Hidden Gems in Microsoft 365

session. This is going to be a great technology hour. Katherine, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate you doing this last minute. We're hoping for all of our members that we can get Katherine to do one more, hopefully in January, so we'll at least have 2 credit hours for you guys, hopefully last minute before the hours are due. But we're excited to have you, Katherine. Thank you again for being here. And it looks like we now currently have 43 members, which The Zoom turnout is unbelievable. So thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Indeed. Thank you. And thanks, Stephanie. I'm Katherine Sanders-Reach. I'm going to share my screen here. And what we are going to go through today is Microsoft 365. And sorry, the slide still says Office 365. I will, I'll tell you why it says that, because Microsoft changed the name. After 5 years of calling it Office 365, they changed it to Microsoft 365. That's really wrecking it for everybody who's used to saying one thing and now it's another, but this is a product that I think a lot of lawyers have gotten recently or have had for a while, but may not have explored all the features and functionalities in it. So I've got a lot of slides which I can share with Stephanie if you want to see them, but I'm also recording the session. So we'll provide that to you as well. So what I'm going to do is actually demonstrate some of the things in the product because it's easier to understand it if I show it to you rather than just tell you or show you screenshots. So this is a live demonstration, which always means that we can have technical difficulties and, uh, and that's just kind of the way of things, but, um, We will go move forward. So one of the things that I wanted to point out, as I said, was in April, um, Office 365 became Microsoft 365, which, you know, really is nothing but a, a minor name change, but still enough to kind of throw you off. What was more probably confusing is that they changed the names of the different plans. So within Microsoft 365, there are a number of plans. The plan that I'm going to be demonstrating today, and the one that I'm going to be talking about, is not a free plan, and it's not a Home User plan. It is the Business Standard plan, and you'll know if you have it because it costs $12.50 per user per month. If you pay less than that, you have a different plan. I'll talk to you a little bit about that Um, the other thing that I've, I've run into is especially with sole practitioners, they went out and bought a laptop at, you know, Best Buy or Walmart or wherever, and it came with Microsoft 365. However, if you buy it at a big box store, the plan that you're getting is actually a home user plan and not a business plan. So if you start seeing stuff that I'm showing you, go, I don't have that. You probably have the Home User Plan, especially like I said, if you bought something where it was preinstalled and it wasn't through a business purchase, like through direct through Dell or through Lenovo or direct— well, actually, I don't know how with a Mac. You probably get to choose. But at any rate, that's just something to be aware of. So if you go, I don't have that stuff, then you probably have a different plan. I do highly suggest that you get at least Business Standard for your practice. It is appropriate for up to 300 users. So for most small firms, that is more than enough, and it gives you a ton of functionality but doesn't give you things that you don't necessarily need. For instance, the Business Premium plan is, um, it includes access to, uh, some more advanced features, cybersecurity, advanced threat protection, remote wiping, file preservation, litigation holds, things like that. That one is $20 a month. If you are in a larger firm or you have more sophisticated needs, and, and you have a good IT department or good outsourced IT help, that might be something that you're interested in getting. It does just have kind of more bells and whistles in terms of the managed side of managing your team. But Business Standard is fine for most small offices. And so again, that's $12.50 per user per month. One of the things I always like to point out is this is a ton of useful software for a very small price. And the thing about Microsoft 365 is if you bought it because you were replacing your Office suite, So Office would be Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This does way more than that. So for one thing, you're getting a hosted Exchange. So in the past, if you had Microsoft Outlook, you might have been using some sort of IMAP protocol or POP to a third party like Gmail or something like that. But with Microsoft 365 Business Standard, you can get it, you get the Exchange server which means that you can synchronize between the web, your phone, other devices, and it all works seamlessly. And you can, you know, any device you pick up, it'll sync with the Microsoft 365 Exchange seamlessly. It's built to go. And plus it syncs your calendars, your contacts, your email, everything. So if you had ever synced before, but you just got email, but not your calendar, If you go with this Business Standard plan, you're gonna get everything on every device. So that, that is also so useful. You get file server through OneDrive or SharePoint. We'll talk about the difference between OneDrive and SharePoint. And then you get a whole bunch of other things like Teams, and we'll talk about Teams and whether you've explored Teams. So there's, there's a whole lot more than just the Microsoft Office suite built into Microsoft 365 Business Standard, which is a whole, kind of cloud plus installed applications. So you've got everything that you have access is available on the cloud. It's available on your laptop, on your desktop, on your mobile device. For each person who has a license, you get 5 installs of the applications. So I always, I was like, okay, I got my phone, I got my tablet, I got my laptop. I might have a desktop back at the office. I never can figure out the 5th use, so I always say you got one for the dog if you need one. So at any rate, you pretty much can have all of this installed on every device you want to. The other thing is this is what all is in the suite. So it's not, like I said, it's not just Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. You get all these other