by Jeff Andersen / Director of Technology / OIA / The Global Efficiency Group
With all the busy-ness of 2021, making time to watch all the sessions at iManage ConnectLive Virtual 2021 was difficult but well worth it. Across almost 15 sessions I managed to "sit-in" there was a comprehensive cross-section of the multitude of things going on at iManage and all were very engaging, informative, and easy to take in. All the sessions are now available on the iManage Help Centre. I've summarised a few areas that really spoke to me during the conference.
Making Knowledge Work + the iManage & Microsoft Partnership: Looking at iManage's recent successes and continued growth, it's obvious that the iManage platform - especially cloud - is the most relevant information management solution for professional services, legal, accounting, CLD and many other industries that our customers are part of. The history, current excellence and futures of iManage prove again it's the right platform and cloud service for our customers. The partnership with Microsoft and leveraging of Azure adds to a bright future of relevancy with exciting integrations with Teams, co-authoring, Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) plus broader integration with Office 365 further aligns iManage with the productivity applications that our customers are depending on 24/7. We are working closely with our new and existing customers to plan, prepare and transition smoothly to the iManage Cloud, ready to take advantage of everything to come.
"Work" Re-iMagined: Shawn Misquitta's keynote - as expected - showcased exciting evolution for iManage Work and productivity when it comes to the iManage Cloud platform, Security & Governance and iManage Work features and integrations. Azure Conditional Access is an area of security that looks to bring far extended security controls to the content we're already securing in iManage Work - by determining *how & where* users can access content based on location, which apps and which devices they’re on. MIP adds security embedded in files to secure content when it moves outside of our protected DMS. Office add-ins developed to work across the Office 365 apps will offer a consistent experience & access to iManage from multiple O365 apps and platforms. There's also plans to add iManage Work as a storage provider so when you're using e.g. MS Word for iOS - iManage Work will appear as a location in the native menus. The closer alignment with Microsoft platforms is going to bring iManage to wherever we want to work. We've been working hard to keep our customers up-to-date, current, with an eye on the horizon.
Signatures 101: This session could have been easily overlooked but I wanted to re-affirm our position on signatures & understand how they're being used more broadly. We help our customers to leverage a range of electronic signature technologies that can integrate tightly with iManage Work, our workflow platforms and stand-alone. It's mostly definitely become an essential part of the digital transformation journey. This ConnectLive session does a great job of identifying and explaining the three types of electronic signatures: Simple (SES), Advanced (AES) and Qualified (QES).
Zero Gravity Work Desktop: I found this session very interesting… the direction that Shawn Misquitta mentioned in his keynote around the Zero Gravity Experience (cloud only, anywhere/any device, web based add-ins) and the Power Experience (desktop, deep integration with Office, offline) is expanded on in this session - Ravi and Ganesh explain the why & how iManage is providing a more flexible user experience so users can work anywhere, on any device, while staying safe and secure in the iManage Work platform. This will be welcome news to (pretty much all) of our customers leveraging Office 365 with access to Office Online and other web based apps.
These are just a few highlights from ConnectLive 2021 that really stood out to me - of course - over the 15 odd sessions I attended there was a lot to take in, understand and be excited about - there's no way to fit in all in here! If there's anything here or across the whole ConnectLive 2021 event that you're interested in - please reach out - we're ready to advise and enable our customers to get the absolute most from their iManage investment as possible!
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