Tag Archives: LINK App

Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work Report

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Each year I look forward to Okta’s Businesses at Work report. Okta anonymizes data from its more than 9,400 customer entities. These are customers which use the Okta Identity Network (OIN) with its over 6,500 integrations with cloud, mobile, and web apps, and with IT infrastructure providers. The report is free, not even a registration is needed. To my knowledge no other public report provides this level of data on cloud application usage.

For data lovers it’s a treasure trove of facts about cloud usage. There are over 28 charts and tables. Download it here. I’ll share a few of my favorite insights from the report.

Most Popular Apps by Number of Customers

Microsoft 365 wins. I attended a legal technology conference in 2014. In a session on SharePoint, hosted by Microsoft, the roadmap showed that Outlook, Exchange, and, yes, SharePoint were all moving to the cloud in the form of Office 365. People exited the room in fury. At that time, most law firms were adamant – No Cloud. While there will always be law firms, especially “Big Law,” which will keep Outlook, SharePoint, and the Office Suite on-premises, the adoption of Office 365 or Microsoft 365 in the legal sector has been swift over the past two years. The Okta data reflects this.

This chart shows that the gap in usage between Microsoft 365 and all other applications, including AWS and Salesforce, has only widened in the past 5 years.

Most Popular Video Conferencing Apps

This graph highlights the steep curve in Zoom usage which we all lived through in 2020. At Mobile Helix, we started using Zoom heavily in 2017. We even perform our LINK system deployments remotely over Zoom in about two hours. When the pandemic hit, we were easily able to deploy LINK with IT staff who were themselves working from home. Customers favor our over-Zoom deployment over an on-site visit as it ends up taking less of their time.

Customers Authenticating With Each Factor

Phishing has been up 220% during the pandemic per F5’s 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report (an excellent report on phishing). The Okta report quotes, “F5 warns that the login page of our most popular app, Microsoft 365 (M365), is one of the most popular targets for generic phishing because attackers know that stealing Office 365 credentials can grant them access not only to email but also corporate documents, finance, HR, and many other critical business functions.”

Strong Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) should be used with M365. The chart above shows that of Okta customers authenticating with a factor in addition to, or instead of a password, 82% use Okta Verify. The good news here is that weaker factors such as SMS and security questions are on the decline.

One of the positive conclusions from Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work report has to be that as difficult as 2020 was, with 38M people applying for unemployment, if it had happened even 10 years earlier, how many people would have been unable to work from home? The growth of web-based applications, cloud-based services, and mobile apps resulted in most office jobs successfully transitioning to work-from-home in two or three weeks.

2020 was The Year of the Cloud.

-Maureen

Phishing Never Takes a Holiday

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No. I’m not referring to the now infamous GoDaddy employee $650 holiday bonus email. Employees who responded to the email with the requested information were later informed that they had failed the company phishing test. If you have not yet read that dispiriting story, it’s here.

I am referring to this charming email which I received this morning.

Phishing Email and Fish
Phishing Email from “[email protected]”

It is from: “Mobilehelix passwordexpiration.”

Presumably, that would be warning enough for your employees to hit the “Delete” button posthaste.

If not that, then maybe those over-sized blue bands which overlap the line below would be a tip-off.

(I have obscured the recipient’s email address.)

This is a very good opportunity for me to show you a security feature in our LINK App. When you open an email in LINK you will always see the alias and below it the sender’s email address. You don’t have to tap or do anything else to display the email address. It’s there.

In this case the alias is the aforementioned, “Mobilehelix passwordexpiration.”

And the email address is, “[email protected].”

If your employee were uncertain as to whether to hit that “Delete” button, I think that seeing that the email is from “[email protected]” would be the icing on the cake. This email is definitely not from the company IT department. Delete.

We are serious about security at Mobile Helix. Much of what we build into the LINK system, such as certificate-based device registration in the new user registration process, is behind the scenes. It’s invisible to your employee and works in the background.

But this security feature is a designed to help your employees to be watchdogs for senders with devious intentions. 90% of organizations experienced targeted phishing attacks in 2019. Humans are the weakest link. This is one simple tool to help all of us to be vigilant.