things, and we're going to go through some of these other products because they're really useful and a couple of tips and tricks on what you get. And then I'm also, I'm going to show you some add-ons. So I am a huge fan of add-ons for Microsoft products when they make sense and when they are really expand and extend the product itself. So I'm going to show you a few specifically in Outlook that I really like that I think make a huge difference in productivity. Especially for lawyers, just trying to reduce the amount of clicks and things that you have to do to streamline your activities. So we're gonna look at some add-ons too. If you are a Clio user or a PracticePanther user, or pretty much any of the web-based practice management applications, or you're a NetDocuments user, a ton of legal-specific products that integrate with Microsoft 365. If you have any of those products and you're using 365 and you haven't hooked up that integration, definitely take a look at that because it's, it's gonna, again, it's gonna make it easy for you to flow from one product to another without repeating information, without having to click in and click out. So anytime we can kind of have everything talking to each other, I think that makes life much easier. So the first thing we're going to look at is, is Outlook itself. And, um, you know, if you've been a Microsoft user for a long time, you probably are very familiar with Outlook. It's the primary email, calendar, and contacts management, uh, application in the Microsoft Office suite. But they've added a bunch of things to, um, Outlook with the advent of 365, and they just keep adding things. So we're going to look look at some. I mentioned Outlook add-ins. So in the interface, in the ribbon, there is a little button called Get Add-ins. And so if you— if I mention an add-in and you go, where, where do I get that? Just click on the button that says Get Add-ins and you can find it. Some of them are admin managed, which basically means if you're not the admin of your Office 365 account, then find who is, probably your office administrator or your IT department, and say, She said something about this admin-managed add-in. I want it. And they can go and turn it on for you, and then it'll appear in your, um, your add-ins. So the other thing that's cool about add-ins in the 365 suite versus the, the old-fashioned Outlook with the local Exchange server is that the add-ins now appear in Outlook on the web. So I was at, uh, a law library waiting to do a presentation for some law students. And so one of the benefits of, of Microsoft 365 is I didn't have my laptop with me. I was at the library, so I just went and logged into my office.com account, and I have access to all my documents, emails, all of that kind of stuff. But within Outlook on the web, uh, those add-ins that I like so much actually appear in the web interface. So if I have them installed on my desktop, I can also access them through the web interface. So even though I didn't have my laptop with me, I still had that. In the old days, any add-ons you had weren't accessible to you through Outlook on the web. So they're a little hard to find. In this entire Microsoft Office suite and across the web applications, the, the little ellipses is the magic button. If you're wondering, how do I do something? Or where's my stuff? If you click on the ellipses, that's going to give you a whole other bunch of menus and options and things. So always be on the lookout for the ellipses because that's, that's kind of where all the little extra bells and whistles are that, that aren't necessarily built into the primary page. So some of the stuff that's built into Outlook through Microsoft 365 is artificial intelligence. And this is both cool and disturbing because it really starts learning you and what you're doing and starts making suggestions and kind of connecting the dots. The more, the more all in you are with the suite, the more likely you are that you're gonna see some of these helpful suggestions. And so one day I pulled up a PowerPoint presentation and there was this yellow bar across the top that says, It looks like you presented this file at this, um, CLE presentation. Do you wanna share it with the attendees? It knew because I had that presentation on my calendar that this file was likely something that I would wanna share with the attendees that was on my calendar. So that level of connection and making suggestions is some of the interesting stuff that's happening, uh, with this product. So I'm going to show you some of these things in real life. So this is my Outlook. And so, for instance, if you get an email from someone and they say, do you have time to meet next week? You'll see that it pops up a little box that says suggested meetings.. And if you click on it, it says, we think we found an event. It, it basically is able to read out of your email and say, it looks like Wednesday, next Wednesday at 1 o'clock. And then all you have to add is the location and then add it to your calendar. So that makes quick work of getting things that, you know, someone sends you an email and talks about a meeting, but you haven't actually gotten it on your calendar yet.. And I'm going to show you an application within 365 that is very helpful to make sure that you have everything on your calendar as soon as you book it. And I actually, I think I use this with Stephanie. I use a different product called Calendly. If anybody uses Calendly or Acuity or something like that, this is where I can send you a link. You can see my free busy time and book an appointment with me directly. So I don't need to have an admin negotiate this. I don't have a bunch of back and forth emails, that kind of thing. But that means that I have to get everything on my calendar really quickly. That way I don't run the risk of having somebody book something on my calendar and then I realize, whoops, I forgot to book. So suggested meetings are one thing, action items are another. Action items are kind of hit or miss. It tries to read through the email and it'll say, it looks like there's an action item in here. And then you can basically flag it for follow-up. Because again, all these products are talking to each other. If you flag an email for follow-up, it also shows up in To Do, which is another application built into the, the software. To Do was formerly known as