 Hello, welcome to the webinar. We're just waiting for a few more folks to show up. Hi, welcome to the webinar. We're just going to give it a couple more minutes for more attendees to join us. All right. I think we can probably go ahead and get started. So, Steve, you want to take it away. Welcome everyone to our webinar today. We're going to talk about a case study on a SharePoint implementation. Today's webinar is a joint effort of the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Projects or LSN TAP and Just Tech. A little bit of housekeeping before we start. Questions are welcome. You can type your questions in the chat feature of Zoom there. Where we can, we'll take those during the presentation, but we'll also save time at the end to take your questions. So maybe we'll start with some introductions. Next slide please. Okay, so we'll start with me, I guess, so I'm Steve Pomeroy, Director of Marketing for Just Tech. I've been in the technology space for over 20 years now in a variety of different technical leadership sales and marketing roles as well. I'm happy to be your guide, your facilitator during the webinar today. Also joining me, I have John Froyo, Deputy Director at De Novo Center for Justice and Healing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John has served as De Novo's Deputy Director since December 2015. He started at De Novo in 2001 as the Housing and Disability Supervising Attorney. He promoted to De Novo's Assistant Legal Director in 2004. And prior to working at De Novo, John was the pro bono legal project coordinator at Tri City Community Action Program in Malden, and an attorney in private practice. John has dedicated his career to combating the effects of poverty and violence by providing equal access to justice. He received his law degree from New England School of Law, and he has served as a co-chair of the Boston Bar Association Delivery of Legal Services section. So thank you, John, for making time for us today. Also joining me, I have Tony Lu. Tony is a senior consultant with Just Tech, and Tony has dedicated his career to serving low income communities and increasing access to justice through technology innovation. He began his career as an Open Society Institute Fellow at the Urban Justice Center, representing low wage workers in the domestic work and restaurant industries in New York, and later joined the staff at the New York Legal Assistance Group as an immigration attorney. In 2010 he joined Pro BonoNet, where he helped to develop and implement projects that use technology to support pro bono attorneys. Tony became a product manager for the Immigration Advocates Network, where he spearheaded the development of new online platforms to help immigrants determine their legal options to apply for naturalization. Tony also served as a director of pro bono for Community Legal Aid SoCal, and he received his BA from the University of California Berkeley, and his JD from NYU School of Law. Thanks for joining us today, Tony, and thanks to all of you out there for taking the time out of your busy schedule to attend our webinar. So let's talk about the agenda. So real quick, we're going to give a quick overview of SharePoint, what it is. Then we'll dig into the, I guess the meat and potatoes of the webinar, which is the case study. So we want to talk about DeNovo's initial SharePoint implementation there. Following that we're going to dig into some of the refinements and improvements that DeNovo has worked on since that initial implementation. We'll then talk about some of the key considerations when thinking about implementing SharePoint. And as I mentioned, we'll follow that up with with some Q&A. And with that, over to you, Tony, to talk about SharePoint. Great. Thanks, Steve. So the one of the most important things to realize when you're thinking about a SharePoint project is that it was designed to be a collaborative platform. And this is a really kind of essential thing to kind of to understand because as a product, its identity is meant to be both collaborative. So it's driving people to interact and to work together on all of its content. And it's also because it's a platform, it's very kind of it's extremely flexible, it's wide open. That brings with it a lot of strengths, but a lot of challenges as well because there's no clear guardrails. And so there's a lot that you can do with it. It's generally particularly the online version of SharePoint that most organizations are using these days is integrated with Microsoft Office by default. And it's also primarily used for content management. So things like news, key important links, events, documents, and lists, which kind of functions as a built-in database. So you can really use it for a lot of different purposes. And I think the best way to kind of think about it is captured in that quote. Think of SharePoint as a Swiss Army knife of content management. It can pretty much become anything you wish it to be. And by the same token, because it's kind of like a Swiss Army knife, it may not be the best tool for any single purpose but can be used for lots of different things. Next slide. Yeah. So the other thing to think about is that there are a lot of ways to integrate SharePoint with other software. As I mentioned before, by default, it's very integrated with Microsoft Office and the various applications and services that Microsoft offers within those licenses. And so Microsoft Teams off the bat is integrated with SharePoint as are their sort of core Office suite Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive, which is Microsoft's kind of like Microsoft's answer to Dropbox is very deeply integrated with SharePoint in some ways. And so whether you like it or not, when you roll out a SharePoint project, if you are using any of these other things, there will be implement implications for how you use Teams or Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, etc. So that's something to always keep in mind is you may think, oh, I'm just going to build a SharePoint project. But in rolling SharePoint out to your organization, it will potentially impact the user experience for these other platforms as well. There's also external integrations. So things like case management systems and John will talk a little bit about their integration with legal server as a case management system, as well as other software. And there are a lot of ways you can integrate SharePoint with lots of different software platforms. A lot of that is sort of out of the scope of what we're going to talk about today because they often require heavy customization, but it's just something to think about. As you're moving forward that it can be integrated with other systems, but oftentimes that integration requires, it's almost like a project in and of itself to get the integration to work. And then just to kind of set the table for sort of the life cycle of a SharePoint project, there's the initial conception of the project which is, you know, what do we want to do? Well, what particular problem do we want to solve with SharePoint? And then the initiation phase where you're trying to figure out how you want to implement it, who should be involved, who should be responsible, which then leads into the discovery phase where you are trying to figure out your requirements. And then figuring out what your SharePoint setup needs to be needs to do kind of specifically. And then you move into a design phase where you're trying to understand the architecture and what components specifically within SharePoint you'll be using, which then feeds into an implementation phase and testing phase to actually build things out and make sure they're doing what you expect them to do. And then the launch, which is the wider rollout to your users, which would in most cases with SharePoint be your staff. Back to you, Steve. Thanks for setting the table that way. So obviously there's a, it's a big undertaking when it comes to SharePoint. So with that, what I'd like to do is kind of transition over to John and have John start to