Microsoft is our copilot: A partnership built on trust – find out more with iManage

Our customers of all sizes attribute significant value to the iManage partnership with Microsoft. This is why we strive to bring high-profile speakers from the organization to speak with us in situations where our users can derive the most benefit from those discussions.

Common threads that emerge from these talks include:

• A strong alignment of mission and vision
• Our shared commitment to building on the foundation of Azure
• The critical importance of trust between our companies

This article expands on these threads and takes you a bit deeper into the reasons we say that iManage and Microsoft are better together.

Vinge also wanted a strategic technology partner, and having one that was close to Microsoft was key. “Everyone says they [iManage] are a good partner of Microsoft, so we asked Microsoft who they are closest to, and they said iManage.”

Anne-Marie Ovin, CIO and head of knowledge, process, and innovation, Vinge

“There was a big drive to move to the cloud and everything that goes with that, including better security.” Key was having “the right system to plug everything into” and also the iManage partnership with Microsoft.

Bruna Pellicci, CTO, Linklaters

Ensure the best possible user experience

The Microsoft partnership with iManage goes back many years and only continues to grow and bear fruit for our shared customer bases. To paraphrase Jeff Markowitz, who leads Microsoft’s software and digital platform business, Microsoft observed firsthand the iManage commitment to making sure that its customers, partners, and internal teams all have the best possible experience using Microsoft platforms. And the dedication to customer success that iManage has demonstrated aligns well with Microsoft’s customer-centric mission to empower every person and organization to achieve more.

Critical foundation underpins exciting new developments

Our initial engagement with Microsoft was customer-driven, intended to drive deeper integration of iManage with Microsoft products and deeper collaboration with respect to how we use Azure; but at the same time, something more profound was happening.

Neil Araujo, CEO & Founder, iManage

To this end, iManage Cloud is built on the strong foundation of Microsoft Azure, which enables iManage to provide specific key deliverables for its customers — of which 2,600 customers are now in the cloud (and we’re adding more every day). These deliverables include an unparalleled, high-availability platform with data durability and resiliency, as well as the assurance that we can recover our (and your) data in the event of a catastrophic disaster or loss.

Those underpinnings are critical to achieving our shared mission of ensuring the best possible experience on Microsoft and iManage platforms. They also enable us to provide time savings and add productivity-enhancing capabilities to existing products while offering exciting new tools with increasing frequency.

Such as …?

Together, we’re building the future of work. One example is how iManage users can now use co-authoring, which allows multiple users to work simultaneously on the same document and accelerates work timelines while eliminating friction. Making good use of Microsoft CSPP+ (cloud storage platform provider plus) enables us to integrate more deeply with Microsoft 365 and give customers an entirely new experience working between Microsoft 365 and the iManage repository.

We’re also super excited about the Power Automate low-code, no-code workflow platform. With Power Automate, iManage and Microsoft empower you, our customers, to accelerate and simplify your app modernization. So think of a process in your organization that involves a series of repeatable steps, but that you don’t want to go to the effort and expense of adding a third-party solution to automate.

With Power Automate connectors, there’s no need. You can develop an app to automate them yourself — and at 70 percent less cost than using traditional coding methods. This also saves time and labor and helps you enforce consistency across the department, practice group, or organization. This means you can reach more transformation scenarios, all on one platform with one vendor. And iManage Work is the glue that holds together the rest of your ecosystem. Microsoft already makes more than 500 built-in connectors available.

Another Microsoft application we are integrating is Purview, which protects and governs your entire Microsoft ecosystem. How is that relevant to iManage? Because iManage holds a critical piece of data that Microsoft has a part in, and that is your documents. Microsoft Purview allows you to apply a ”sensitivity label” to those documents to say, for example, “This document is top secret,” “This document is internal only,” or “This document is public.” Purview can then help you track where your labeled data is going.

Purview also enables you to identify personally idenitifiable information (PII) and label a document as having PII to ensure it is only accessed by authorized personnel. You can use labels to apply watermarks, for data loss prevention, to keep a document from leaving the environment via Exchange or SharePoint, and you can also do something called Digital Rights Management encryption. We think it is a great enhancement to the industry-leading security and governance you have with iManage.

