Tag Archives: Office 365

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

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.