Wunderlist. Wunderlist was a much beloved to-do app, and Microsoft bought it, wrecked it, and then finally last year got around to integrating it well within the Office suite and making it functional and useful again. So we'll show you that, but One of the things is if you flag an item for follow-up, it will be in your to-do list. So if flagging an email doesn't actually get you to do anything with it, which I'm frankly, I'm really good at ignoring pop-ups these days. Now it's in to-do, and I can actually take action on it. So another thing I wanna show you that's, it's technically an add-in, but again, this is one of those things where you're gonna get your, your administrator to make sure it's turned on is this thing called Templates. And so I'm going to show you Templates real quick. So if I go to send a new email and pull this over the screen, I can put the cursor down here and click on View Templates up here in this upper right, and then I can click on this and it just drops that text in there for me. So you can have lots and lots and lots for your Zoom meeting. So if you are sending out the, the Zoom link and you have to go look it up every time, if you make it a little template and I click on it, it puts in all the dial-in and the login information. I don't have to go look it up. So templates are really useful. I used to use Quick Parts for this. Quick Parts are great if you've ever used them, but the problem with Quick Parts is that Quick Parts are locally installed on your machine. And so the only time Quick Parts are available to you is when you're on your laptop doing this stuff. That's why I mentioned that some of these add-ons now extend over to the Outlook on the web, because now my templates go with me wherever I go, including on my phone. So building out your templates versus taking, you know, using your, your Quick Parts is actually very helpful. So how do you actually build a template? So you just click on View Templates and then you scroll down to the bottom until you get to this little plus sign that says Template. And I can click on it and we'll call this Test Template. Type and save. And it's as simple as that. And now we've got my test template. So you can go into an email that you, that you send a lot, um, copy and paste. I'm actually going to use a quick part to show you how this looks. So say you are constantly sending out an email that says How to Dress for Court. So this is a long email that you may send frequently, you know, what to look like when you go to court. So if you select it and then go down to your template, call the template Dress for Court, paste in the content. Now the next time, instead of going into my Sent Mail and finding all this text, I'm just going to view my template, find my Dress for Court, and plop in the text. So that's where templates really come in handy. If you find yourself going to your Sent Items to find an email that you frequently send, saving it as a template is going to save you a lot of time and just make life easier. And that can be something as simple as, you know, like I said, the Zoom link, or your Calendly link, your Bookings link, or longer text blocks, whatever. It can be long and short and everything in between. But I, I do love templates because I'm lazy. Anything that helps me make life faster and easier is better. So next thing is, oh, FindTime. So FindTime is another little add-on that I think is super useful for lawyers. In that it allows me to create a meeting poll. So if you are doing a, you're gonna have a meeting with your client and their attorney and their client, say you're doing a family law and you've gotta arrange a meeting for 4 people. All of a sudden that becomes a whole lot of emails. And so you normally would hand it off to an assistant or a paralegal or something to say, find a time that we can all meet. FindTime actually has this built into Outlook. And so, you know, if you're lucky and you have somebody who can help you out doing that kind of thing, great. But if, if you're on your own, then this is the kind of thing that you have to do. And it just eats up a lot of time when you're trying to find availability for multiple people. So FindTime is just this little add-on. And so let's say I'm going to send a new email., and I'm going to invite some people who are in the firm and some people outside the firm. So for me, I'm going to click on this New Meeting Poll, and it's going to load up, and let's find some attendees first. So what it wants you to do is pick some people. So I'm going to pick some people in my organization or in my Microsoft 365 tenant, basically the people we're paying for in the firm. And then we're going to add some people who are outside of the firm. And then what you see is it's changing, and what it's doing is, okay, so we're going to say the duration is going to be an hour. We want to have this during work hours. We've got Eric who's in my org and Stephanie who's outside of my org, and it's looking at my calendar and at Eric's calendar because Eric's on my Exchange server, so it knows his free busy times if he uses his calendar effectively. And then this kind of blank one, that's Stephanie, because we don't know Stephanie's availability. But before I go picking availability, I'm going to make sure that I'm available, Eric's available, and then we got a guess with Stephanie. So I'm going to switch over. I'm actually off this for the rest of the month. So I'm not available until the beginning of the year. So now you can see that I'm free. Eric's free. We still don't know about Stephanie, but I'm going to select this and I'm going to select this one and I'm going to select this one and click on next. And then I want to get notified about the poll updates. I can remind people, I can hold these times on my calendar until we've all selected our availability. All this, you have a bunch of bells and whistles, and then you add it to your email. And basically what happens is everybody's gonna get a link and they can click on it. They take a poll, choose their availability. When everybody has added their time, it puts it, it sends out a calendar request and puts it on all of our calendars. That's it. It's super simple, but it makes things so much easier when you have to schedule multiple people for an appointment. So that's something that I wanted to show you. So that's kind of the, um, layout. I