take us through DeNovo's experience. So John, over to you. Okay, so what I thought I'd talk about first was talk to you about DeNovo itself, who we are and what we do. So we're a combination and would you mind moving to the next slide? So what we do is we provide services to both legal and mental health services together in one organization. And what that does and did and does is it really makes it a little more complicated this type of implementation, because we have to respect the privileges and confidentiality requirements of majorities, as well as mental health professionals. So, but we're an organization that provides both of those services at times that's together. And otherwise we could just provide legal services to clients or mental health services. Our staff, we have about 30 staff members that's broken down to be about 13 attorneys, five social workers, and then the rest would be either admin staff or support staff. And within the program we actually further break it down to six different units or six different programs. We have our council and each of those units has probably between five to seven staff members. We have our counseling program. We have a disability benefits unit, which is our smallest unit, which only has one FTE, but then we have a domestic violence family law unit, housing unit and immigration unit and admin and each of those units and other units of the organization use SharePoint. It's all in one way, but it's a little bit different for each because they have the each have their own unique needs. And we really and I will talk about this in a minute but we really tried to work in the entire organization into our build out of on SharePoint. John, just a follow up on your on your organization kind of structure. Can you talk a little bit about your technology, infrastructure and capacity. Okay, so, because of the size of the organization we, we don't have internal staff who who are the people who work on technology. I'm the main person who overseas technology within the organization, but that's one of about eight hats that I wear. I did also the other thing is I'm just an accidental techie I really don't have any experience. I just I'm just not afraid I guess. And so I so I oversee it with everything else I do within the organization, but then we also work pretty closely at times where they have helped us reconfigure our case management system legal server as well as implementing this program. And we have outside it services who help with us with the hardware and with a lot of support for our staff members, where they'll do that remotely. So, we don't have a big internal capacity but I think with what we do a lot with what we have. Okay, thanks. So, John, and thinking about the, the novos move to SharePoint. I wonder what some of the business drivers were. So what happened was and this this goes back now about three years three three and a half years ago where I knew that we had internal we had a server on site, where we stored everything we had about 40 years or files on that server, because each time we upgraded we brought something with us. And that server was about just it was approaching five years being five years old. And it was my understanding from talking to the tech people that outside consultants as well as I'm some research I done was that you should really replace your server every five years, just because you run the danger of something happening to the server and it crashing and we definitely didn't want to be in that situation. And actually, five years prior to looking at a way to try to either bring on a new server coming up with a new plan on saving our documents in the manager program. Five years earlier, our system actually did crash, and we lost everything for two to three weeks. So I didn't want to be in that situation. Another time. So what we decided to do was to, instead of spending the money on bringing in a new server and migrating the 40 years of organic growth that was on that server we decided to see if we can move all of our function to the cloud. And as part of our grant writing process we wrote a grant to have to migrate to the cloud, and we put it in place and the luck on our part. The one it was really we were really lucky because we actually started this process prior to the pandemic. So we, we had no idea how more useful and significant it would be. And we, unfortunately, we didn't have it rolled out in March, April of 2020. We had just, we had been working on the migration process, probably two to three months prior to that. But within six months of everybody being remote, we were up using, we were using the cloud and I mean that was really, we were really, it really benefited a lot us a lot because the first six months we had people VPN ending to the server and there was a bunch of for me there was a big concern because that really opened up a lot of security holes and so forth and it wasn't the best way to operate. But, but because we had this project in process, we were able to fairly quickly move into the cloud based case management and document management system. I think this and then what you share john but what what really led to share point. Okay, and with with share point itself we, we, I already had office 365 and for and that whole system we were using for our mail server, email server, and we but we never fully utilized it. And, but because we're already part of that system, we thought it made sense and we use, we use all Microsoft products. So we thought it made sense to integrate them all into one system and to, and that was a way that we could not have to have a server on site, but really give people remote access to to anything they would need from the organization. And that's on some of this as well but in terms of the objective so you talked a little bit about the move to cloud some of the security benefits there as well. Any other kind of objectives you had in mind and move to share point. I think to make it to one big concern of mine was that if you if you looked at the structure of our file system within the within with our server. Any of our attorneys were not able to work from something happened to them and somebody else had to go into their file system and see what was going on with cases and so forth. That would be really difficult for them because each attorney did it in a different way, and you wouldn't necessarily know what was the error where it was, we really wanted to organize our documents in a way that anybody would understand what other people within the organization are doing. We also a big part of it and this might be more for the admin team, but it does have some effect on the, on the attorneys and social workers is just a cloud collaborative piece of it, where a lot of times, I may be myself and our development director, maybe working on a grant application. And by us being able to be in the document at the same time, we're able to edit it see what the other person is saying and really collaborate on on any changes are the final product of that document, which really helps out a lot and and you're going to guess and which is the final document, because within the SharePoint world, there's a versioning provisioning part of it, where each version is saved upon itself so you can go back to any version, but you always have the most recent version as a one that's available readily available. Definitely lots of benefits there. Next slide please. Yeah, so I think I'll talk a little bit about what don't actually built in SharePoint kind of using the sort of way we as you know, technologists that help implement SharePoint kind of think about architecture in some ways so So Nova was using SharePoint as a document management system and as John mentioned, you know there's a lot of benefits to that. In terms of managing both administrative documents and then also resources for staff to be able to access both in terms of, you know, resources, also practice and procedure resources just generally operational resources for the organization and forms right and then those are typically