TechnoFeature: SharePoint: Chapter 17 From The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies
By Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell
The American Bar Association (ABA) recently published Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell's book The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. Jordan Furlong, Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Bar Association's National Magazine, describes the book as "a thoughtful, comprehensive, strategic guide for 21st-century lawyers to understand and appreciate the significance of collaboration, and how it can be integrated into real-world legal practices." We also think it's terrific and a worthwhile investment. Thanks to the ABA and the authors, below you'll find a reprint of Chapter 17, which focuses on using Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration tool. If you like this excerpt, you'll love the book, which you can order from the ABA.
Chapter 17: SharePoint
SharePoint is a portal-based collaboration platform from Microsoft. It might be the most widely available collaboration tool for legal professionals, primarily because it is attached to the Microsoft Office suite of tools. SharePoint has drawn a lot of attention from large law firms, particularly over the past few years and especially among those firms running a Windows Server environment with Office and Exchange. We've noticed large audiences at presentations on SharePoint at legal technology conferences we've attended.
SharePoint uses the familiar Microsoft interface and is contained almost entirely within the web browser, making it easy for anyone with an Internet connection to access. It can be used internally or externally. SharePoint also integrates well with Microsoft Office products, including OneNote, and it can be configured to pull data from other law office programs, databases, websites, and other sources. Even right out of the box, it provides a wealth of collaboration tools as well as easy ways to personalize and customize the tools.
A basic SharePoint portal page is composed of modules called web parts, which are components that implement a specified function, such as a task list, discussion board, calendar, or shared document area. SharePoint sites are quite customizable, which means users can add the web parts they need for each specific project. A SharePoint site can be used within a firm or company via the organization's intranet, made available to clients on an extranet, or published to the Internet for more public use.
The SharePoint family is composed of three different applications. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is the basic application, and it's a free add-on to the Windows Server. WSS offers the basic portal infrastructure, allowing collaborative editing of documents and document organization as well as creation of to do lists, alerts, and discussion boards. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) improves upon WSS, adding better document management, search functionality, navigation features, RSS, and support as well as the ability to create wikis and blogs. For power SharePoint users, the Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (MOSD) is an HTML editor that helps users design their own SharePoint sites.
SharePoint is portal based. It lets you create a single portal or dashboard from which you can access all of the information you need for your project. In other words, SharePoint gives you a "home" page for your project. It also provides enterprise search, document and content management, and workflow tools, all featuring strong integration with Microsoft Office.
What makes SharePoint such a powerful collaboration tool? It is fully customizable, allowing you to create exactly what you need for your project and nothing more. A SharePoint page is built by taking the web parts and combining them into a single web page. Here are some of the modules you can add:
• Discussion forums
• Task lists
• Calendars
• Document libraries
• Links to external pages
• Wikis
Because SharePoint is a Microsoft product, it integrates well with Microsoft Office applications. With MOSS, users can view and edit Office documents directly within a web browser, making it simple to work on documents from anyplace with an Internet connection. The SharePoint services can also be accessed through Microsoft Outlook, and users of Office 2007 can synchronize their Outlook calendars and task lists with their SharePoint counterparts. Another advantage of using SharePoint in a firm environment is the product's ability to fully index all of the documents stored in its library, so that users throughout the organization can search across all libraries and user groups. This document management capability will definitely be of interest to legal professionals. Individual pages or the entire site can be searched via the search box at the top right of the page.
SharePoint is ideal for those interested in a more full-featured project management tool than Basecamp or some of the other web-based applications. Separate pages can be created for different aspects of the project, so that each page has its own dedicated discussion forum, task list, calendar, and document library. Each user can customize the project pages to her or his specifications, moving them to different areas on the page or minimizing web parts that do not apply to them. There is a specific web part that will filter tasks, showing only those for the particular user. And there are several ways to work with the data outside of SharePoint:
• Edit in Datasheet — allows users to bulk edit the information using a datasheet format.
