Matter Center for Office 365

Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) group, in partnership with the Office extensibility team, developed Matter Center for Office 365 -- a document management and collaboration solution built using the Office app development model, Azure and SharePoint.

Learn more about Matter Center for Office 365.

Intro

Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) group, in partnership with the Office extensibility team, developed Matter Center for Office 365 -- a document management and collaboration solution built using the Office app development model, Azure and SharePoint. It takes advantage of the enterprise content management capabilities of the SharePoint platform, and offers many additional benefits through Add-ins in Outlook and Office (e.g., Word, PowerPoint). This allows the solution to quickly create, find, and store documents on predefined projects or matter sites. Matter Center takes advantage of the enterprise-grade cloud platform of Office 365 and Azure, so these productivity gains are realized while also reducing risk and cost.

Roadmap

Where is Matter Center going in the future?

Administration

• Automate new client creation (new site collection)
• Matter templates (e.g. area of law, matter type)
• Develop matter lifecycle workflow, matter status and health indicators
• Modify project name & description; delete matter
• Further automate external sharing workflow

Extensibility & Interoperability

• API event handlers
• Improve OneDrive for Business integration
• Integration with O365 Groups

User Experience

• Create matter from the web
• Create a matter contact list
• Work on behalf of someone
• Real-time communication (email notifications); includes email links from top pages (e.g. Project Landing Page)
• Allow Drag and Drop of multiple emails and/or documents into Matter Center
• Provide client search when creating new matter

Installation and build

Please note the following software must be installed before you can open and deploy the Matter Center solution:

• SharePoint Online Management Shell
• Windows PowerShell
• Azure PowerShell
• DotNet Core
• Visual Studio 2015 (Community or Pro and above)
• Azure SDK
• Office Developer Tools for VS 2015

Please find links to our additional resources:

1. Matter Center Web Application Architecture
2. Matter Center Web API
3. Matter Center Build and Deployment Guide (+ prerequisites)

Questions, Issues and Feedback

Having trouble with Matter Center? Check-out Issues and if you don't see your issue, please open an issue in GitHub.

Have feedback? Notice a bug? Submit through the Matter Center page on UserVoice.

Contribution

This project was originated by the Microsoft Matter Center Engineering team. We wanted to build a solution to help our own legal professionals improve their productivity. Based on our conversations with many people in the industry, we decided to open source the project so others can use and enhance this solution.

We look forward to maturing the project with your help.

Priorities

We have been working on this code for some time and know its many limitations. We created an initial list of priorities that include architectural changes we’d love your help with. Together, we are excited to see these priorities realized and to continue adding to this list.

On December 17, 2015, we open sourced the project. We are thrilled to talk with as many contributors as possible to provide information and context:

• For bug fixes, we suggest simply creating an issue through GitHub and/or UserVoice in order to alert people and chat about the design of the fix.

• Please try to make your pull request(s) as small as possible and be sure to keep your change close to master to avoid merge conflicts.

For features, substantial code contributions, or interface changes, we would appreciate if you look first at the list of priorities and announce your intention to work on a specific subject via the mailing list. This will allow for broader visibility, and maybe help find other people who already are working on that particular subject.

We would prefer initial work to be based on the priority list. Of course, if the priority list does not contain a specific subject you think is important, please help us identify new subjects and see how they fit in with the other priorities. There is some architectural work and refactoring that needs to happen first (as described in the priorities list) that will enable other work. Therefore, please discuss your suggestions on the mailing list to ensure it is an appropriate addition at this time. The committers will prioritize the list.

We encourage that you fork the repo if you’re planning to do substantial work. This lets you move forward at the pace you want and, when it comes time to submit a pull request, we’ll be able to refer to the fully working set of end to end code.

Additional focus areas

In addition to the priorities list, we bring Matter Center to GitHub with a wealth of existing feedback. Conversations with various communities has provided for a catalog of focus areas for us to consider as we move forward.

We have already pushed these ideas to UserVoice as well as to the Issues list. We encourage you to look to these two places.

Committers

There are currently the following committers:

1. TBD

Additional committers will be added later based on interest and deep technical involvement with the project.

Pull Request Checklist

Pull Requests need to adhere to the checklist below. The committers may ask you to make changes before accepting your changes

• Coding guidelines

  Please follow the project [coding guidelines](tree/master/cloud/docs/Matter Center Coding guidelines.docx).

• Third party libraries

External libraries for the project are located in folders: "\Main\Microsoft.Legal.MatterCenter\packages" - this folder contains main third party libraries used in this project. Some libraries are licensed in a way that prevents us from shipping them. Your pull request may be declined should that happen. If your contribution changes require adding or modifying a new third party library, please contact the mailing list first and get approval from the committers.

• Security and privacy review requirements

We believe security and privacy are extremely important. Therefore, please place a lot of attention on this area. We will be asking members of the Microsoft IT security team to review the code to provide feedback on common security and privacy issues.

• Licensing requirements

The code you submit should be licensed under the MIT license as is already done in the rest of the repo. If you use code that you did not author (like from Stack Overflow), you need to ensure correct attributions and license statements are made for those code blocks. Please work with the committers or the mailing list if you have any questions.

• Description of the changes

Please include detailed descriptions of the changes:

• Purpose of the change(s)
• Description of functionality that was changed; and
• Bugs and/or issues detail, if the pull request fixes it.

We’re looking forward to amazing contributions!

License

Matter Center for Office 365 is licensed under the MIT Open Source license.

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.