what organizations will will use SharePoint for is to you know if somebody needs a travel reimbursement form, put it on SharePoint rather than emailing the one person in the department that you're always needing to get it from. So it's also, it's also set up to allow the various groups practice groups that John mentioned to have their own site. And so each of those sites will have their own section of useful links that are relevant to that particular team, as well as sample documents and forms so these could be legal practice related samples like sample briefs things like that. This library for each of the practice groups as well as, as John mentioned the case files, and that leads to the final piece which is that it's integrated with the novice case management system legal server for all case related documents. Anything you want to add john about kind of what what you built initially. I mean I think that pretty much covers it. Great. Next slide please. Next slide please. Oh, we may have lost the connection. Okay. One second, let me just see if I can jump in and pick up when we were pulling up and dropping back and I think I pretty much know what's on the next slide again. So Rucha are you are you back with us. I'm able to just send it back again. I'm sorry. Are you able to see my screen I just shared that again. Okay well let's let's keep going and see if if this works I know. Yeah, which is in Florida and there have been, you know, recent events in Florida that may impact things like internet connectivity. So this is a screenshot of the novice homepage. I just, well, there, we lost it. Yeah. Okay. So screenshot to novice homepage. I just wanted to kind of break down the site structure a little bit. We won't get too deep in the weeds of it but essentially this you'll see at the top that horizontal bar that has global links which is the home administration counseling case management links. So those are, that's the global navigation bar that follows the user, you know, every on every subsequent site that they're on. So if they were on the housing site, they would still see all of those links the same way. Everyone often talks about SharePoint in the sense that like, Oh, this is our internet site. The internet is actually technically a combination of sites, right so the legal site, the family housing all of those links that you see at the top are actually their own independent SharePoint sites that are all tied together by a hub. So, so it's helpful to think about the SharePoint implementation more as a constellation of different sites that you can kind of connects together. And what that's all held together by is that search bar above that horizontal navigation where it's a search across all sites. So that's what SharePoint kind of, that's the glue that's kind of connecting on the sites is you can run a search that will search for content within any of those sites across all of them. If you do want to kind of narrow your search you could just, you know, visit one site specifically and then it would be narrowed to that searching within that site so this is a what's called a hub site within SharePoint. And so, very logically the hub site is typically your, your homepage where you kind of start when you, when you are going to your SharePoint implementation. There's, there are some visual links there in the middle. And those are typically used to kind of call the call the visitors attention to specific content that you want them to kind of zero in on. And then also to the right, there's a vertical list of quick links and those are often used to kind of link to very common sites or categories of sites, or even sometimes external resources like, like it could be a link to your case management system to give it, give your staff very easy access to those things. And then on the left side there's another vertical navigation and those are typically those that's another quick navigation bar, and that's used to identify resources within the site that you're in so it's like a sub navigation for this hub site so you could imagine in the family site there would be a quick navigation on the left that would point to potential resources and document folders that were specific to the family, family law group. So, that's kind of the breakdown of how the sites are structured there's a lot of flexibility within the, how you set up a SharePoint site. This is not by any means the only layout you could set up. But this is a very common layout that is used because the navigation pieces are very kind of clearly laid out and and easy for users to follow. I will point out also that SharePoint, the modern SharePoint and the online version of it is designed to be a responsive website which means that if viewing it on a mobile site works pretty well. I mean a mobile device works pretty well and the elements the navigation elements and everything get rearranged depending on the size of your screen that you're using. It's not that I imagine many legal services staff are trying to access an internet on their mobile device but it is also it injects a certain level of control limitations in terms of layout options because because of that responsive design. So, I guess with that we'll go ahead and talk about you know the implementation process back to you john. So the first thing we did to move towards the implementation process was to put together a team of staff members to really be involved and come up with a plan what I really wanted was when I put together the team. I wanted somebody almost like a champion from each unit to be on this team so that that person could go and meet with the respective units on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and give them feedback what was going on, as well as bring feedback back to the team about what we should be doing with that shared point site. And the other thing I thought that was really important about this process was to not have just not to have more than just all of the people who really felt comfortable with technology. I really wanted to have some members on a team who are uncomfortable with technology, because I thought they would be able to give us good insight as to what others might be concerned about as we move forward. So I went into the process. And this really bear out to be true was that I figured about 20 to 30% of the staff would be excited about having access to SharePoint and using this new technology about 50% of the staff would kind of be ambivalent and they would try to use it but they really, they weren't excited about it, but they would try it and then about 20% of the staff just wouldn't ever want any part of it. And my whole approach was to try to make sure that we bring that middle 50% because I figured if we got that 50% we knew we'd get the 30% and even some of the other 20% who were unenthusiastic might be brought along. So that was really what the focus was and that's that I strategically put together the team to hopefully make it more likely that this implementation would succeed. And that's I mean that that's that's what the team was made up of. And I think it really worked well. You want to move on to the next slide. And the actual implementation process. The team met weekly, but then a consultant from Just Tech joined us every other week. And in between meetings, what would happen was that the staff members who were part of that team would be to have decision making content that they'd have to bring back to their individual units, talk to the unit about it, and then we'd all come back together and make decisions based on the feedback that we received from the, from the organization that those team members are also responsible for gathering content from each of the units to make sure that what any but whatever anybody would need up in SharePoint, it would be there and it would be in a place that that would make sense. And as part of the team and we to know it was an organization that relies heavily on volunteers as well as part of the process we also added a volunteer to to our team and and without like she