Outline for Microsoft Office

 

We are proud to announce Outline for Microsoft Office, our upcoming enterprise template management system.   Outline is due for release at the end of Q1 2011.

 

What's the problem?

 

From contracts to wills, leases to litigation, documentation is by far the single biggest output of the modern legal practice, for both in-house legal departments and practicing firms, where house style and branding are king.  Microsoft Word is the world's leading word processing software and for the majority of its audience, it addresses their needs perfectly.  It would not be unfair to say that when faced with some of the specialist requirements of the legal industry some holes in the product begin to appear.

 

This is where the vast majority will invest huge amounts of time and effort to bend Word into working their way.  This is achieved by developers creating new templates, replacing functions, designing new interface forms to replace existing ones;  the list is literally endless.  And, the fact is that the further you get away from the out-of-the-box product, the harder it is to keep running smoothly and consequently the larger the overhead is to support it.

 

And having said all that we have not even considered this problem appearing across every language that your company practices with.

 

If you work or have worked in legal IT sector, I'm sure this will be only too familiar.

 

So .. What if?

 

What if there was a way you could vastly consolidate the templates you have across the globe and easily handle multiple languages?

 

What if you could give your users a single consistent interface for working with documents that integrates with your existing systems?

 

What if you could hand control of your templates back to those that use them, taking the pressure off of IT ?

 

And what if you didn't need to buy new hardware to achieve this?

 

In short,  now you can!

 

 

Really!?

 

Yes!  We have created a cutting-edge template management solution aimed at addressing the needs of today's legal professionals.  Allowing you to:-

 

• Standardise and consolidate the number of templates used across your world wide offices
• Provide a standard and consistent user interface for ALL templates which are easily integrated with your CRM, practice management, document management, etc. systems.
• Hand back the maintenance of your templates to those that use them every day, taking pressure off your IT department and reducing cost.
• Reduce, or even eliminate, custom code to get back to out-of-the-box Word.
• Ensure your staff have the latest templates wherever they are.

 

What's the catch?

 

A lot of people would say none at this point, however that is unfortunately rarely the answer to this question in any walk of life.

 

Implementation of Outline does require some up-front effort to adapt your existing templates to work with the Outline system although once you get started you will see how simple it really is.

 

We cannot guarantee there will not be small tweaks required over the years as Microsoft change the underlying Word product, however the cost of ownership, training and rollout projects will be greatly reduced.

 

 

And what does it cost?

 

Outline will be offered in both a fully-hosted subscription based licence model as well as a traditional on-premise installation.

 

As with anything, there are advantages and disadvantages to each of these models and this will largely depend on the culture of your company,  which is why we initially plan to offer both models.

 

How does it work?

 

Outline is essentially a Microsoft Word add-in which is installed on the client machine.  This client handles everything from template synchronisation to document creation as well as template design and system administration all within the Word environment.

 

The server side of Outline differs depending on the model you have installed.  The fully hosted solution will run on the Microsoft Azure platform where as an on-site installation will require you to have local server hardware to support the software.

 

The files needed to support the system will either be stored on secure cloud based web servers or on web servers hosted on site with the client.