SharePoint|The Reality Series 6
Migrating your users—not just your data

“Now when we have spot inspections,” Norton adds, “we can quickly answer investigators’ questions and provide source documentation for them. No more frantic searches for information, no more mad compliance scrambles.”

Fish & Richardson’s Mersereau says,“We’re tackling the leveraging we do in our case management system.” The firm’s attorneys produce large volumes of docket-driven trademark and patent documentation, so it’s critical to build templates that generate the correct form and submission process. Such form libraries live across thousands of the firm’s extranets. That includes everything from simple file sharing to web-parts where clients can see their trademark portfolios and patent report status across the global markets and jurisdictions.

“We have in a directory tree the filing specifics, and due dates,” Mersereau explains. “We include the roles and responsibilities for each of the players and wrap the account and legal details around that. It’s pretty holistic, includes all the parties and appends checkboxes for each contact in our listings. We know how to route the communication and who receives our correspondence.”

Now that Mersereau’s team has fine-tuned the functionality, the next step is to adjoin it to web front end in the form of SharePoint 2010—a three-year undertaking. In Conley’s on-deck circle is an effort to build an executive dashboard with the same toolset. That more integrative approach will demand a further reaching buy-in from the front office. Dashboards by nature expose departmental siloes, and resistance to such transparency is widespread—especially when SharePoint business intelligence (BI) capabilities expose unproductive and questionable data collection practices.