was a retired librarian. So she really helped us through the process and really think about how we should structure our file system within SharePoint. So she worked with us along with Just Tech to really put together an outline, looking at what we had a G drive or our server drive, looking at all that content and then coming up and figuring a way that it should be structured in a consistent and systematic way within the SharePoint. And we, we kind of mapped out on, I think was on Excel, what subfolders will be and everything. And we, I think she might have taken the first pass at it, brought it back to our committee, and then we talked about it amongst ourselves, and then each unit went back and talked about it with their staff members as well, because we really wanted buy in across the organization. And eventually what we did was, we came out with this new structure that incorporated everything we needed in prior to being built on SharePoint. We actually built it on our server, so that the new structure was built on the server as a staging area. And then we had, and this process took about eight months. So it wasn't done overnight. We had each, and this is from non case related documents, but we had each unit go ahead and move, copy all of the content that they wanted into the new structure, into the new structure so that, so that all of the files were living on the server, but in a structure different than it had been for 40 years. And what that did was by having the newly designed structure right on the server. It, I think made it a lot easier for the just tech team to migrate everything into the newly built structure within SharePoint. So we had to have a special staging area for our case related documents. As part of that process we made a strategic decision to only move the case related documents for active clients, and how we set that up was we, we set up a separate folder for client files, and the file name was the file number, and then underscore, and the client's, the client's name or the client's last name. The reason why we did it that way was so that staff, the staff members could start to use the new structure on the server, but they wouldn't just be looking at that client number, they could still look at that, the client name as well and know what case it was for. And they said they emptied all the documents or they copied all the documents into this new structure, and then started to work live in that new structure until the date when we migrated everything. And again what just like was able to do, based on the way we named the file folders, they were able to pair it up, attach it to the legal server file, based on the file number. This whole process took about eight months, but, but because we did all this prep work, I think because we had a lot of people within the organization, part of the process, it really made the go live portion of a lot easier. And, I guess, can we go to the next slide? Yeah. So, and the key things we were looking at, so after we, that was one part of it, we also wanted to design and implement the SharePoint site. And the key things that we really wanted was consistency for all of the users. And one thing that really concerned us, like I said earlier, about our file system with on the server, it grew organically. Some of our staff members have been with the organization for 25 or 30 years, but there are some staff members who were here a few years and each person use a totally different filing system which, if anything happened to any of them, I don't think any of us would have been able to figure out what they had done just because each person did their own thing. But this the consistency really would make it easier for everybody in the long run, and the user experience was really important to us to where we want to we want to make sure it was a simple simple straightforward process that everybody would understand. But we also understood that, although we wanted the consistency, we also wanted to make sure that each practice group was able to make their own decisions. And one example of this, like Tony, I think it said earlier, we built a special site for each of the practice groups, and they decided what links they wanted up there, what subfolders they wanted on the left hand side with the farms and documents, and we gave them a lot of leeway, just because we felt that they knew what they needed to be best for them. And like I spoke about earlier, we made that strategic decision to only connect active files with legal server. But we had many files within the server that were for clients who have closed the case, the case that they had been closed over the past 15 years. Since we didn't connect those up with legal server, we wanted to make sure that there's a way that staff members, if needed, had access to those folders. What we decided to do with that was once we cleaned up everything we want to clean up within the server drive and moved everything to the staging area. And when that was left, we didn't want to delete or get rid of, we wanted to just leave it there. We then had Just Tech migrate that to a special archive section of SharePoint. And now we have limited access, and myself and maybe one or two other people have access to that archive file. And if any staff member wants to have access to their closed client files. If they're able to reach out to us, I can do a simple search and within two or three minutes I can get them what they needed. But the reason why I don't want to open access to the archive site to everybody is because I don't want people working in that archive site. And I also don't want them to leaving stuff I'd like to just leave it as it is. So it's limited, there's limited access but pretty much anything that anybody may have left on the server they can have access to, because of this, this archive was created. So many things. So many questions I guess I have there but just that idea of the archive and being able to sort of separate that out from the present and go forward about what one of the, because one of the questions I do have for you. Any surprises anything that kind of unexpected that jumped out during that kind of design is your as you're working through there. I think that the, I mean, the one, the one kind of not surprised but I mean, as I said, different people have had different levels of involvement and and just thinking about right now and I don't know if I said this but every two to three months or maybe three to four times a year. I have somebody, one of the staff members come back to me and say, can you get me something out of the archive. The person who didn't want to be part of this project at all. And really, I mean, she definitely was part of the 20%. She's the one who contacts me most often and asked me for stuff I think mainly because because she wasn't involved so the more you can get everyone involved in the whole process. I think you're better off and like I said, I think there's some people just because they're afraid of technology, whatever it might be, they may not be involved but it really, that's one thing I really try to focus on it as much as you do that. You'll still I think I don't think you'll capture anybody, but you may. Yeah, is that technology is just a just a tool I guess it's definitely about how you applied and the people. I totally agree. Can we go to the next slide please. Okay, going going live. I felt, and I think I might have said this before but being prepared and not not really when when we went remote we could have really tried to push forward and have this happen a lot sooner than it really did because we started to meet in January. For this process and we really could have pushed it along sooner but we really wanted to do it right. So, so we went through and we had a clear picture of how we want to go about it. And I think with, with just text help it was really well structured. And because people started to use that new structure within the server, even though it wasn't in SharePoint and didn't look pretty, it still was the same structure. And