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How Office 365 can help small practices
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: May 26, 2017
The folks at Solo Practice University (.com) are recommending Microsoft’s Office 365 as a “glue” app that can hold a solo or small practice together, saying it is “about time” to move over to this productivity suite if you haven’t already done so. Putting everything under one roof, so to speak, eliminates conflicts between apps, duplicated efforts, and the need for multiple office management apps.
As someone who has used that product since its inception, I’ll share their thoughts, and mine, with you all.
Office 365 is a monthly or annual subscription service that provides the entire Microsoft Office suite in the cloud and simultaneously on the desktop, along with a number of other functions small firms should find useful.
For one, the subscription service is automatically updated as soon as updates are available. It also comes in a single user or multiple user format.
Feature one is OneDrive, a free (included), one terabyte of cloud storage that could take the place of Dropbox, Mozy, Box, etc. It us accessible from any device.
Next feature up is Hosted Exchange, which comes along with the recommended Business Premium subscription. Hosted Exchange is an intranet or WAN featuring spam filtering and shared email, contacts and calendars. Commercial hosted exchanges can cost as much as an Office subscription, so this alone is worth the money.
OneNote basically functions like Evernote—note taking and storage, media storage, handwriting conversion to text, and organizing all media across all platforms.
Bookings accesses the Outlook calendar to set up appointments through the website, using established times. Eliminate both scheduling conflicts and whatever scheduling app you’re currently using.
Planner is a simple project management app. Takes the place of more expensive, standalone ones.
Lens, which is also a standalone app, is a smartphone scanner that can correlate what it is scanning though the rest of the suite, as well as create a searchable PDF, business card database, etc. One of the more powerful small apps out there.
Customer Manager is a customer relations management (CRM) feature. CRMs basically organize offices’ relationships with clients, vendors, etc.
Finally, the Flow feature organizes the interrelationships among all of these functions and your other apps.
So, it really does seem that for about a hundred bucks a year, Office 365 can coordinate an entire law office, and let you get to the golf course or the beach sooner and with less guilt.