Microsoft Exchange in the legal industry is growing very rapidly. Many firms, from the solo attorney to the multi-office firm, have or are turning to Exchange to streamline their organizational collaboration.
Exchange is a Microsoft product that handles organization-wide collaboration through email, contacts, calendaring, tasks and more. Over the years, Time Matters has increased the quality and reliability of its sync utility application for Microsoft Exchange. Just like your Time Matters SQL Server, Exchange is a software and database engine that runs on a server at all times to send and receive email, update employee calendars, sync with other devices such as phones and tablets, and, for many law firms, sync both ways with the Time Matters Calendar, Contact and ToDo lists. This sync provides attorneys and their staff with real time information on all of their devices. What they see in Time Matters is exactly what they will see in Outlook, as well as any device syncing their email, within minutes of a change or addition.
Unfortunately, hosting and maintaining an Exchange server for some firms can be costly in hardware and IT services. Many firms and solo attorneys simply choose to use their ISP-provided, or Web Domain hosted, email service (such as GoDaddy) but as a consequence lose out on many functionalities and capabilities that Exchange can provide to an organization.
Over the last few years the Software as a Service industry (SaaS) has grown enormously. The “Cloud”, as it is often referred to, has ridden in on a white horse, like a knight in shining armor, to save the day for those smaller firms who find it financially unrealistic to purchase and maintain their own Exchange server. There are a growing number of Hosted Exchange Services providing cloud based email, contact, and calendaring management for a monthly fee. Many of these providers have already been successfully setup to sync with Time Matters. One in particular, Microsoft Exchange Online (or as a part of Office 365), is now supported by Time Matters technical support and is being used to by many law firms today in conjunction with Time Matters and its real time sync.
There is no need for smaller firms to “make do” with their less-than-adequate internet email, carrying around paper calendars printed from Time Matters. Throw out the paper and look into Hosted Exchange Server.
Need help figuring out how to move to a hosted Exchange solution for your firm? Give us a call at 877-357-0555. We can help you get rid of that paper calendar!
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.
