More and more firms are using some sort of portal or file sharing application to communicate with clients working from home. The workflow for file sharing varies widely from firm to firm. I did an extensive post about this back in July. Click here to see it.
Worldox has recently released an integration with Microsoft Teams. Obviously this means that the people the firm is collaborating also have to have Teams/Office 365, but this is increasingly the case with law firms.
The integration creates a Team named with the client/matter number for the given matter. This may seem rigid, but is essential to prevent users from going wild and creating random, duplicative Teams. Within each team, users can create “Channels” to specify what exactly they are sharing with clients and define who has rights to see and manage the contents.
From within Worldox, you can then share one or more files with the defined Team/Channel (and if necessary create a new Channel for that team). Files can either be just copied from Worldox or checked out (which would mean they can no longer be edited from within Worldox). After the client has worked on them (or whatever), they can be checked back in, as a Version of the original file if necessary. Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to add a comment when creating a version, but hopefully that is in the works.
Once a file is in Teams, the Teams functionality takes over in terms of editing and collaborating on the document: Worldox no longer has anything else to do with it.
The best part of this integration, especially compared with some other offerings, is that it is free. There is no charge from Worldox, and many firms have Teams as part of Office 365.
Comments