Tag Archives: Office 365

Quarterly Feature Roundup | 2025 Q1

Posted on by
Reply

Welcome to the LINK App Feature Roundup, where you can find information on new, enriching features of the LINK App.

You can learn more about these and other new features by visiting our Feature Roundup page, or by clicking the links to the Quick Tips noted below.

Import a Newly Created Document from a Microsoft Office App

Now you can create a new document in one of the Microsoft Office Apps (like Office M365, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) and import that document to either LINK files or your DMS.

Learn More

Check-in a File Shared in a Teams Channel to DMS

There are multiple ways you can check in a file shared in a Teams Channel to your DMS workspace. The simplest way allows you to do so from within the LINK app, saving you from having to open the Teams app separately.

Learn More

UI Enhancements for Email

There are multiple improvements to the look of the email UI. The most noticeable differences are a redesign of the address selector (when you are writing an email and selecting email addresses) and a redesign of the attachments overlay that pops up when you are attaching a file to an email.

With the new Attachment Overlay, easily navigate all available file repositories, including iManage, NetDocuments, OneDrive, Emails, Notes, and more. You can add multiple files at once by using the multi-select feature – simply tap the checkboxes next to the files you want to attach. You can also choose the format of each file you attach.

UI Enhancements for DMS

There are a few navigation improvements in our iManage app. First, we have added quick action buttons to send emails or edit a file in iManage. Second, we have added a button at the top-left that allows you to quickly bring up the root of the iManage work area so that you can switch from wherever you are browsing to Recent Docs, My Matters, etc. We’ve also added a list of recent items to the homepage of iManage and recent and favorite items to the homepage of NetDocuments.

Microsoft Outlook Configuration Features

Our LINK Email integrates with Microsoft Exchange and has many beneficial features, including the ability to open NRLs, establish predictive email filing to DMS, and more. Some law firms have opted for a configuration of LINK that instead uses the Microsoft Outlook app for email. In these cases, we implement the “open in hook” to connect the MS Outlook app to the LINK app. The following are common workflows that illustrate this configuration.

Open an NRL in the Microsoft Outlook App

Learn More

Email Multiple Files via the Microsoft Outlook App

Learn More

Import an Attachment from Email to iManage

Learn More

Compare an Attachment to a File in iManage

Learn More

The LINK App is designed to make working easier for lawyers. This roundup is just a snapshot of the newest features to improve productivity and user experience. There are even more ways to use LINK to optimize your workflows.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our Resources page, book a demo, or send your questions to [email protected].

Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work Report

Posted on by
1

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

Paperless Legal Pre-bill Approvals with the LINK App

Posted on by
Reply

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

https://vimeo.com/411902782

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