Colligo Add-In for Outlook Used By Legal Departments
A recent post by Rees Morrison in the “Law Department Management” blog discusses how National Grid, a large power utility headquartered in the UK, is using SharePoint for document management.
I was pleased to see the following quote from Adam Davidson of National Grid:
We are also about to start deploying (after a successful pilot) the Colligo Outlook Add-in to give us an even better tool to upload emails into SharePoint, as well as allowing lawyers offline access to their matter files within SharePoint.
This really highlights how the Contributor Add-In for Outlook can help to reduce the barriers to adoption of SharePoint for content management applications, such as legal matter management. I was especially proud since we were selected by a team that has been recognized for it’s leading edge application of SharePoint. National Grid won the “In-House Legal Department Initiative of the Year Award” at the Legal Technology Awards in 2006 for their use of SharePoint for DM.
Thanks for the mention, Adam!
Rees mentions SharePoint in an earlier post from his blog and references an article in the ACC Journal by Nanci Tucker of the Simpson Neely Group, a provider of law technology consulting services. The article presumably evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint for legal departments, though I couldn’t access the article from the ACC Docket archive since I’m not a subscriber.
It’s great to see SharePoint getting the notice it deserves from the legal community. As Adam from National Grid said:
…[SharePoint is] not as fully featured as some proprietary DM/PM [document management/project management] systems, but it cost less and is much easier for us to administer…
I have a feeling that many of the feature deltas will be closed in SharePoint v.next.
Hi Barry,
Just to add to your post (from the Colligo sales perspective), I am seeing a quite a number of deals in corporate legal departments. To those corp legal folks following here I wanted to advise them that Contributor allows users to specify default values for metadata at the per-folder level (see: http://support.colligo.com/Lists/Features/DispForm.aspx?ID=111). I am emphasizing this feature more and more in demonstrations and engagements these days and wanted to flag it here as well.
For legal begals I am coming to realize that this is an important feature because of the fairly consistent topology of client parent folders and matter subfolders legal departments seem to use (flows from a traditional paper filing system). With default values the metadata is cleanly captured upfront and with little hassle based on the drop location enabling lawyers and paralegals to focus on their day job! No fuss, no muss.
Regards,
-Bill
More than happy to give you guys some credit. Drag and drop for emails is probably the most asked feature that we don’t have in our current set up, so I expect to see a further jump in user adoption oncewe’ve got the Colligo Outlook Add-in deployed. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!
All the best,
Adam