iConect Integrates its eDiscovery Platform With Microsoft Office 365

iConect, a company that specializes in legal review software and services, recently announced the integration of its Xera eDiscovery software with Microsoft's Office 365 productivity suite. With the connection of the two services, documents and email can now be stored in Microsoft's Azure cloud solution, leading to improved file access and organization.

Users of the Xera system now have access to the joint solution and are able to search their entire document collections and emails within Office 365—ostensibly making the process of editing and collaborating on documents easier. In addition, users can create intelligent collections with copies of email threads and conceptual information, which can then be imported into the Xera platform through a single click.

"This [integration] makes it simple for corporations that were storing their data in Office 365, to, in very few clicks, be able to get that information into our review platform, so that the different lawyers and investigators who need to go in and look at that data can have direct access," says Ian Campbell, president and CEO of iConect.

Campbell emphasizes the simplicity of the joint system. "There are specific templates that Microsoft is creating that we are going to be holding in our system, so that when information is coming in from Office 365 it will go directly into a prebuilt template based on the files that are coming. That will be a very simple process for end users," he says.

According to Campbell, power is also a defining feature of the new integration. "Office 365 is an incredibly powerful product, and the ability to hold potentially millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of records related to a project and bring that down and drop it into our system—our software can manage that," he says. Campbell notes that the Xera solution can hold billions of documents in its databases, and says that the addition of Microsoft's search tool gives tremendous power to users.

Campbell also says that Xera's interface differentiates it from the competition. "[The interface] is one that people find very comfortable to be able to go in and search, sort, organize, and print their documents," he says. "Being able to make the documents available for multiparty access through a centralized archive, through a very intuitive interface, is going to be a key differentiator versus potentially how others, in the future, might manage bringing documents out of the cloud and making them available to you."

iConect has been a pioneer in eDiscovery software since 1999, and the Xera eDiscovery platform is an aid to organizations including law firms, corporations, and government agencies that need Big Data management. Recently, iConect announced deeper integration with cybersecurity company Nuix, adding a Nuix button to the Xera platform that enables users to easily access the Nuix processing engine. The integration also allows users to quickly import and export data.