-Maureen

Originally published in LinkedIn on December 28, 2020

LINK App: New Safari Button

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Here is a great new feature in LINK which I use several times a day. When you open a web page in the LINK app using LINK’s browser, you can now tap the familiar Safari button to open the page in the device’s Safari browser.

You can open a link in an email, or in a document, or from an application page, then tap the Safari button to open the page outside of LINK. Here is an example.

Tap on link in Email
Opens in LINK’s browser
Tap Safari Button
Opens in Safari
Tap on “Link” to return to LINK app

I use the Safari button when I receive a link to an uncommon video conference or signature service (we test the popular ones in the LINK browser), or when a page is not rendering correctly. I also use the Safari button when I want to read something, but not now. I open it in Safari. It stays open in Safari. Then I can go back to LINK and continue working.

Sound good? Here are other benefits of the Safari button:

  1. Safari is where you do your personal browsing. If you are logged in to nytimes.com, for example, those cookies are cached in Safari. If you click a hyperlink in Link, your cookies/password manager are not available to you. Better to just browse in Safari.
  2. The LINK browser routes all traffic through your office network. The Safari button allows you to move all personal web browsing into your personal browser. This (a) keeps your work network safe, and (b) prevents web proxies that your company establishes from intercepting and monitoring your traffic. It is a simple matter of employee privacy – you should always have the ability to keep your personal business personal.
  3. Native Safari has special capabilities that LINK does not. In particular, Safari has knowledge of all the apps on your device and many sites will use this capability to automatically launch a mobile app, rather than continuing to view a website in the browser. Safari also has a few important features that are not implemented in LINK’s browser. Chief amongst them is WebRTC, which is a protocol for real-time applications like in-browser video conferencing.
  4. IT can control when Link automatically pushes hyperlinks clicked in email to the native Safari browser. For example, IT can configure Facebook links to automatically open in Safari outside of the LINK container.

Have any questions? Let me know at [email protected].

-Maureen

LINK App: Time and Date Stamps

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LINK’s in-app annotation is an attorney favorite. LINK has long had the feature to sign and initial documents. Now we have added stamps for time, date, and time/date. No writing. Just tap to insert a signature and date.

Here’s how to do it on either a smartphone or tablet.

  • From the open document, tap the Paper/Pencil icon in the upper right
  • The annotation menu will appear on the left
  • To add a signature. tap the “J” icon, then tap the signature
  • To add a date, tap the Stamp icon
  • From the Stamps, tap the date, time, or date/time
  • Then position it on the document

That’s literally all there is to it. Now you can email the document or save it to DMS or file storage.

For a quick demo, view this video.

Have any questions or want to see a demo of the LINK app? Email me at: [email protected].

-Maureen

LINK App Enhanced Email Swipe Menus & VIP Notifications

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Let’s face it, Email is vital to our work, but it’s also tedious and time consuming. In LINK we care about features which make Email management more efficient.

LINK’s configurable “Swipe Menus” are one of those features. Here are 3 key things to know about Swipe Menus.

I. Color-Coded: By popular demand, menus are now color-coded per the task.

Inbox Swipe Menus

– DELETE: RED

– ARCHIVE : BLUE

– FLAG: ORANGE

– REPLY/FORWARD/FILE: GREY

– VIP: RED

– READ/UNREAD: BLUE

II. More Options from Either Side

Now you can select any of these options from either Left or Right Slide: Delete, File, Flag, Unread, Forward, Reply, VIP, Archive

There are 3 swipe left options and 2 swipe right options.

III. Settings

From the Inbox, tap the Gear Icon, in the upper right to go to Settings. Select your options. Then Save.

Email Settings from the Gear Icon in the Inbox

Bonus: VIP Notifications

Don’t forget to use your VIP features. You can make any correspondent a VIP by swiping and tapping on VIP. Then in Settings, select a distinct sound for VIP notifications. Learn all about VIP notifications in this video.

I hope that these swipe menus make your life easier!

If you have any questions, please write to me at [email protected].

–Maureen

LINK App: Add to Favorites & My Matters

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New in LINK and by popular demand, you can now:

  1. Add a workspace, folder, or file to Favorites
  2. Add a a workspace to My Matters
My Matters & Favorites Image

Just tap the ellipsis menu to the right of the workspace, folder, or file name.

