Matter Center for Office 365 is Microsoft’s solution to document management and online collaboration for lawyers.  It marries Office 365, Sharepoint, and One Drive together to make document sharing secure and easy. Its major selling point? Collaboration is accomplished within familiar Microsoft Office products, like Word and Excel.

But that isn’t all.  Matter Center for Office 365 has partnered with other products that have the potential of making Matter Center a powerful practice management competitor.

One such partner is LawToolBox, a centralized deadline management system in the cloud.  It calculates state and federal court deadlines based on rules of procedure for each court and monitors deadlines for rule changes. LawToolBox users can track who edited what deadline and when, customize calculators, and build their own deadline templates. When used in tandem, Matter Center and LawToolBox turn Outlook into a power legal docketing tool.

If you’re interested in the concept of Matter Center for Office 365 where should you start? One place is this promotional video.  But here is an even better explanation. Because there is a twist with Matter Center for Office 365: you can’t just install it yourself. If you want it, you can only get it through a developer or Microsoft partner.  A little ironic for an open source program.

Use the Payne Group

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know I am not compensated to endorse products nor do I recommend vendors.  Today I am making an exception.  Donna Payne, and her company, PayneGroup, have been certified Microsoft Office Solution Providers for at least 20 years.  She literally wrote the book on how to use Microsoft Word.  Her company has metadata, redaction, bates stamping, and other workflow assistants. PayneGroup provides training and support to Microsoft users and is an implementation partner for Matter Center.  Best of all, Donna and her company are located in the Pacific Northwest.  Since you need a developer or partner anyway to obtain Matter Center, why not go with the best?  The PayneGroup can help you every step of the way.

[All Rights Reserved 2016 Beverly Michaelis]