• Connect to Outlook — synchronizes the items for that particular web part and makes them available offline in Outlook.
• Export to Spreadsheet — downloads the documents into Excel for analysis and editing.
• Open with Access — uses the popular Microsoft database program to work with your data.
• View RSS feed — creates a feed that will alert you whenever something is added to or changed within that particular item — for example, when tasks are added or completed.
• Alert Me — sends email alerts whenever something changes on the site.
The SharePoint document libraries are particularly powerful. The Check Out feature permits you to take a document from within SharePoint to edit it on your computer or somewhere else. While a document is checked out, other users do not have access to edit it. Users can also access the version history of each document, to review and perhaps restore previous versions of a document. If sensitive documents are uploaded, the permissions for those documents can be managed so that the document can be restricted for certain users.
How might a law firm use SharePoint? A firm could easily use SharePoint as the foundation for its intranet to provide a wide variety of information to employees. The firm might also personalize each lawyer's experience by creating a web part that gives easy access to wanted information. For example, a lawyer could see a display of work in progress, accounts receivable, and other financial matters for top clients pulled directly in real time from the firm's time and billing software. News items, practice-specific resources — internal and external — and forms can be displayed in a handy "resources" box. The SharePoint search function allows easy search across all firm databases, including the firm's documents, accounting, and HR materials. Firms are reporting fast search functionality across millions of documents.
Software platforms typically have third-party integrators that develop software to make the platform work with legal-specific software. As an example, Microsoft and third-party developers are looking at SharePoint as a platform for electronic discovery tools. Here are some of the companies that already provide integration with SharePoint:
• Handshake Software
• SocialText
• XMLaw
• SV Technology
• eSentio Technologies
• Hubbard One
• MindJet
One benefit of using a SharePoint portal is the ability to make use of the institutional knowledge inherent in any law firm. Users can set up internal blogs to share knowledge, and any member of the firm can access and search this information. Since the information is captured by the system, it is no longer necessary for firm employees to know the "right person" in order to gain access to important information. A simple search of the firm's intranet is all you need. It's a simple but effective form of knowledge management.
SharePoint is an immensely powerful tool for collaborating within a law firm or organization, and its ease of being customized has attracted large law firms in particular. In addition, third-party providers have begun to develop legal-specific applications for SharePoint. Because of its scalability and ability to work with third-party applications, we expect that over the next few years many large law firms and some smaller firms will implement SharePoint as their intranet of choice and begin to take advantage of the collaboration tools and integration with Office in creative and productive ways. Small firms and solos should also consider hosted SharePoint sites to take advantage of this platform at a modest monthly cost.
If you're interested in learning more about SharePoint, visit SharePointpedia.
Read another sample chapter, view the table of contents, or purchase this book. Copyright 2008 Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Reprinted by permission of the ABA. All rights reserved.
About the Authors
Dennis Kennedy is an information technology lawyer and legal technology authority based in St. Louis, Missouri. A frequent speaker and an award-winning author with hundreds of publications to his credit, Dennis writes the legal technology column for the ABA Journal and his articles on legal technology and electronic discovery topics can be found in many print and Internet publications. His blog, DennisKennedy.Blog, is a highly-regarded resource on legal technology topics and was included on the ABA Journal's Top 100 Blawgs. Dennis was named a Top 100 global legal technology leader in 2006 by London's CityTech magazine, and received awards as the 2001 TechnoLawyer of the Year and 2003 Contributor of the Year from TechnoLawyer for his role in promoting the use of technology in the practice of law. He is a member of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's Council and is an editor and board member of the Law Practice Today Webzine.
Tom Mighell is Senior Counsel and Litigation Support Coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas. He is a frequent speaker and writer on the Internet, legal technology, and eDiscovery issues. He has published the Internet Legal Research Weekly Newsletter since 2000, and the internet and technology blog Inter Alia since 2002. He is a member of the ABA's Law Practice Management Section, and served on the ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board from 2004-2008. He served as Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2008
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