Lawyers at RTR, a criminal defense firm in Miami, Florida, had been using faxes, couriers, and an unreliable server—which impeded productivity. Then one of its lawyers introduced Microsoft Office 365, mobile devices, and smartphones. Now documents are stored online, lawyers access case files in court and at home, on any device, and they use simultaneous coauthoring to create briefs. Productivity is up by an estimated 25 percent.
During the last hurricane season in South Florida, a lightning strike destroyed the server that stored every electronic document ever created at the office of RTR, one of the largest criminal law firms in the southeastern United States. While this IT crisis caused some anxiety and embarrassment for the firm’s seven attorneys, it also served as an unexpected stroke of good fortune for one of them.
“Since joining RTR in 2008, I’ve been trying to bring the firm into the twenty-first century, technologically speaking,” says Joe Nascimento, the newest member of the firm. “Our senior partners are highly respected and have successfully argued cases in front of the US Supreme Court, but their understanding of business technology was a little behind the times. I wanted to improve mobility and productivity at the firm by introducing better business tools for the workplace.”
None of the attorneys used laptops or smartphones to access emails and documents while working on cases in courts across the country. They carried paper files and waited for faxes to be sent to hotel rooms. “We had already gone through three servers when the lightning struck,” says Nascimento. “We realized that something had to be done to safeguard our documents. I jumped on the opportunity to introduce cloud computing and the idea of mobility to the firm. It’s made a huge difference to productivity and efficiency at RTR.”
Nascimento chose Microsoft Office 365 for the firm’s cloud-based business productivity tools. Office 365 unites familiar Microsoft Office applications with the power of Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online. No on-premises server is required. RTR worked with ConQuest Technology Services to deploy the solution. “The transition to Microsoft Office 365 would not have been so smooth without the training and around-the-clock support of its IT service provider, ConQuest,” says Nascimento.
“Office 365 kick started our adoption of twenty-first century IT,” says Nascimento. “I’ve introduced my colleagues to laptops, mobile devices, and smartphones. I’d estimate that we are at least 25 percent more productive when working inside and outside of the office.”
Anywhere Access to Files
Today, RTR has a better disaster recovery solution: all electronic documents have been uploaded to SharePoint Online for more reliable storage at a Microsoft data center. No one is worrying about the safety of their case files when the next lightning strike hits. Lawyers and staff can search for and access files they need on any PC, laptop, mobile device, or smartphone, anywhere they are connected to Internet. This flexibility benefits RTR lawyers who must comply with different courthouse policies: some courts allow the use of phones during proceedings, while others allow tablets or laptops.
“While my partner is questioning the witness, I can use my phone or my tablet to retrieve a required document, edit it, and email it to my assistant in the office with instructions to file it electronically,” says Nascimento. “Five minutes later, the judge’s assistant receives the file, prints it, and brings it up to the bench. Before, I would have left the courthouse to find a lawyer I knew in the area and borrow a computer. With all our information at our fingertips, we’re providing more efficient and effective services for our clients.”
Round-the-Clock Productivity
Criminal law does not follow a nine-to-five routine. Nascimento often gets a phone call following an arrest in the middle of the night. Instead of having to go to the office to prepare the Notice of Appearance for his client and file it in court the next morning, he can access the relevant documentation from home, prepare the paperwork, and file it right away.
The tight deadlines of criminal appellate work mean that Nascimento’s colleague, Criminal Appellate Specialist and RTR partner, Benjamin Waxman, often emailed files to himself to work at home. Then he would email the latest version back to himself to resume work at the office the next morning.
“Sometimes, Benji opened the wrong document and begin reworking an older version,” says Nascimento. “Now he’s saving five hours a week because he saves his documents on his personal site and uses Office Online to edit the document from home. When he saves the document back to OneDrive for Business and starts work the next morning, he’s always using the latest version. With Office 365, Benji can take on a larger caseload, and spend more time with his family.
Search Saves Time
Previously, RTR lawyers relied on their memory of past cases and manually searched files to find particulars of existing appellate work that could be reused when starting similar appeals. Today, they are saving 10 hours of work every week by using search to look through old emails and files in SharePoint Online and quickly retrieve case law, statutes, and prior successful arguments that have relevance for a new appeal.
Seamless Collaboration
Waxman’s new work habits have a positive effect on productivity and teamwork at the office. His assistant, Elizabeth Hernandez, is relieved that when RTR lawyers work from home, they access and edit documents online instead of on paper. She no longer faces 50-page documents covered in handwritten notes waiting for retyping in the morning. She’s saving several hours of copy editing every week and working on more important projects.
RTR lawyers collaborate on the hundreds of pages of briefs that are necessary to appeal a case through state, federal, and supreme courts. Previously, coauthoring was an iterative process fraught with versioning issues.
“Collaborating on briefs is so much easier thanks to the simultaneous editing that we can do using the Microsoft Word app in Office Online,” says Nascimento. “I am in my office, Benji is in his, and Elizabeth is in hers, and the three of us can edit a single draft at the same time. This was an amazing eye-opener for everyone. Office 365 has completely transformed how we work at RTR.”
