Building ROI From Your Investment in HighQ Collaborate

During our forum in 2013 we established that many of our clients buy HighQ Collaborate to address just one single issue of challenge, despite the flexibility of the platform. Our clients said that for them the top five use cases for Collaborate were the following:

75% use HighQ Collaborate for secure file sharing
64% use it for team collaboration
64% use it for secure client extranets
57% use it for virtual data rooms
50% use Collaborate for client knowledge sharing
It’s now the end of January 2014 and all but the last few clients have upgraded to Collaborate 3 and importantly all those clients quickly realised that HighQ Collaborate wasn’t a one trick pony and could add tremendous value to their orgnaisation. Whether our clients purchased HighQ Collaborate for secure file transfer, a white label dataroom, or to provide the latest generation of extranets to their clients, all have realised the untapped potential of their investment.

Since upgrading to Collaborate 3 our clients are slowly coming to understand is that we’ve been working very hard behind the scenes bringing together a blend of those consumer grade solutions to the enterprise, a mobile optimised platform, an awesome user experience and that we’ve had you, the clients, in our thoughts along the way. The majority of us at HighQ have worked in or for law firms before. We know the challenges you face and importantly we are building solutions to help you address them. Read More

Tuesday Tip: Private Messages

Our Tuesday Tip blog posts give you some quick tips and tricks that help you make the most of HighQ Collaborate. Get more tips in our Tuesday Tip archive.

Private messages

You can send and receive private messages in HighQ Collaborate.

Create and access your private messages using the Private Message button on the right of the Top Navigation Bar.

Click on the icon and a drop down menu showing your recent messages will appear (unread messages are shown in blue).

Compose a message from here by clicking the New Message button, or click on the See all… link to access the full Private Message module. You can choose to receive online and email notifications when you are sent a private message.

Do you use private messages? Share your tips in the comments!

Source : http://highq.com/tuesday-tip-private-messages/

Seven Ways Group Tasks Help You Keep Track of Projects

You might be working on multiple projects at once, working on one with multiple components, or maybe just working on a small project – either way, having a place to keep your thoughts organised, keep your team up to date, and to use as a reference point for information is invaluable. The Tasks module in HighQ Collaborate is a useful tool for organising your project and keeping your group tasks on track.

No matter what you’re working on or how many people you’re working with, here are seven ways group tasks will help with your projects:

1. Tasks help you keep track of what you and your team members are doing

All tasks stay visible within your team’s collaboration site, which means that you can always keep an eye on the status of your own tasks and those of colleagues and team members. As the task list is collaborative, everyone can see and add to task lists, and it is easy to quickly see overdue tasks, and filter tasks by assignee or due date. When tasks have been completed, they appear on the task list marked as complete, so it is easy to see what has been done and what is outstanding.

2. Tasks keep all relevant information in one place

What is so great about using group tasks to organise projects is the ability to keep everything associated with the project in one place. You can attach files to tasks and link to wiki pages and blog posts which makes it even easier to carry out the task once you start. If you assign a task to someone else, you can attach all the relevant information that they will need to complete it. Read More

How could your law firm use Collaborate?

Collaboration platforms are designed to help law firms perform better, forge relationships with clients, and share information between colleagues. Here’s how a few of our law firm clients use HighQ Collaborate to solve their business problems and help them achieve more.
Ian Rodwell, Linklaters
“We use HighQ Collaborate to share content with a number of external parties, primarily our clients and also our alliance firms as well, so we see it as a secure way of sharing quite confidential materials with a number of third parties that we deal with. Having the product range from HighQ has really helped establish ourselves in that market, and I think it’s also demonstrated to people internally the art of the possible, and seeing how their content can be delivered to clients - it’s encouraged them to produce more that we can share.”
Esther Albers, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek
“We use Collaborate as a document exchange platform for our clients. It enables us to deepen our client relationships, and to deliver added value to our projects that we run with our clients. What we really like is that it enables us to build real sites, both for ourselves for projects, and also with our clients to exchange know-how, legal alerts and events information.”
Mark Gould, Addleshaw Goddard
“We’re using Collaborate primarily for real estate clients where they serve institutional investors with panels relationships. It replaces a lot of the social tools we were thinking about implementing otherwise, so it saves us a lot of money. Our clients find it particularly useful to have one site to go to, so you might have a surveyor with several different firms he’s working with, but to be able to go to just one site, to be able to deal with documents on a whole range of different sites is great, it’s useful.” read more.