because of that, it really made I think the launch of SharePoint a lot easier for us. And it's because we took a extended extended time to do it and we really compared well. On the day of the, of the launch what we did was, we set up I think it was a half day training with everybody we went we did an overview of the SharePoint site, how it worked how it integrated with legal server and really went through the nuts and bolts of it. But the problem with that is that a lot of times as much as you do in one of those trainings until the staff members really start to use the product. They can watch it and they might understand a little bit but then that brings up a lot more questions. So what we did beyond that day of training, we scheduled individual meetings of just get meetings with each unit to try to answer questions after they tried it for a few weeks. So we did that a few weeks out. We also one of our staff members who I'm along with Justin put up and put together a lot of how to use and training support on the SharePoint site that if people had questions they would be able to go to it and review it. So that was kind of our approach and then the training and being prepared ahead of time and having a training plan definitely was important to them to the whole process of going live. And yeah, in the post launch, after we launched initially, the benefit especially and I mean I can talk about being part of the admin team was, was the fact that everything we have is in one place now. It's in an organized file structure so if I want to. If I want to look at a specific grant application or I know exactly where it is and we've really done well in keeping that structure and although you although you can add folders and delete folders and so forth. We really, we really have kept it. I think it's worked really well within the admin team. It also helped out like I mentioned earlier the collaboration on documents and knowing what is the final version of anyone document. It's really helpful. And even like when where I also oversee the finances of the organization, when we're moving forward to our audit each year. I'm able and we're able to know where all of the grant contracts are and everything because we set it up in a way that we would all understand where it was where in the past when we were on the server. It was all in one place but you kind of would have to ask other staff members well where is this because it wasn't a clear structure. It was separate but just having that that systematic way of filing things I think made our lives a lot easier. The things that didn't go so well. And I don't know others experience but working with pb. SharePoint and Office 365 is really Microsoft based product, and it works great on word it works great on Excel, or any word, any Microsoft based product. But our staff members and even myself had great difficulty using PDFs, because you can't edit a work on PDFs in within the SharePoint system. What you need to do is if you want to edit or add anything, you have to download a deep PDF, open it up in Adobe, we use Power PDF, make it changes, and then you have to upload it back to SharePoint. So it's like a two or three step process, rather than just going into SharePoint, open a document up working on it. And that really caused a lot of staff members concern and they it led to not using the system as much as they should. For PDFs. The other challenge is really how each staff member accesses or would like to, they each have ways they operate a function. Some differently. So some may prefer to be one example would be within legal server. And when you're in legal server, you're on a client's folder, a file, you then press a button and it brings you to the SharePoint site, we can work on documents, but you have to enter it through legal server. But other staff members were asking me, Oh, I want to see all my clients within SharePoint. So because people work at it, work differently and have different systems to work on documents, we really try to work as part of our revisions, we really try to help both ends of the spectrum to make it easier, because to me, if this type of implementation is going to be successful, you have to make it so that it is a lot easier for staff and otherwise they'll just find work around and not work within the system. I think that's anything else on that that's that's going to move on to the refinement and improving stage. Okay. Yeah. So, so, with regard to we, we launched it, we, my staff members used it for, for about eight or nine months. And then I was talking to a few staff members and what I found out was that some of them were saving all the documents to their C drive, rather than to SharePoint. And then at some point they would upload it. But that, that really concerned me obviously because nothing's backed up, it wasn't, at least when they saved it to the server was backed up, even though the server was a mess. And they weren't you fully using the SharePoint system this was on everybody but this was a handful of people. So because of that, what we did was we launched a new project to refine and to improve SharePoint. So that we could get even greater usage than we had. And what I did was I reconvened that same team, a few members might have done, might have switched out but it was primarily the same people. And with that team, as well as with the librarian, we put together a survey for the staff. And, and that volunteer actually, the team came up with the quite list of questions, but that that volunteer met with each staff individually and we're small enough, we only have 30 members, but asked them about the usage of SharePoint and found out what was concerned what their concerns were, what they liked and what they thought could be done better. And, and what we found out one thing we found out. I mean that the PDF portion was really apparent. Another thing people were somewhat confused about what they did with their personal work work related documents, because there wasn't really a structure for that at all. And based on that, what we decided was in, when we try it and let me back up for a second prior to the pandemic, our staff, none of our staff had laptops, everybody had just a desktop at the office, and we had two or three laptops that people could already have their personal laptop. Because of the pandemic, now everybody has a desktop at work in their own laptop, but because it rolled out during the shutdown and we were giving our computers, we didn't necessarily set up one drive for each staff member prior to the launch of SharePoint. So what we found was that people didn't, we never had a training on one drive, people weren't using one drive. And, and that was part of the problem. So we decided we had to make sure that every staff member had one drive working on both their desktop and laptop and it was syncing and encourage them to use one drive for those documents rather than the C drive so they didn't lose it. We also decided when we first, there's a function within SharePoint where you can share a link to the SharePoint files within your own one drive. And where you, since you shared that link, you actually can open up files on SharePoint, but it appears as though it's opening up on your desktop. So it lets you, it looks as though it's like the experience that staff members have had for the past 30 years using a computer where they see file folders on your desktop, and they click on it, and they open up that document. And if it's a PDF, it will open up in Adobe or in whatever system you have on your desktop. But you're really working on the document that's saved to the cloud, that's saved to SharePoint. And by, by implementing, by deciding to, to add that feature in training staff members on how to use it, it really made staff members life a lot easier although they can go into SharePoint to work on documents, they could also have the documents that they use on a regular basis, right in file folder links on their desktop. And, and that was probably the number one that I think the most important thing we did