The annual meeting of the International Legal Technology Association kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas, and that means lots of announcements coming out this week from companies that serve the legal industry. But for today, at least, it is turning into a Microsoft kind of day.

First was this morning’s announcement that Microsoft is finally launching its long-rumored Matter Center for Office 365, a practice management platform for law firms and legal departments built on Office 365. Now comes another.

This afternoon, NetDocuments, the cloud-based document and email management service, announced that it will fully integrate its services with Microsoft cloud technologies, including Office 365, Matter Center for Office 365, and Azure, Microsoft’s platform for building cloud-computing applications and services.

According to today’s announcement, key aspects of the integration will be:

  • Azure. NetDocuments is working with Microsoft to design an Azure-hosted version of the NetDocuments DMS, to include all existing features and functionality.
  • Office 365. NetDocuments says it “is committed to delivering access to its DMS data through the Office add-in model.” The NetDocuments email management product NetDocuments EM (formerly Decisiv Email) will also be fully integrated with Exchange Online.
  • Matter Center for Office 365. NetDocuments says it is working with the Matter Center for Office 365 team to integrate additional Office 365 design patterns to provide an end-to-end robust document and email management solution on the Azure cloud platform.
  • ndOffice. ndOffice, a NetDocuments-built legal DMS application that embeds NetDocuments functionality in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, will become more broadly and deeply integrated with Microsoft technologies by leveraging the API capabilities of Office 365 and NetDocuments. Supported capabilities will include: device synchronization, mobile apps, concurrent multi-user editing, mobile security, OneDrive for Business and NetDocuments content exchange, among others.

In addition, NetDocuments says that, by moving to Azure and extending to the Office add-in model, other partners will be able to add their product offerings to this framework.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.