A step-by-step guide to getting your business working social

“Social” in the enterprise context means connecting people. It means associating work, content, knowledge or data with the person who created it. It means being able to see something that someone has done within a collaboration platform and viewing their profile where you can see what else they’ve done and get an idea of their field of expertise. Getting to know the people that you work with helps you to find right person with the right knowledge for the right job. Working social means that knowledge sharing can become a side-effect of working. Everything created within a social collaboration platform is visible to colleagues who have access, so knowledge is instantly shared and information is immediately communicated.

Social business, on the other hand, refers to the concept of optimising the way an organisation runs in order to benefit its entire ecosystem, from owners to employees to clients. This is done by instilling a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing and open communication throughout the business. The goal of this is to become more effective as an organisation, help people get their work done, and leverage human capital in order to ultimately become a more successful company read more.

Webinar_ Using iSheets to manage a real estate portfolio from HighQ on Vimeo

Webinar_ Simplifying the due diligence process from HighQ on Vimeo

The Perfect Blend of Secure File Sharing and Enterprise Social Collaboration Tool

Highq provides secure file sharing and enterprise social collaboration software to leading law firms, banks and corporations.

A simple guide to easy project management

Project managers, how do you currently schedule your project timelines? Most likely you create a spread sheet or Gantt chart with each of your milestones mapped out. These charts are extremely useful in apportioning time and resource to each element of a project, as well as being able to estimate completion dates for each element and the project as a whole.

However, they hold a vast amount of information that can be difficult for someone who isn’t deeply involved in project management to follow. These individual documents are often held in one place which isn’t easily accessible for everyone involved in the project or those on the outside, and when milestones inevitably changes, it is difficult to communicate the updated time schedule to everyone involved.

Instead of struggling to communicate a complex schedule to many people on your own, you can use your enterprise social collaboration platform’s Events module to do it for you.
But how exactly can you use the Events module to boost visibility and transparency of your project milestones and help you with project management? read more.

Gartner's Nexus of Forces and the Future of Collaboration

HighQ Collaborate uniquely combines advanced document management and file sharing with leading-edge enterprise social collaboration, productivity and knowledge sharing tools that allow users to get their work done more efficiently and securely share information with internal and external users in one unified space, from any desktop or mobile device.

Find the right person for the job with smart expertise location

“Mr A meet Mr B, he has what you need.”
An online system which can make the above statement happen has the capability for expertise location.
There are multiple online systems in place which help people to find other people with specific expertise. All of these systems start with individuals’ details and aggregate information in a way that is searchable and findable.
A People Directory (a Who’s Who) is considered one of the most important resources within an enterprise. Consumer social tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter also serve as an important way of finding people that you know or people you want to know. In fact, these online systems have become global directories of contacts and relationships.
The way each of these social tools manages contacts is different depending on their area of focus. For example, LinkedIn focuses on professional contacts whereas Facebook focuses on social contacts.
Social software has matured in the past few years. However, companies are still not fully capitalising on the skills available within the organisation. As this Wall Street Journal article rightly points out:

Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated read more.

Breaking your addiction to email… It’s tough but possible.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute report The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technology, which uses IDC data, workers spend 28 per cent of their time reading, writing or responding to email.
If you took email away from lawyers they would feel less productive and isolated. This feeling would be a genuine reaction because over the last ten years Outlook has become the hub of productivity (ironically). I wrote about the changing role of email in business here. I guess you could say that a loss of productivity would be true of most people to begin with, however change is a-coming.
Now, I’m not saying that email is going to be die, because it won’t. It will always have a place in business, but perhaps more aligned to what it was designed to do. I firmly believe that much of the communication that happens over email can be considered a burden on an individual’s productivity and reduces an organisations ability to leverage its human network because it is mis-used as a tool.
What are my issues with email?
1. I am forced to action every item. This is a burden, even when it is a simple delete action.
2. Email is inherently insecure and you have no control over a message once it has been sent.
3. My mailbox is a information silo. This reduces discoverability and encourages a poor sharing culture.
4. It limits my ability to find information or experts because I have to know who to ask a question of.
5. Reply all. Need I say more?
So what are the alternatives? There are many out there but a secure enterprise collaboration platform like HighQ Collaborate (shameless plug) provides all the tools required to enhance many of the existing work practices that exist within law firms. Whether that be sharing a file securely with a client, creating a knowledge community, managing your matters or just encouraging a connected organisation.
So you have identified the type of technology (and I’m making the assumption it will work), but how do we reduce the dependance on email? read more.