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Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
The Future of Productivity and Growth in Manufacturing
The old rules don’t apply. Its not enough to focus on economies of scale and efficiency. Today the focus in the manufacturing industry is on achieving top line growth from customer engagement, and new levels of agility and productivity from the convergence of digital information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT). Manufacturers are challenging their existing business models and redesigning operational and business processes by infusing digital into all parts of their operations. The future of manufacturing includes remote monitoring, predictive maintenance and virtual repair capabilities, for highly customized products delivered faster, and by systems that are easy for a changing workforce to learn and use.
Customer journey transformed.
Today's consumers interact with brands across a wide range of touchpoints throughout their shopping experiences. They use social media to read reviews, and smartphones to conduct research. With their own consumer experiences - exacerbated by a skills gap in their own manufacturing and supply chain - even industrial manufacturing customers are demanding immediate, personalized service. By focusing on delivering great customer experiences that they will want to share, manufacturers can create sustainable relationships. But that means that everyone in an organization—from sales representatives to engineers to delivery drivers—need to put the customer first in every decision. Building teams around the customer journey means breaking down the walls of the traditional workplace and helping employees to do their best work with connected technologies.
Intelligent engagement.
Digital manufacturing technologies, including Industry 4.0 (also called Smart Manufacturing or the Industrial Internet of Things), robotics, additive manufacturing (sometimes known as 3D Printing) and smart connected products, are creating opportunities for manufacturers to take a leap forward in margins and differentiation through rapid prototyping, agile manufacturing, and servitization of product-centric business models. Manufacturers can market with new insights gained listening to smart connected products and social sentiment, blended with data from customer touch points across all marketing, sales and service channels. Engineering and marketing can reduce risk and rapidly validate new product ideas with 3D models and 3D printed prototypes. The new era manufacturer can be confident they are delivering a marketable product, and that they can fulfill demand using intelligent automation and digital manufacturing.
Growth at the new speed of business.
It’s called a revolution for a reason. Investment in Industry 4.0, with new smarter connected products, and new service-oriented business models can be challenging, especially if manufacturers are also constrained by their business software. Characterized by excessive infrastructure requirements, complexity, and cost or time to change, legacy systems were designed for a bygone era of simpler, more predictable manufacturing. Manufacturers now need the ability to develop, test, deploy and grow (or close) new business models in weeks rather than years.
With Microsoft Dynamics AX, Lifecycle Services, and Azure, we give manufacturers the ability to leverage the power of the cloud to overcome the traditional challenges of enterprise software and focus on the opportunities presented by Industry 4.0. The technologies easily integrate with legacy systems and data, so companies can continue to benefit from their existing investments and remove any barriers to growth.
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Boost law firm productivity with Matter Center for Office 365
We are pleased to unveil a preview version of Matter Center for Microsoft Office 365 at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Matter Center for Office 365 is a powerful documentation management and collaboration solution specifically catered toward law firms and law departments.
Working seamlessly with Office 365, Matter Center offers those in the legal profession a way to intuitively find and organize files without leaving the familiar productivity tools they use the most—namely Microsoft Outlook and Word. Matter Center for Office 365 enables professionals to quickly locate and collaborate on legal matters from virtually anywhere, anytime—from any device. In essence, a one stop shop for all your document collaboration and management needs.
Matter Center is the product of months of collaboration between our Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) group, outside law firms, and Office 365 product engineering teams. We are excited to have built the solution by using the cloud app model for Office 365, enabling Matter Center to expose rich document management, search and collaboration features directly through Word and Outlook. For external sharing and collaboration scenarios, Matter Center integrates with OneDrive for Business to maintain the ‘legal briefcase’ lawyers are familiar with.
The Matter Center experience
We made Matter Center easy to navigate, delivering a consistent experience across your productivity tools. For example, you can search and find matters and related documents directly within Outlook, and track or pin frequently used ones as well.
Search and find matters or documents inline, or pin them for quick access directly from an email in Outlook
You can also file email or email attachments to a matter directly from the Matter Center app within Outlook.
File email or email attachments directly to matters from Outlook
Matter Center is also accessible directly from Office 365.
Matter Center landing page in Office 365
Matter Center delivers numerous benefits for legal professionals
Legal briefcase in the cloud. Matter Center integrates with OneDrive for Business. That means you get 1 TB of individual storage and a personal briefcase that automatically synchronizes your documents across all of your devices, and can be accessed online or offline.
Get more work done together. Gone are the days of emailing multiple versions of the same document. Securely share your files with others, both within and outside of your firm. With Matter Center, you can work simultaneously on your documents with other attorneys, using the automatic version control to quickly and easily track changes.
Robust matter and document search. The powerful integration between Outlook, Word, and Office 365 enables you to easily search and find matters or related documents directly in the familiar interfaces of Word or Outlook. You can effortlessly track or pin frequently used documents or matters, as well as track just the most recent documents or matters.
Secure access and permission control. With Matter Center for Office 365, you can grant or exclude your user’s access to a matter. All of the subsequent documents associated with the matter will inherit the same permissions, thereby reducing concerns about ethical walls and data leakage.