Our partnership is built on trust

Markowitz also emphasized the most critical, essential element of this relationship: trust. He shared a slide at a recent event titled “Our Partnership is Built on Trust.” This message acknowledges the sanctity of our data, iManage customer data, and stresses Microsoft’s commitment to respect and safeguard that sanctity at every step — including the assurance that this data is not used to train or enrich foundation AI models.

Microsoft is here to ensure iManage has the tools, the guidance, and the support needed to build responsible AI applications, trustworthy AI — and that’s really important.

Jeff Markowitz, General Manager — Software and Digital Platforms, Microsoft

In this AI-saturated moment, we find ourselves benefactors and also defenders of our and our clients’ sensitive information and intellectual capital. We need these assurances, and we expect our partners to honor and value this pledge as highly as we do ourselves.

Trust is a defining feature of the Microsoft-iManage partnership. So, while Azure set the foundation, the trust Microsoft had in iManage governance gave them the confidence to support integrations with Outlook, Teams, and co-authoring in Word within Work, which were all pivotal to propelling knowledge workers into the modern Office 365 environment. Markowitz applauds iManage for embracing change early on and investing in building the appropriate infrastructure so that the company was well-positioned to take advantage of all the new technologies that Microsoft has brought to market.

As a result of those investments and capabilities, iManage was highlighted at Build, Microsoft’s annual developers’ conference, as a Microsoft partner that is building on the latest technology that the organization has.

What this means for iManage customers

One of those new Microsoft technologies is Copilot, and Markowitz says that within the consulting world, legal professionals, accounting firms, and among knowledge workers in general, there is a movement to really embrace this type of technology — that the potential is just incredible.

Imagine you’ve been in court, or in a meeting, or out to dinner with an important client. You don’t want to be disturbed, so you turn off your phone. But when you turn your phone back on, instead of going into Outlook and scrolling through all the messages that came through in that time frame, you can ask Copilot if there were any important messages during the past two hours, and voila! You have them. You can quickly and easily prioritize your responses and move on to the next thing. Markowitz shared a personal “IRL” version of this story with our audience at a recent event.

But how does that work within iManage? You can see for yourself in the video below! We showcased our integration with Copilot at the Build conference with a new offering called Ask iManage.

The perfect pair: Ask iManage & Microsoft Copilot

Ask iManage is a generative AI natural language assistant within iManage that lets users uncover specific data points in documents. Ask iManage also automates tasks like summarizing or comparing documents, and that enables users to “cut to the chase” and focus on higher-value work.

An exciting time for knowledge workers

With Microsoft focusing its massive resources on cloud infrastructure in Azure, iManage can focus its attention and resources on improving our applications and increasing their benefits. That’s the real power and benefit of this partnership for our customers. The collaboration between our two companies allows us to build deeper integrations and customizations while bringing new functionality and developments to our customers much faster.

Neil Araujo, CEO & Founder, iManage

iManage believes that neither our thinking nor Microsoft’s thinking on the future of work, especially from the perspective of the Microsoft–iManage relationship, should be shrouded in mystery. We strive to communicate often, sharing our recent developments, strategies, and roadmaps for the future. We also encourage representatives from Microsoft to come to our events and share their vision with our customers so that you can hear this valuable information first-hand, not just from us.

Araujo and Markowitz agree that generative and other forms of AI will continue to have a profound impact – specifically in the legal sector –  and research supports this.

For example, recent McKinsey research indicates that by combining generative AI with all other technologies, work automation could add 0.5 to 3.4 percentage points annually to productivity growth. McKinsey estimates that generative AI alone could add approximately $2.6 to $4.4 trillion across 63 use cases while impacting global GDP by approximately $7 trillion, or 7 percent.

Markowitz implored the iManage audience to imagine a world where 60 to 70 percent of your routine tasks become automated, enabling you to focus on more creative and strategic activities.

“Given how fast the cycles are moving right now it’s going to be very interesting to see where we are a year from now, two years from now,” he remarks. “What we’re seeing is the potential to do more meaningful work, for our industries to be more efficient and effective, and for economic growth to be much more robust,” says Markowitz. “It’s super exciting what’s ahead.”

In other words, hold on tight — it’s going to be quite a ride!