send out this link, they get an email and pick their preference. They can add notes. And then I have a little dashboard if I had a lot of these going, so I can see who's answered, who hasn't answered, that kind of thing. So if you've got somebody who's scheduling things for you or you're scheduling things with multiple people, this is a great add-in. There are lots of other products on the on the market that do this, but FindTime's one of the few that's built into Exchange. So it sees your calendar and other people in your firm's calendar. Another artificial intelligence thing built into this is Insights, and Insights is pretty creepy. So I'll show it to you. And when I say creepy, it's, it's because it's, aware of my calendar, it's aware of documents, it's aware of events, it's aware of emails. And so if I click on Insights, it's actually really useful, as kind of invasive as it may feel, because, well, it first, it begs you to block time to get work done, which I appreciate, but it also starts getting interesting because it says follow up on your requests. Looks like you've got a couple of requests here. So here's some things you, you, you've asked other people to do. Um, here's some meetings you want to prepare for. Here's people that you're meeting with. And so if I click on follow up or with requests that I follow up with these people, I have followed up with her so I can mark that done. I followed up with her so I can mark that done, but that one I need to follow up. So I'm actually going to, you know, at this point, I may wanna add it to my calendar. I may wanna add it to, to my to-do list. It just kind of goes through your email and your calendar and helps you pull things out that you might've missed that you haven't flagged for follow-up or otherwise. And then the other thing that's kind of new is this daily email briefing for Cortana, from Cortana. And it's similar, except that you saw with Insights, I had to click a button to see Insights. Now, your computer is sending you a daily email with that same sort of information. Looks like somebody asked you for something. Do you need us to set a reminder for you? Have you followed up with this? So I'll go and see what Cortana said I had to do today. And it comes in as your daily briefing. And it reminds you every time. You can unsubscribe from this. And this is personal and private to you. You're the only person who's gonna see this. And it just kind of gives you, you know, tasks and prep for meetings and things like what Insights does, except it's a daily email. If you don't like it, unsubscribe from it. Okey-doke. So that's Outlook and some of the things. Outlook hasn't changed substantially. It's that it is building on intelligence from Teams. 'cause a lot of us are getting a lot of our to-dos and our tasks through Outlook. So Outlook has gotten a lot better about kind of helping turn emails into action, which, you know, if it fits into your inbox and you're using your inbox as a task management tool, it's trying to get you out of that habit. So the next thing is the communication and collaboration portion of this. And this is OneDrive, SharePoint,, and then what you can do with sharing documents within 365. So we'll, we'll look at that. So the difference between OneDrive and SharePoint is that OneDrive is the equivalent to your local, local drive. So that's your C drive basically, but now it's in the cloud. So if you are in a small firm and you don't have a shared server environment, and each one of you save things to your local drive, and then you'd save it to a hard disk or something like that. You know, OneDrive is your local drive, but it's now in the cloud, so your local drive is now available to you wherever. The other thing with OneDrive is you can share it with other people. So if you're in a small firm and SharePoint seems a little confusing or over the top, you can just use OneDrive and give everybody access to the folders at the top level, and then all the subsequent folders will be shared with everybody. And that's a quick and dirty way of of using OneDrive as kind of a shared drive, but the default is that it's just stuff for you. SharePoint, on the other hand, is more like your server. So that's your file server is what SharePoint is. SharePoint comes with Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and we'll look at that. The neat thing about SharePoint is that you can create shared libraries, you can create templates, you can have, where people can upload their expenses. There's all sorts of other things you can do with SharePoint because in addition to just storing files, there's a lot of intelligence you can bring into it and a lot of functionality you can bring into it. But with OneDrive, basically it's like my C drive except that it makes it really easy to share a file or a folder with somebody from within that without emailing it. So I just wrote a 2,500-word article on why to stop emailing attachments. And so when it gets published, I will send it to you if you're interested in, but there's, you know, emailing attachments is inefficient, it's insecure, and there's just a lot of better ways to do it. So one of the things I tend to want to show people is how OneDrive works and how to share a file or folder from within that. So let's go look at that. And the way that you can get into Microsoft 365 most easily, just open your browser and then go into office.com. And when you go into office.com, it has everything that you want. So There's that Stop Emailing Attachments article I was recently working on. It's got kind of my recent work, what's been shared with me, you know, kind of a nice little one-stop shopping for recent activities. But if I want to go into OneDrive, I can just go over here, click on OneDrive, and that's going to open up. And the reason I'm going to OneDrive in the cloud versus OneDrive on my desktop is because this gives you the most functionality. So in OneDrive, you see I've got all my folders. And if you wanted to share a whole folder with a client or, um, with your team, the process is the same. You pick the folder and then you mouse over it, and then this little weird icon pops up. And if I click on it, it brings up a dialog box. And if I click on People You Specify Can View, it actually shows you more options. So The options for sharing are anyone with the link. If you work with consumer