Many of our clients have employees that need to be connected to their mailboxes and their content stored in SharePoint at all times. More and more companies are moving to a distributed workforce, serving clients and their offices nationwide on a project basis. As this trend grows, the technology supporting it becomes the center of the business.
Last week I spoke with two employees of DiscoverReady, an interesting professional services company that is assisting their clients in their need to streamline the process and management of discovery. DiscoverReady has a unique team of process-driven attorneys, project managers and technology integrators committed to bringing order and efficiency to the challenging world of discovery. The company provides law firms and legal departments with effective discovery management solutions delivered by highly skilled professional resources. Founded in 2005, DiscoverReady is headquartered in New York City.
Discovery needs of the fortune 1,000 and now SMB’s are exploding thanks to new laws and increased regulation and oversight. Recent rulings known as The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are regulations governing civil procedure in United States district (federal) courts, that is, court procedures for civil suits. The most recent revisions, which took effect in December 2006, made practical changes to discovery rules to make it easier for courts and litigating parties to manage electronic records.
For hosting providers these new laws mean several things, including the need for clients to electronically store and archive their email files while having the ability to search them when needed. With the explosive growth of information being stored – it is estimated that over 80% of all corporate information is now in digital form http://www.onlinesecurity.com – and the platforms to store them on, the services that hosting providers enable, are often at the center of these investigations.
DiscoverReady uses Intermedia's SharePoint collaboration hosting platform to distribute and share information across the organization. With employees and client offices all over the U.S., SharePoint has become the critical link that ties the company together. The project manager that I spoke to creates the document workspaces and templates for storing project related files and reports. The technology and legal teams each have their information accessible wherever and whenever they need it.
DiscoverReady chose SharePoint as it not only suits their collaboration needs but is also cost-effective and integrated with their hosted Microsoft Exchange mailbox users, making it easy to have a secure and backed-up platform. With more and more business working online from disparate locations across the country, SharePoint is becoming an increasingly essential business tool. Microsoft recently announced year-over-year growth in SharePoint revenues of 35%.
