10 Things SharePoint Can Do for Your Firm

I often find myself staring at Microsoft SharePoint and wondering how I can do more with it to enable a 21st century law firm; one in which attorneys, clients and staff can easily share ideas, expertise and information across time and distance. How can it be used to reduce costs while expanding the ways in which we collaborate?

In this article I'll suggest 10 ways you can use SharePoint today in your firm to improve attorney effectiveness, deliver better client service and reduce costs. This is not a "how to" but a "what now" article, written to answer that perennial question: "now what?"

1: REPLACE YOUR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Just like a "real" DMS, SharePoint can store millions of documents along with associated versions and metadata. It can be configured to enforce retention policies and approval workflows, to allow each practice group to define their own document properties, to enforce those policies and properties centrally, or some combination thereof.

The most controversial issue relating to the use of SharePoint as a DMS has nothing to do with features or functionality, but rather with the fact that it stores documents in an SQL database as opposed to individual files on disk like leading legal DMS vendors such as OpenText and Interwoven. Storing documents in the database leads to two concerns:

1. Many believe that documents stored in SQL Server are more likely to become corrupt than the same document stored as a file on a disk drive. This concern stems from problems with Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage in early SQL databases during the 1980s and 90s. Old fears die hard;

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Source: law.com
By Mark Gerow