clients and you're not confident that you know whether they have a 365 account or even a Microsoft account, default to anyone with a link. Now, of course, anyone with a link means anyone with the link can also share it with anybody. So there are some protections you can put with that. So if I choose anyone with the link, I can allow editing. The default is they can't edit, they can only view. I can set an expiration date and I can also set a password. So if you're sharing files this way or folders this way with a client, um, and you wanna do anyone with a link, just so you don't have to figure out whether they have access to 365, do anyone with a link, but set a password. Do not email the password when you share the link with them. Call them with the password. One of the things that I usually suggest is when you start working with a new client, establish a good, long, strong, unique password for everything you're going to do with them. And that way you don't have to, to deal with, um, setting individual passwords every time you share something with them. If you are going to share it with specific people, that would be people that are going to have to log into 365. Now they can if they have a Microsoft 365 account and they log in, that'll work. If they have an office.com free account, that works. So, you know, that's the kind of stuff that we try to reduce the friction when we share. But if I click on Specific People, again, the default is to disallow editing. So if I want them to be able to edit, I'm gonna click on that box. And then people within your firm, It's going to show up people in and the name of the firm. If I click on this again, I can either allow them to edit or not. And then I click apply and then it sends it to the people I want to send it to. And it's hooked up to my, um, my contacts. So it brings up both the people in my organization and also people in my contacts. And then I can type a message. And then I can copy the link and paste it into Outlook if I want to. I could open this in Outlook, or I can just send it from here. It will show up in Outlook in your sent messages. So I'm going to send the link. And now that I've done that, um, what happens is that when you look over in this far right column, if I've shared a folder It'll show that I've shared that. So I'm going to go to a different folder to share, show you some more intricacies with this. So for this folder, you can see that it's shared. If I click on Shared, it's going to pop up this dialog box over here. It's going to show that Eric and I have direct access. If I want to see exactly what Eric can do. I click on this little arrow, he can edit it. If I want to switch him over to view only, I can switch him over to view only. It changes the icon. If I want to stop sharing with him, I can also do that. So you have a lot of granular access to changing things once you've shared something. If you go, uh, I don't want him to be able to edit anything, you can make it view only, or you can stop sharing altogether. And then there's, there's some links giving access within this folder. So I can share the whole folder with Eric and give him edit access. But if I wanted to share an individual file with a specific person within this folder, then I can go into this folder., and there's, there's a lot of folders in here. And then I can see, um, individual files. They're all going to show that they're shared because I've shared it with Eric, but I can go in individual, um, files and see that I can share with an individual person. So let me find the actual document that I shared with someone else. Okay, so for this particular file, I'm gonna go click on Shared again. And well, it's the wrong file, but at any rate, one of these files somewhere in here, I added another person who has View Only. So in the law firm, you can share your entire folder with people on your team.. But then you can share a specific document with different permissions from within that folder. So if you need to share the file with the client and you say, I just want them to have read-only, you can do it from within there. So you can, you can be, you know, as granular with the sharing and then, of course, revoking access as you need to be. So the other thing, so that's all that, and then that's in your materials, and then I showed you how you can see access who has access to the folder and how to manage access. But then we get to the fun part, which is multi-author document collaboration. So if you've got somebody, say you've got co-counsel that you want to draft a document with them or draft a document with anybody that you want to, you can share the document via a link like we just did. But it maintains version control. So I'm going to show you what that looks like. So this is a document in Microsoft Word. It's actually the materials I sent y'all. And so one of the things is I can go and I can see right across the top here as the name of the file, it has a little icon to let me know that I've shared this with someone., and the last time I modified it. If I click on this, I can see where it's stored, and I can also click on version history. If I need to revert back to our previous version, I can click here, and then what I get, if you're familiar with Word's compare features, I can compare the original or the current version with that particular version, and it just shows you the, you know, the revisions, the compare document, everything like you're used to doing with the Word compare. So if you do send this off to share with someone, they have access to this at the exact same time as you do. If they download it and edit it and they upload it again, you'll still see the changes. If there were multiple people in the document at the same time, up in this upper right corner, we would see that other people are there. If I want to share this document with someone, the easiest thing to do is click on Share. And it's the same, so you could go into OneDrive and do this, or you can just share from within the document itself. You get the same kind of options here, anyone with the link, people in the organization, specific people, same kind of blocking download or editing. And so you can share it directly from there. When you do that, it does some interesting things in terms of visibility. So I'm going to show you something that I shared a file with a whole bunch of people. So