using the platform to collaborate externally with clients and partners – but how wise is this, how far can Teams take them, and how do we keep control?

As more and more organisations are discovering, Teams has a lot more to it as a communication platform than might first appear. If project, engagement or matter leads want to use it to collaborate and share content with external parties such as clients or service partners via a dedicated ‘workspace’, they’re discovering that all of that is possible within the parameters of Teams. The only thing holding them back from doing more of this is a concern that internal team members might inadvertently breach privacy or security policy, by sharing something they shouldn’t or leaving something exposed, out in the ether, for the long term.

The good news is that Repstor’s software sharpens organisations’ control – and visibility – over external collaboration activity, giving managers the assurance that employees can maximise their productivity and the client/partner experience without risk to information compliance.

Here are 3 pointers on using Teams to create external collaboration workspaces with confidence:

Don’t hold back: it’s what Teams was designed for.

What I mean by this is that, even out of the box, MS Teams readily supports rich, secure collaboration, with some fantastic capabilities and the option to decide who can find and join teams, both internally and externally. It really is the modern way to support productive working across extended teams or client/partner ecosystems. In 2020, it makes no business sense to buy special bespoke document-sharing or ‘deal room’ platforms for such purposes when MS 365 and enhanced capabilities from Repstor already provide everything companies need for a fraction of the price.

Repstor software enhances Teams’ controls for added peace of mind.

With the extensive collaboration facilities provided in Teams comes responsibility – to ensure that sensitive client or project/matter-specific information is visible and accessible only as appropriate. Repstor software provides discrete controls over who can set up a collaboration workspace, and what the privacy, visibility and access parameters are. This helps to prevent users being added carelessly. We make it very easy to establish any boundaries, locking down workspaces to specific groups of people.

This, in turn, increases the confidence in using Teams for external collaboration. And the more that people use Teams-based workspaces to collaborate, the less likely they are to circulate sensitive content over email – content that could hang around indefinitely and be forwarded ad infinitum. Rather, defaulting to Teams-based collaboration workspaces should encourage people to share live links to the correct, latest content, which is stored centrally and locked down securely. This gives internal owners more control which version of a document team members see, in addition to the ability to remove links or retire/remove content once its immediate value has expired.

Repstor provides a clear audit trail of all content access & editing activity.

Ensuring information compliance and building trust in Teams also requires that project/engagement/matters leads can readily see what people are looking at; which versions of content have been accessed; and when and by whom any updates were made. Repstor provides clear, at-a-glance visibility of who has accessed and edited content, enhancing auditability. Although activity is monitored within Teams as standard, Repstor makes it easier to ‘surface’ and display that information so that those responsible don’t have to spend time hunting for it.

I expand these and other points in our Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinars. Sign up here to find out more.

Ask the Microsoft Teams experts: How do we curb information & team duplication?

In their rush to be productive while working remotely we’ve noticed that people can end up creating multiple teams related to the same projects or topics and reinventing the wheel when related information already exists in central systems. What would you suggest?

We hear this a lot, too. While it’s fantastic that Teams is so intuitive and easy to use it can mean that, in their enthusiasm to get going, people create new teams related to a project or matter when perfectly good ones already exist. This could result in Teams holding hidden silos of information and/or people sharing wrong versions of content. It may not occur to them that they could simply import and work with the latest approved information and documents as stored in central SAP, Dynamics or project/practice management systems.

Why give users the task of creating and defining new Teams, when the latest, approved information already resides in established systems of record? Repstor’s native Office 365-based solutions remove the temptation to reinvent the wheel, by providing seamless integration with common content repositories and allowing easy, controlled importing of information from original internal sources to aid and streamline the set-up of teams.

Here are 3 benefits of maximising content integration & import options to ease teams’ creation, using Repstor software:

The efficiency and control of carrying across the right names, descriptions, codes, settings and look & feel.

If someone has already done all the hard work of assigning the right people; naming, coding and describing a project or matter; and putting in place appropriate collaboration and security parameters, it makes no sense to start from scratch when creating a ‘team’ to aid associated remote working.

With Repstor, you can simply link a team with the back-office system that contains all the client or project information and any related settings and import them across into Teams. We also bring across a list of all the related metadata, setting out the type of service the project comes under, who the lead partners are, the correct descriptions and client/case coding, plus any access restrictions and even the right ‘branding’ (logos, colour schemes, etc).

Accelerated teams set up.

Once existing project or case/matter-related information has been imported, those who are accountable can decide whether to create linked teams at the outset that are ready to go, or wait until someone wants to initiate a related collaboration discussion or sharing forum. Then too, they can have everything ready for them – in the form of a template with all of the necessary parameters pre-determined. This reduces the risk of ‘rogue’ settings being introduced and saves the time of having to seek approval for a new team.

Repstor supports great flexibility in the make-up of teams, from the channels and tabs involved, to the way each team looks, to the privacy and security settings. So, the templates are a productivity aid, rather than a curb of creative freedom.

Easy, multi-dimensional navigation making existing teams easier to find.

The rich, standardised metadata which our software carries across when it imports project information from core business systems makes it much easier for remote workers to check for existing teams before they set up a new collaboration or discussion forum.

It’s easy to slice and dice this information, too. All information linked to a team becomes readily searchable by any element of the metadata and is presented via a graphical dashboard, making it easy to look up teams by service, client/project code, lead partner, and so on. It’s also possible to call up an at-a-glance hierarchy of professional services engagements or legal matters by client.

I’ll be expanding on these points in a new Microsoft Teams Bite-Sized Webinar. Sign up here to find out more.