CBA Record

an online calendar. This model has been used by many other businesses, including consultants, dental offices and financial service providers. Bookings allows your clients to book appointments with you via your website, blog, social media page or mobile apps. Clients (and staff) can easily book appoint- ments, reschedule or cancel, send email or text notifications and more. Bookings displays bookings for each lawyer in the firm, and far more. Similar products include SetMore free (unlimited appointments, 20 staff mem- bers, unlimited customers), an online appointment calendar software that helps you book and manage appointments via Web, Android, and iOS apps. Another product, ScheduleOnce, starts at $5 a month and offers bidirectional sync with Google Calendar, Office 365, MS Outlook and iCloud Calendar to show free/busy times. The ScheduleOnce booking page is customized for the firm. You can create daily/weekly workload rules so that there is a cap on the number of appointments, and other time management features. Yammer Yammer started as a kind of Twitter for enterprise, asking “what are you working on?” and billing itself as a free private social network. Anyone from the same domain who signed up for an account could follow other people at that domain, and send short form updates. As the service gained popularity they have added many new features. It was eventually purchased by Microsoft, and is now available to anyone with Office 365. Users can share file, create white pages for notes, events, groups and much more. Practice areas, functional areas, and com- mittees can create subgroups to share docu- ments, hold conversations and take polls. Yammer has many features similar to social networks, so users can “follow” someone, “like” a message, and add hashtags. Initially Yammer was only available for users in the same firm, but now others outside of the firm–clients, consultants, co-counsel–can be included in specific conversations. For people who spend a lot

LPMT BITS & BYTES BY CATHERINE SANDERS REACH What’s New Now in Microsoft Office 365

I n the September 2015 edition of the CBARecord, the Bits and Bytes column has an article on basic functions and pricing for Microsoft’s subscription model to their tried and true office suite, Micro- soft Office. Since thenMicrosoft has rolled out many new features and expanded the capabilities of others on the “cloud” side of Office 365. These new functions include project management, portals, robots, and super productivity tools. Find Time When you need to initiate a meeting, it can quickly turn into a mess of emails without a resolution. FindTime is a feature users can access from Outlook online logged into MS Office 365 or from the installed Outlook application. FindTime is Micro- soft’s equivalent to online services like WhenIsGood, Doodle, MeetingWizard and a dozen more. All of these tools solve a problem–helping people in different organizations/companies/firms easily find and agree upon a time to meet. When done via email, a simple thing like finding a mutual time for several busy people to meet can be an administrative nightmare. Tools like FindTime make it easy to set up a quick poll to send to people so that they select their available time and it tallies to show the best time for everyone. InOutlook calendar (online or installed), Catherine Sanders Reach is the Director, LawPracticeManage- ment & Technology at the CBA. Visit www.chicagobar.org/lpmt for articles, how-to videos, upcoming training and CLE, services, and more.

if you invite people outside of the firm to a meeting, FindTime will appear and ask “would you like to FindTime?” Simply follow the instructions to send out the request. Others will get it, respond, and sooner than you knew possible you will have arrived upon a mutual time to meet and have it entered into the calendar. Flow First came IFTTT (If This Then That), which connects applications, services and devices through “recipes”, followed by Zapier that connects business applica- tions through “zaps.” These tools create automated workflows between apps and services online that do not normally inte- grate. For instance, Zapier offers 5 zaps for free that will run every 15 minutes with up to 100 tasks per month and has over 500 apps that connect everything from legal SaaS Clio to Basecamp to HelloSign. A few clicks and users can automate activities that were manual efforts. Now there is Flow from Office 365. Flow’s motto is “work less, do more.” In Flow users connect services like Office 365, Slack, Twitter, Dropbox, Blogger, Face- book, Google,Wunderlist and far more–58 services in total–through templates to create a workflow. For instance, there are templates to save new email attachments to OneDrive for Business, save Tweets to an Excel file, get an RSS news feed to Yammer and hundreds more. The best way to get acquainted with the possibilities is to peruse the templates, get a few going and see how automation can help! Bookings Bookings is currently only available to cus- tomers with Office 365 Business Premium plans. Bookings lets firms provide a way for clients to schedule appointments through

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