let, let me navigate back to that real quick. So I had a big PowerPoint. PowerPoints, you know, are often Big files. So this, in addition to having multi-document or multi-author document collaboration, sharing big files like this, but sharing a big file for multiple people to edit is also useful. So I'll show you kind of an example of this. So I was doing a program for our estate planning program. And so when I mouse over this document, you can see that it's shared., and the last time it was modified. But when I mouse over the name, it starts telling me all sorts of stuff. How many views this has had, details about sharing, who's viewed it. And if I mouse over, this is an email conversation I had about this document when I shared it. So if I click on this, I shared this, but we also had conversations about the document itself. And it pulls up the entire thread of the email conversation about that document. And that's where I think this is really helpful. I don't have to go back into Outlook and find the email thread, you know, obsessively folder all that. It's got, here's the slides that I'm sharing with you and here's the conversation we had about it. So again, this is the kind of stuff where using all these tools built within the product is all of a sudden really helping you with productivity because you're not searching all over the place You're able to take a document that you've created, share it with people, have an email conversation about it, get back at the— look at the versions, revert to versions, compare versions, see— and it, it kind of redlines through if you have multiple people making changes. So if you have not played with the collaboration tools in OneDrive and within Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint,— or Word, sorry, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, this is— it's really easy to do like I showed you in Word. All you have to do is— and I just did this the other day— click on Share, and that starts the thing, and you just kind of follow those prompts and do it. So, okay, the next kind of collaborative tool that they've built in that you may or may not have played around with is Teams. So I'm going to show you Teams. Teams, this is a really nifty product. It's built on SharePoint. If you've never used SharePoint, you may still find that Teams is really useful because it basically gives a lot of context to SharePoint. SharePoint is, um, not for the faint of heart. It's a little complicated to get set up and use it well. So Teams basically is a product that's built on SharePoint that lets you have chat. So if you have ever thought about having some sort of internal conversational tool like Slack, Teams builds that in. Teams is also something that people are using because of COVID and having to work from home. They're using it as a video conferencing platform. Which you can use with your internal team or with people outside of the office. So I could have just as easily set this up as a Teams meeting as Zoom. I think Teams works a little bit better for internal communication, but there are certainly lots of organizations using Teams as their video conferencing platform. So you don't have to have Zoom and Teams. You don't have to pay for both. If you've got Teams, if you got Office 365, so you may be able to save yourself some money and not necessarily pay for Zoom. You kind of have to figure out what your use case is for either one. Teams doesn't do things like breakout rooms. So for that, that's why a lot of the mediators are using Zoom because their breakout rooms are very easy to use. So, you know, you'll have to do a little bit of comparison before you get rid of a product you're already using a lot. But one of the things I've been reminding attorneys throughout COVID is, You're paying for a whole lot of stuff with Microsoft 365. Use it so that you're not using all these other tools that you may already have built into the platform you're using. So I'm gonna show you Teams with the caveat that my organization is not using it. We're still using Slack. So some of the stuff that we would do in Teams, we're handling through Slack and Zoom. So mine's a little bit empty., but I think you'll be able to get a sense. So if we were using it for chat, all of the chat across the organization would appear here. Anything new that I've done in Teams appears in my activity. If I wanted to call or video conference with somebody, I just click on the call button and then pick person and find them and call them. And you can see the history of your calls. You can also get voicemail, people can leave you a voicemail through this. So it's video conferencing and audio conferencing built in. And then I think for law firms, this is where the real power is, is this thing called Teams itself. And so it, it's most useful if you figure out how best to organize this, because the way it works is you can have, so you can see here that we have multiple teams. I have the MX department, I've got the social media team, got my departmental team, some project-based teams. Be intentional about how you set this up to get the most use out of it. I think based on if you are the kind of firm that has a lot of clients with usually unique matters versus a few clients with a lot of matters, that's, you know, so thinking about setting it up because So say if you have a lot of clients with individual matters and you have more, so say you've got real estate, family law, trust and estate. So some of these, you may have multiple matters for, but for the most part, you're probably going to have a single matter for each client. So you could do, this could be, this team could be your real estate. And then within real estate, each one of these could be the client. And then within each one of these, if I open one up, and this is where it gets interesting. So your team can have a conversation about what's happening under post for this client. So all the chat around this client's matter, all the files related to this client's matter, which I can upload files that already exist, or I can create new files right within Teams. And it stores it in this folder in Teams for that client. They have these things called wikis, and this is freeform notes. You could use it for phone notes. You could use it for brainstorming. You could use it for whatever you want to. Then they have a little project management