as part of as part of the revisions. The other thing we did a part of this was like I said, make sure that everybody has access to, to OneDrive so that now when people say, staves up either in my files or any folder created within that OneDrive, it doesn't just live within their on their piece, on their PC or on their laptop. It lives or it's saved and backed up within the cloud to SharePoint. And the other thing we did, we did some site refinements where there was some things that people saw and they didn't understand why it was where it was or they wanted some additional links put in. We had Just Tech work with us to do that. And we also where we're just finalizing the stages where client files prior to the refinement. If somebody wanted access to a client file, they'd have to go into the legal server, go to the section of legal server where all the SharePoint links are and click on that and that would bring you out to SharePoint. But now we're setting it up so that we actually have it so that the metadata from the, from legal server flows into SharePoint. And you can go into a site on SharePoint, a case file site, and see the client number, the client name and whether the case is who the primary advocate is and whether the case is open or closed or what the disposition is. And each staff member is able to see all of their cases on one list, and they can click while they're in SharePoint, open it up and work on those files there. So that that would accommodate people who like to be in legal server or people who really like to see what all their cases look like on SharePoint. The other thing too we found was just the initial training we did really wasn't enough where people kind of got a fail for it, but they really needed more in depth training to fully utilize SharePoint and legal server and the integration. So as part of this refinement, we had the Just Tech team come back and spend another two or three hours of training for all staff. And I think that really cleared up a lot of questions and made the process much better going forward. Lessons learned from the whole process. The training and ease of use and really being intuitive is key to making sure that the project is success. I think that I would have checked on staff usage earlier than I did. Because when I tell you, and at that eight month point, when I found out that people were saving stuff to the C drive, that was, that was very concerning to me. And I would also have introduced OneDrive a lot earlier so that so that people would be able to use that. And the fourth thing that I would do is, if you don't want to do the sharing of SharePoint links to OneDrive, you really need to have a plan that staff can work on PDFs because I know a lot of our practice areas, although they use Word for writing briefs and so forth is farms and documents. And there's a lot of items they work with on PDFs. And if they don't have a way that they can use it in a like, up in SharePoint, it's, it really, I think frustrates them and leads to them not using the way it was designed. Great. Thanks. So I think there's there's a couple of questions that we'll get to. I just want to take a few minutes to talk about some key considerations and then we'll we'll jump into some of the questions. Some of these things are sort of, we've already touched on but sort of clearly identifying your why, why are you choosing SharePoint and what problem are you trying to solve. Someone mentioned really empowering internal champions to kind of help with the change management process. This is, this is a little bit of a harder thing but understanding what's possible and what's not within SharePoint right and I think this is something that organizations will often struggle with because when you're trying to implement a system that is flexible and open but also has these limitations sometimes you don't even know what you don't know. And so, but, you know, trying to do some research or finding other folks to talk to. First, before you you dive into it, so that you can make sure you don't have any assumptions, thinking that oh yeah of course it does this only to find out that it doesn't right. And then following the integrations both the automatic ones like office integrations and then the ones that are more optional like case management systems. And maybe not so seamless ones like like Adobe as John's mentioning. And then another key thing to consider is just making sure that you are setting in your mind that after you launch, there will probably be a time when you realize there are needs to tweak and improve. And some of those things can be small, right, small, maybe changes to the way links are structured or the, or what links are available. But then sometimes there's what one of my former supervisors used to say things that are bigger than a bread basket, things that are slightly bigger projects, which could, you know, involve cost and time. And so then trying to decide then okay when do we undertake these bigger changes are they going to require more training to our staff is it changing things from how we were doing it before. And then how do we balance that against the benefit that we'll get by making these changes and so really making sure that you have like a an expectation that this is sort of a living system that will will evolve. I think without we can get into the questions. So, one of the questions john mentioned one drive as a key takeaway like implementing one drive. So one of the questions is what is the difference between one drive and SharePoint. I'll go ahead and talk about that as in as succinct ways I think as possible, but one drive is essentially Microsoft's implementation of basically creating a way for individual users to have files that are saved in the cloud, instead of saved on their hard drive. So, when one drive is turned on every person within your organization will see a section in their windows file explorer that is essentially their one drive kind of space. And so within that they can create folders, save files to those folders etc. And only they have access to those documents so that's So typically how that gets ends up getting used john was saying that one of the things that realized early on, people had these individual working files that didn't fit within the structure that their volunteer library and help them define right because the end and because that structure that was being defined was a structure, a collaborative structure within SharePoint, but if for example, I want to download a copy of the, you know holiday calendar for 2022. Where do I save that, rather than save it to a hard drive. One drive would be the location that I might save that other things might be like documents in progress that you don't want to like save to a location until you sort of brought it along a certain to a certain extent you could save it in one drive. So the way to think about the difference between one drive and SharePoint is one drive is for the individual and SharePoint is for the group, right SharePoint is where the group files are, and one drive is kind of where individual files reside. And as John was talking about the SharePoint integration with one drive. What that allows is within, like say my individual one drive space, I can create shortcuts to a SharePoint location. So if I work on, you know, a set of five cases that like I currently just have five very active cases I can create a shortcut to each of those case folders within SharePoint that just show up in my one drive. So I don't have to kind of go to SharePoint and navigate the SharePoint structure every time just to get. If I'm just trying to jump very quickly to a set of locations within SharePoint. So you know that that's essentially like kind of creating bookmarks, or if you've ever created a Windows, Windows shortcut, right, Windows shortcuts kind of are exactly the same thing you can create a shortcut to files and folders within Windows. It's kind of the same functionality. So the final follow as a follow question is there additional costs for one drive. Most