Microsoft recently announced its plans to make Matter Center more broadly available through GitHub later this year. With Matter Center building momentum among firms after its recent pilot program, this announcement is bound to turns heads.
So what does it mean? And, how can you benefit?
As it stands, Microsoft has released the compiled Matter Center source code that will lay the foundation for software vendors to build a case and document management system using Microsoft’s latest development architectures. Acrowire, and other system integrators (SI), will be able to take what Microsoft has built and extend the platform to create a unique experience among law firms for greater flexibility and customization. Currently, only the compiled bits have been released to Acrowire and other select vendors which allows integrators to deploy the solution but not customize it. The ability to extend the platform will be enabled once the underlying source code is released.
The functionality that Matter Center provides in collaborating with clients via Office365 is impressive. End users can easily access matters, co-author documents and collaborate from any location within SharePoint and Office.
This is all good news.
Something to be aware of, however, is that Matter Center uses SharePoint as the document management storage layer and there is not one to one feature parity between SharePoint and a traditional DMS such as iManage, OpenText and NetDocs. As a result, Matter Center will not likely be a primary DMS for firms until that gap has been bridged.
Acrowire has actively been a part of the Matter Center pilot program that included 200+ legal partners. Matter Center is built upon the latest development architectures such as SharePoint 2013 App Model* and the Office 2013 Cloud Add-In Model. We anxiously await the release of Matter Center to GitHub as we will be able to help law firms leverage the foundation Microsoft has built for further flexibility.
For more information on how Acrowire can help your firm, contact us at info@acrowire.com.
*Learn more about the SharePoint 2013 App Model referenced above, here.