Reduced overhead and increased billable time. With Matter Center’s seamless experience, you reduce the amount of administrative resources needed to support a document management system, enabling you to spend more time working directly with clients, building lasting client relationships, and most importantly, providing a positive customer experience for your clients.
Matter Center also caters to the needs of IT professionals
Confidently move to the cloud. Matter Center offers a way to begin your journey to the cloud at a lower cost and reduced risk, enabling you to maximize the ROI on your existing infrastructure with enterprise-grade security, management, and administrative controls.
Deploy based on your terms. Matter Center can be deployed in the cloud, in a hybrid scenario, or as a part of an on-premises Microsoft SharePoint environment based upon a firm’s needs and existing infrastructures.
Maximize ROI on existing IT investments. Adding Matter Center to an existing on-premises solution such as SharePoint and Exchange will help you to realize greater value as a unified productivity platform.
Built on an industrial strength platform. Matter Center includes enterprise-grade security, management, and administrative controls, and is compliant with multiple industry standards. Permission control and taxonomy are centrally managed and applied automatically; legal professionals don’t interact with the back-end settings.
Always up to date. Deploying Matter Center in the cloud, reduces the cost and time of upgrades and migrations as Office 365 is always up to date. No patches or software upgrades are necessary, and Microsoft adds new value and capabilities on a monthly basis.
Higher-adoption rates. Matter Center has an intuitive interface, simplifies processes, and can be accessed directly from Microsoft Office products that are used every day. This tool satisfies the most important needs of users, while reducing training and support efforts.
We are excited to bring Matter Center for Office 365 to market in the near future, and look forward to helping legal professionals change the way they work.
Matter Center is currently available in a limited preview, and interested customers should visit http://microsoft.com/MatterCenter to learn more about signing up for our beta program.
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Case Study: Condé Nast goes all-in with AWS Cloud. The company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%
About Condé Nast
Condé Nast is a well-established media and publications company known for producing high quality lifestyle content suited for everyone. As a result of going all-in into the AWS Cloud, the company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%.
In just three months, Condé Nast was able to migrate over 500 servers, one petabyte of storage, various mission critical applications (such as HR, Legal, and Sales), and over 100 database servers into the AWS Cloud. With this migration, Condé Nast can now create content faster, while improving organizational creativity, productivity, agility, flexibility and time to market.
Brand switching is up 29 percent since 2010, and poor customer service is to blame. In the US alone, customers are taking $1.6 trillion in revenue with them as they swap from brand ‘A’ to brand ‘B’. If you want to be on the winning side of those numbers, it’s time to take a close look at what you can do to keep your existing customers coming back for more.
It’s all about forging strong relationships, and here are four ways your CRM solution can strengthen the ties that bind your customers to you:
1. Identify your at-risk customers. Right now you’ve got repeat customers who are thinking of jumping ship. Change their minds. By tracking key metrics like customer purchase patterns and frequency of calls to your support team, you can see which customers are at risk of leaving you and assess their individual concerns or pain points. Then, take the proactive approach. Reach out. Ask what you can do to improve their experience with your company, then follow through on your solutions.
2. Develop personal relationships with every customer. Every interaction you have with customers is a chance to show them how much you care. Create detailed customer profiles and share them with every one of your customer service channels so you can reduce the number of times your customers have to repeat themselves.
Update these profiles after every interaction, and take special care to add any personal details your customer chose to share with you. Go above and beyond customer expectations by simply sending them a birthday card or wishing their child a happy graduation.
3. Make your special offers special again. “Spamming” customers with offers irrelevant to their needs is a one-two punch right to your customer service department’s gut. On the other hand, taking a little extra care and sending out promotional offers to only those customers you know will be interested can have the opposite effect. Combine advanced customer segmentation strategies with each customer’s purchase history and that “spam” could morph into top sirloin.
4. Always be within arm’s reach. Many customers only reach out for help once before jumping ship, and you’ve got to be ready for them no matter what channel they choose. Use social engagement tools to listen for sentiment online. Track frequently asked questions as they appear via chat, phone, email, and video conference. Constantly add newly relevant solutions to your self-service channels.
Simplified Deployment with Windows 10 is almost here and educators will be pleased as a dog with a spoonful of peanut butter with new tools to optimize all things scholarly.
Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Surface Hub, the company’s new large-screen collaboration device, will be available for businesses to order in 24 markets starting July 1. Designed for a new kind of productivity experience for groups, Surface Hub harnesses the power of Windows 10, Skype for Business, Office, OneNote and Universal Windows apps.
The device is designed for anyone to walk up and use, providing an engaging way to share ideas and information. It replaces disparate, conference-room tools – including a whiteboard, wireless receiver, projector and audio-video system – with an all-in-one system at a lower upfront cost.
“There is no doubt in our mind that Surface Hub is going to change the way groups work together,” writes Mike Angiulo, corporate vice president of Microsoft Devices Group. “Just as the PC revolutionized productivity for individuals, we see Surface Hub as a transformative tool for group productivity.”
Surface Hub is available in two main configurations: Surface Hub 55-inch for $6,999 and Surface Hub 84-inch for $19,999.