licenses, most organizational licenses will cover both SharePoint and one drive for the users for an entire organization. It's an enterprise level kind of feature but most nonprofits probably have one drive included within their, within their licensing already if they have SharePoint, and it's actually functionally the same technology on the back end. One drive is like an additional layer on top of the SharePoint infrastructure so yeah. So Tony there was one other question about for the archive. I guess this is for for you john. So for the archive is there succession planning in place for when you retire someday or the other person moves on is the question. Um, so for us so it's not really all that complicated I think people don't necessarily know where the link is but I'm not sure we have it locked down that if somebody. If I think anybody really could get into it I just don't want people to know that, but also there are two or three clean key people people within the organization that know about it, plus just tech knows about it as well. So, those are a few places that if something were to happen to me and I wasn't here. I think that I think they could figure it out. One other thing about the archive is you could also set it up to be to give some people read only access if you're worried about them actively working within the archive, you could give them the ability to only see what's there and maybe make copies of it but not necessarily, you know, work within it. And then, I guess, wanted to see if there were other questions that people were had come up for people as we were presenting I know we're at time but we I think we can stick around for a few more minutes to see if there are other questions. I have a couple of questions. Sure. Hi john I'm Jenny I'm the executive director of mental health advocacy services in Los Angeles. So, I'm really interested in this presentation both because I feel like we're the organization that you were like four years ago before you did all this and I'm also just interested in learning about you all in your program model, since we have some overlapping program areas. Thank you for sharing all this I've been taking copious notes. So, so we use Gmail and Google share drive and it's, I have a lot of security concerns about that. And I had never seen a SharePoint homepage until this and like my jaw dropped like it was so pretty, it was so pretty. So I have so many questions one of what one immediate one was like, who updates that beautiful homepage, and do you actually change those announcements in the middle regularly or do you end up welcoming Henry Nasella for like four months, which is fine. And then, does your board have access to this do you use it as like a board dashboard. So those are two of my many questions I'll start with those. Our development director is the one who had who any of us have access to it but she's the one who's put this stuff out there, but we don't update it as much as we should just because I think like any other organization. We have people wearing multiple hats and they're doing other things that they're doing what's the fire that's there that's most important. We don't update as much as we should, but it really is a good tool where we have a lot of volunteers. And when volunteers come in, we, if, if they'll be using our email, we also give them access to this, and it gives them information about the organization. We don't provide we could probably do a board book and set up a site for the board. We don't do that though. Yeah. Okay. And when you're talking about it being integrated with legal server. I mean I guess I, I don't really understand, like, why you would do that if legal server is already like a robust system, we use we just moved to legal server as well and has the security there like, I'm just like what is the fun. Why would somebody like, are you creating duplicate records and does that cause any issues are like the people who say that they like working on their legal server cases in SharePoint why do they like that what are they able to get here that they're not able to get legal server I mean legal this looks a lot prettier than the legal server homepage does. I don't know if that's it but yeah. So the reason why we moved and we wanted a real document management system is because my experience our experience with the server, and we've been with them for about five years now is they have that document. Well, you can still documents, but you really can't work on documents within that environment. What you need to do is upload documents, and then if there's any changes, you have to you want to change you have to download it, and then re upload it which is the user experience which is great. And it's not doesn't let you work on live documents. It's something that in my experience with legal servers, they do a lot of stuff great, but like, like that's what's on the night, because they do so much. They may not be the best option for everything where with that integration, somebody can be within the legal server client file. It appears the same way those documents within that file, they click on a link, and they're able to edit the word document they're able to do everything live. And it seems automatically the SharePoint. So it really is a document management and document editing editing program where in the past where before we had SharePoint, it was really just a storage vessel where you put stuff there and then you took it out and put it back. So it was a different type of integration and really wasn't. I didn't think it was good enough and it really complicated staff members so what we would do at the time is before that we had our server, people would work on all their documents and save it to the server. Then when they went to close the case, all of the final documents they put into into legal server because so they didn't have to do it multiple times. This takes away that step and make sure that everything saved and backed up. Got it. And then it just really, it just really is a cleaner process. Yeah. So for like, for example, the organization chart I see is highlighted right now. So, like, can you have an organization chart that's public to the whole organization, and then like the working version that you've limited access to like yourself or whoever updates that and so there's kind of like the published PDF version that everybody can see but then there's also like the word version or whatever the working version is when you have when you're making changes that you also access here and change it. Exactly. Not everybody has access to change that document. Most people who click on it can only view it. And they can't make any, but there's certain staff members who can make those changes and we try to update as much as we can. I think, I think we use a, what is it? And we use a different Microsoft product to do our organization chart. The name just escapes me but that and then we just, it's just displayed there. So somebody clicks on it they're not seeing that live document they can add. Yeah, and it bears mentioning there's a lot of permission controls within SharePoint so you can set up like a document library that is open to all of staff and then one that is limited to say your management team where you could have working versions or draft versions of like an HR manual or something. But then when you're ready to publish it to the rest of staff you would just, you know, make a copy into the document library that's open to everybody right. And as John mentioned you can also do that on a document level so you could have a document that was the published version of the work chart but then you know certain staff only have the ability to, to read it but not actually edit it. But then that of course suggests that anytime you're making changes you're making your complete set of changes every time you're making them right so it might make more sense to have two different documents one is like, you know, the living version and when it's like the current published version of those things. How does