tool. It is a board-style project management tool. So it comes out of the box with to-do, doing, and done are your 3 columns. And so if I wanna add a task, I can say, And then we'll set a due date. And I can assign it to whoever is— I've also added to this team. We'll assign it to Eric. And then I'm going to add the task. When I do that, I can actually now go into this task and add notes, add a checklist. Add attachments, add comments, set due dates. So once you create the task, you can actually go add a lot more granularity to it so that you have a way to track what you're doing for that matter. So everybody's on the same page. People are getting tasks because, you know, you can assign something to somebody, but if you don't give them a deadline, you have no way of tracking it. Then it's a constant communication back and forth. Hey, did you, you know, did you take care of that? I don't know, let me go look. This basically gives you wonderful transparency and tracking, and this is just something that you can put into any team workspace. I inserted a shared calendar in here, and then this new thing that they've added, which is called Lists. So as an example of a list, what I've done is I created a conflict checking checklist, and the conflict checking checklist is not going to do the conflict check for you. What it's intended to do is track that, okay, we are onboarding a new client, but first we need to do the conflict check. Has it been done? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click a new item and we're gonna say, yes, this needs to be checked. And then the date that kind of we put this into the system. Then how did this potential client contact us? Through email, excuse me, web forum, phone call. So we'll say phone call. I'm gonna assign it to myself. We need to complete this. Let's be realistic after Christmas and any attachments we have. And so basically this is going to trigger, and this is something that I just whipped up. This is going to trigger that you need to do a, um, a conflict check for this person. It's assigned to this person. There's a due date, and then they go check off I've done it. So it's a, it's just a way again to track activity and to be more visible about it. The way that you add all this stuff is you just can open— let me open one that doesn't have much. So I opened this one to have a shared file with my boss. Here's the file that I created right from here. But if I wanted to add task management, I can add the lists, which I showed you, the wiki, which is the freeform note-taking tool. I can add a Word document, I can add Planner, I can add all sorts of stuff, plus applications from across the web, including things like Clio. So Clio now has a Teams integration. Anyway, Teams is really, it's a really fascinating tool. A lot of businesses are figuring out ways to use it effectively. So it's definitely worth something, you know, to, to go in and look. So SharePoint is, because Teams is leveraging SharePoint, I'm not gonna go into SharePoint with you. If you ever see something in Teams, you go, well, I wanna be able to do this. You can actually go build it out in SharePoint and then integrate it into Teams. It just gives you a lot more functionality. It's got all these things called web parts. It basically lets you create little applications. So you can create a shared document library, you can share a wiki page library, you can share, you create a firm intranet, and you just kind of pick the app and build it out. I say that it's not that easy. It takes a little playing around with it if you've never seen it before. This one I created, it's another list. Um, like I did that conflicts checking list. This one is a client ticketing list. So basically we're tracking anytime someone calls into the firm, here's all the things here's, you know, what's the issue, who, who's supposed to work on it, whether it's been resolved or not. Did you call the client back? Did you do what they asked you to do? When is it due and whether or not they're a current client. So categories. And again, this is just something I built. It's the neat thing is it's like a spreadsheet, except that it has more bells and whistles and more flexibility. And also when I get something assigned to me, it triggers an email that goes to me and says, you've been assigned this task. And then I can go back to the list and say, yes, I've done that. So that's a lot of what I think 365 is doing. If you are using any sort of form tool to gather information, Microsoft 365 has a form tool. So you can create little, you know, a satisfaction survey at the end of representation, or how are we doing, or, you know, where did you hear about us? It's great for marketing stuff, not so good for collecting things like Social Security numbers, and confidential information. Well, I think it is held in confidence. I'm not a big fan of using anything that doesn't specifically say it's okay to use this for personally identifiable information, anything that we be considered data breach. So I'm not going to recommend forms for that, but for gathering other types of information, very useful. We talked about To Do. I have a whole video on To Do, and I've also included an article in the materials that explains what it is. But just to show you, remember when I flagged that email for follow-up earlier? So if I go into My Day, it— anything that I flagged for follow-up gets suggested as something for me to do. And then again, I can click on this, I can set reminders, due dates, have it repeat, add a file. You can also create freestanding ones for longer-term projects. So it's kind of your daily planner, or you can do longer-term ongoing projects. There's a lot of project management tools built into 365, and I, it's a little confusing, quite frankly. Pick the one that seems like the right fit for you. If you're a sole practitioner, I think To Do is just fine. If you have a, if you have multiple people in the firm using something like Planner, um, that comes in Teams probably is a better fit. I talked about Bookings. Basically, if you share your calendar with people, you can use Bookings and you just set it up. I'll show this to you. So if I go in, I can create multiple booking pages. I just created a cheating one. I would hook it up to my calendar. So this is my, my personal calendar. And then you create this page, you can say, make it