Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions has launched Passport Office Companion in an effort to bring greater efficiency, collaboration and software usability to corporate legal departments. ELM Solutions’ Passport solution now features an interface that enables legal professionals to manage their legal workflows directly from familiar Microsoft Office Suite of products.
Although Passport Office Companion is being made available today to select customers as part of an early customer release programme, full product availability will only open in the first quarter of 2017.
The firm, which offers technology-based solutions for the legal industry ecosystem, noted that nearly 61 percent of employees typically access four or more systems to get the information they need to do their jobs. With Passport Office Companion, however, users can now manage their matter management tasks and execute their legal workflows within familiar tools including Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.
“Passport Office Companion transforms workflows for corporate legal professionals by eliminating the need to switch between multiple systems while staying within the Microsoft environment where they do a majority of their work,” said Glenn Paredes, executive vice president and general manager, ELM Solutions. “This latest ELM Platform innovation is a result of our deep knowledge of legal workflows and our continuing focus to help corporate legal departments connect disparate processes and technologies in order to remove silos and complexity and make them more effective to the entire enterprise.”
The flexibility and design of Passport, and the Office Companion interface, allows for new apps to be easily added and deployed, the firm said. Built with modern web technologies, the new module is designed to work in today’s corporate IT environments without major desktop or infrastructure upgrades. It supports Office 2010, 2013, and 2016, as well as single-sign-on authentication for simple, quick access while working in Office without having to re-type credentials.
With input from customers and collaboration with usability experts, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions has also launched a new, modern, and more personalized user interface (UI) for the Passport Platform that extends to key Passport applications, including the Passport Collaboration Portal. Overall highlights reflect a modern approach to the user experience, in keeping with software industry design developments.
Just two months ago the firm announced that it has processed more than $80 billion in legal invoices through its solutions.