your email connect if at all to all this because like one thing I'm thinking about is like what a pain it's going to be if we move away from Gmail. I want this pretty website. Do I have to go to Microsoft email I mean not that I mind Microsoft email I just like, you know, it's going to be a pain. So is there a way that like email actually integrates with documents and stuff here. Is that really necessary to make that change if we do this. John did you guys implement any email integration at all. So we had actually migrated to office 365 email about four years prior to that so we that we've been using that system and I think we were on Microsoft exchange before that so it's not as though we were in another. Yeah. I will say that outlook is not integrated heavily with SharePoint in some ways because if you think about it SharePoint is is more about content and documents. And so the one way that it is very usefully integrated is when you're writing an email and outlook and you want to attach a file. If you click on the attachment link it will show you your most recently kind of use documents including ones that are saved in SharePoint so you're editing like for example this PowerPoint deck. I'm sending it back and forth to John and Steve. And so when I needed to attach a copy to them I could just from outlook click on the attachments link and it was at the top of the list because it was the thing that I was working on in SharePoint most recently. That's, that's probably the main way it's integrated. But it's not there are a lot of other integrations that you can kind of implement in SharePoint with outlook but they're often third party solutions that you have to kind of. You have to spend some time kind of working through and may have additional costs so some people like want to save outlook emails to a SharePoint folder. That's not that's not out of the box integrated you either have to buy a third party solution or there's like, so I would say that there are many people who are on Google. Google suite environment that still use SharePoint and it's not exactly seamless in in some ways but it's also not a huge barrier like that outlook would give you a ton more kind of options. Just a point I will mention there, there are a lot of organizations companies that started using Google Drive and have started to use SharePoint because of some of the more granular permissions controls for some of the same security and sort of permissions concerns that you had SharePoint does offer slightly more granular control than I think Google Drive does. Interesting. I would say it's more secure, I would assume SharePoint has like good security. I would say it's more secure in the sense that you that as the administrators you can control the permissions and how things are getting shared. There's, there's more levels of control. In terms of the technical security like it's security against hacking, I can't speak to that, but I would assume that Google has the same sort of level, or that's a similar level of rigor that Microsoft doesn't sort of preventing malicious attacks and things like that. The security the way people have talked about SharePoint being more secure, at least in my experience has been that it's easier for administrators to keep staff from inadvertently sharing things out that they don't mean to share like that. Yeah. Thank you. Is there a chat function. Not built into SharePoint and that's where the sort of complexity of understanding SharePoint, a SharePoint implementation comes in. That's what Microsoft Teams is for. And so Microsoft Teams and SharePoint it can create some confusion about which you should use for which purpose, because they're both collaboration platforms within the Microsoft ecosystem. But so Microsoft Teams is typically what organizations will use for real time chat. And SharePoint is more for document and collaboration and communications, like not real time communications but you know broadcasting out information. So one thing on that integration with Microsoft Teams because we use that as well. And also, technically when you use Microsoft Teams and you have on the communication device, you actually create a SharePoint site by creating a team and if you look down on this sample that's being shared on the left hand side. I created a, for our diversity council, I created a communication platform for the diversity council within our organization where they could communicate and chat and everything and we use that all the time. You can also save documents there. When you create that site, you actually create by doing that and not doing it within the SharePoint realm, you create a SharePoint site that's part of the structure, which I was able to put a link to so that anybody who has access to that team will see this on their SharePoint site and can click and see all the documents on that team, I think they can also see the chats as well within the SharePoint environment. So they're separate and they're different, but because it's all Microsoft. And again, this is a non technician saying this. They're somehow connected. They are connected it does create some user confusion sometimes right because so you have to really think through how you want to train your, your users on what the differences between SharePoint and teams and what they, you know, what they should kind of use each for, because there is some overlapping kind of functionality and so it does, like I was saying before, there aren't a ton of guardrails and so sometimes organizations have to put up their own kind of structures and guardrails to make it easier for people to understand. I think, are there other questions. And Jenny I appreciate that you have. I mean that you probably do have more questions. Maybe what we can do is make sure that you have all of our contact information and, and John's contact information definitely since there seems to be some, some, not just, you know, interest in SharePoint but like, you know, relative to your respective missions, a lot of similarities there. I just had one more thing to the, this might be help you Jenny, but obviously because we have social workers and attorneys. What can be shared between them. It's critical to make sure that certain things are not shared. And that's one reason why I mean, we have both our counseling program and a legal program in on legal server, but we have it set up on legal server so that I think it's by an opportunity or by what what the technical means. If a counselor goes into legal server they can only see counseling cases and vice versa for the attorney goes and they can also legal cases. We've set this up the same way so that if you go into SharePoint and try if a counselor goes into SharePoint and tries to look at a legal case they don't have access to it. One thing at the top level. If you see the various units within the organization, the admin site only members of the admin team can see if anybody else clicks that they won't see anything. You have to be have admin admin team permissions to get into that site, and that's a true across the board to make sure that our attorneys can see counseling data and vice versa. That's the suddenly a great point so managing sort of what people can see and access using different user groups, depending on attributes for that user so. Yeah, it's a it's a key kind of piece of functionality within SharePoint that helps you limit exposure to different pieces of content. Well, I guess if we'll we'll we'll ends there. I think Shelly has mentioned in the chat that you can join the the listserv to see if there's been past, you know, chat or discussions about some of the topics that were raised today and then. Also, we will make sure that the folks that registered and attended today you can get contact information and access the slide back. And I think this presentation will also be posted to the LS and tap YouTube channel as well. So, great. Thank you, everyone. And thank you john. Thank you very much for your time today and your generosity and sharing with us. No problem. Thank you. Thank you.