where search engines won't index it, or you make it public and you can, you can put your firm's logo. You can, uh, set how long the default booking is. I usually suggest minimum lead time of at least 24 hours, but if you've got people who want same-day bookings, you can make it for 3-hour lead time. Um, maximum lead time is 365 days out, so I don't really know what my calendar is going to look like much past a year. So, you know, um, you can add those restrictions. You can add multiple people. So if people want to be able to book with you or your paralegal, you can add your paralegal so they can pull it from a dropdown. And then you put all the information about your firm, your logo, your hours in there. Um, and you just kind of, again, go through, you can have multiple services. You can have a free initial consult, you can have a fee-based initial consult. And then once you're all finished, then you go save and publish, open the published page. This is the link that you would send people to, or you can put it on your firm's website. And if you wanted to book time with me, choose this date, choose this time. Obviously I would go back and set my hours to be 9 to 5. So people would not book time with me on Monday. At 8:00 AM. And then you can actually specify what they include, their name, email, phone number, address, whether those are optional, what do you want? And then they can book it and that puts it on your Outlook calendar. So that's something that there's a lot of services out there that you can use, but you pay for them. This comes free with your 365 subscription. Power Automate. So we started a little bit late, and— but I also am aware that you probably all like to go back to work, but I have to show you this because it's the coolest thing ever. So one more, one more demo. Um, Power Automate is basically— if you ever wrote a macro in the past, it's one of those things where you say, I want to do a multi-step process and I want to be able to basically have it do it for me. So I'm going to show you what this looks like. So you go into Power Automate, which has gotten a lot more complicated in recent days, but we're not going to talk about that. The easiest thing to do to get started is find a template that someone's already created. So if you go, okay, Email, what do they got for email? What can, what can make my email easier? Click on email and it's gonna show you some templates. And the one that is the first one is the one that everybody is using, which is if I get an email with an attachment, save it to my OneDrive. Pretty, pretty, you know, useful thing. This, you know, I wanna take that attachment and put it into my shared file So I don't have to worry about, did I forget to save the attachment where I'm supposed to and all that? And so you walk through it, basically says, here's what it's doing. And you click on create flow. When I do that, it basically takes that little template and it gets it up and running for me. That's it. I'm done. Based on the template, I said, create this flow. It's going to take any attachments that I get via Outlook and put them in my OneDrive. And, but you're like, where in my OneDrive? It creates a folder, but if you want to be able to see that level of detail, then what we want to do is click on Edit. So on new email, including attachments, it's going to, um, put the file in a folder that it created called Email Attachments from Power Automate. Okay, that's cool, but that's not helpful. What if you want to take an email from a specific client that has an attachment and put the attachment in their client folder automatically? So that's where this gets interesting. So I'm going to go in and make some edits to this. So Has attachment, yes, but what if we say that this is from a specific person? So we'll say if Unequa sends me an email that has an attachment, put it in this specific folder. So now I'm going to click on this because it's connected to my OneDrive, and then I'm going to kind of, um, I have to do this right. Navigate, navigate through my, my folder structure, pick her folder, and then every time Niaqua emails me and it has an attachment, it will be attached and saved to that OneDrive. Folder. I could continue to build this expression out so that it saves the— it takes the email, takes the attachment, saves it to the folder, deletes the attachment from the email, and notifies my team that Uniqua has finally sent us that file that we've been waiting on forever and ever. So you can actually just keep building this, um, and they— it's, it's gotten a lot more sophisticated since it came out. Some of the more sophisticated stuff is not part of your 365 subscription. They want you to pay for it. But for pretty simple stuff like this, it's free. So keep in mind that there is also an app that is the Microsoft— so there's, if you use Teams, Teams has its own app for your phone. If you use Outlook, Outlook has its own app for your phone. The Outlook app has your calendar, your contacts, and your email in the app. So you're not going to 3 different apps on your phone. It's all in one app. One of the things I like about the Outlook app is I can get an email. If Stephanie emails me and I answer it on my phone, I can convert my response to an event. So it immediately puts it on my calendar and things like that. So the Outlook app for your phone is a lot more sophisticated than your typical email app that, that comes with your phone. And then finally, Office itself comes with as an app. You have access to creating and editing Word documents, PowerPoint, Excel, accessing your OneDrive, accessing SharePoint. It also has— it turns your phone into a scanner. So I can take my phone, open up the Office app, click on Lens, and scan whatever I'm looking at as an editable Word document or as a PDF, and it'll save to my OneDrive. So the apps are, and that's part of what you get for your $12.50 per user per month. So it's absolutely worth getting. I'm going to skip through again, because this is one of those things that goes a little too long, but I gave you a paper with lots of information. So if you want to read a little bit more about these things, go read the paper and then I'll save the recording and you can share it with your teams if you want to. And I'm going to stop the recording and then stop sharing and open it up for questions for anyone who wants to stick around.