This 36 second video shows how quick it is to do so.

If you have questions, email us at: contact @ mobilehelix dot com.

-Maureen

Register for our ILTA Webinar on July 20th: Paperless? It’s Easy with the LINK App

Paperless Legal Pre-bill Approvals with the LINK App

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Before we all moved to working from home, were your attorneys and paralegals approving pre-bills by marking up paper? And now? Are you scanning reams of paper? Printing and FedEx-ing?

In late 2018 we were contacted by the head of Knowledge Management of an AmLaw 100 law firm. They had a specific goal: to make approval of pre-bills paperless and easy to do on an iPad. They have a practice which has high monthly transactions. Some partners were approving several thousand pre-bills per month on paper. This was difficult enough when a partner was in the office. It was untenable if the partner had to travel. This firm had heard about our LINK app’s built-in annotation and integration with DMS. They wanted to know if we could help.

Marking up pre-bills is easy to do with LINK. Here is a common workflow:

  1. Accounting uploads the pre-bills to a folder in DMS.
  2. Attorney goes to that folder in DMS from the LINK app.
  3. Attorney annotates the pre-bills using LINK’s in-app annotation.
  4. Attorney saves the marked-up pre-bill to DMS from the LINK app.
  5. Accounting retrieves the marked-up pre-bills.

That’s all there is to it. In LINK you can mark-up a pre-bill with a pencil or a finger. Add a stamp or note. You can even capture your signature then place it on documents.

This law firm started approving pre-bills with LINK in 2019. Their partners are very pleased with the improved process. There is no going back to paper for them.

There are variations to the workflow. Instead of DMS the firm may upload the pre-bills to network file shares or OneDrive. Or, the pre-bills may be emailed to the attorney, marked up in LINK, and then emailed back. LINK can be used on a phone instead of a tablet.

You may watch a video showing two workflows, one using DMS and one using email, below.

in legal we are seeing that this pandemic presents an opportunity for certain productivity improvements. Not only in the case of Zoom, but usage of DocuSign has rocketed. “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

We would be happy to discuss your pre-bill workflow and how LINK could apply to it.

-Maureen

[email protected] +1 347-508-0967

LINK App: Paperless Legal Pre-bill Approval Workflows 8:54 from LINK App by Mobile Helix on Vimeo.

We Want to Help – Special LINK Offer

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If our LINK app can help you to provide business continuity to your attorneys and staff in this unprecedented time, we want to get LINK in your hands.

We are extending this special offer:

  • Our free LINK app trial duration is now 90-days
    • Applies to trials which begin before August 31, 2020
  • You may add unlimited users
  • This will be a full production deployment including all of LINK’s security measures

LINK is best-suited for firms or departments of 30 users and up.

LINK’s server software is deployed on VMs on-prem, behind your firewall.

With LINK it’s easy and secure to work from tablets and smartphones. LINK is an encrypted, containerized mobile app, integrated with iManage, NetDocuments, email, Office 365, and the firm intranet. Lawyers and legal staff can review, annotate, compare, edit, and email documents with LINK.

We are happy to:

  • Tell you more about LINK
  • Show you a demo via Zoom
  • Describe the trial further

If I can help you, please email me at: maureen at mobilehelix dot com.

–Maureen, President & COO

Learn about what you can with LINK in this 2.5 minute video.

ILTACON ended one week ago, are you caught up yet? 🙃

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LOL. I am by no means caught up. I’ve got to-do lists and piles of sorted business cards. Plenty of follow-up yet to go. How about you?

If you were there, wasn’t ILTACON fantastic this year?

A View from a Booth

ILTACON 2019 was the first year of Joy. Not only do I mean the first year of ILTA’s vibrant new CEO, Joy Heath Rush, but the first year that ILTA felt truly back on-track.

ILTACON 2019 broke all attendance records, at over 3,500 legal techies comprised of over 1,800 members and 1,700 business partners. Over 800 members were first-timers, which is fantastic. I can imagine that some of the booth locations were poor at the Dolphin. We were fortunate to have good traffic and terrific interest in our LINK app.

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