Several years ago, Microsoft made a splash at ILTACon with their announcement of Matter Center, a document management system built on top of SharePoint. Microsoft representatives spoke about how this new tool was built to serve the needs of its own internal legal department, and assured the legal technology community that this would become a fully supported product. What followed was a closed beta program, and a frustratingly quiet period. Ultimately, Microsoft released the code as open source, effectively making the system available to anyone interested, but at the same time putting the software’s future in question. Many felt that Matter Center was a dead technology.
During the quiet period, Epona was building upon the Matter Center framework to create a more usable front-end. The product, appropriately called Epona Matter Center, works in conjunction with Microsoft’s Matter Center, and the combination of the two has become a full fledged SharePoint-based document management system. With its roots in the Netherlands, the company started building its installed base in Europe, but is now gaining traction in North America as well. In August, Epona announced its 100th production deployment.
“Epona began in 1993 as a software development company,” explains Epona USA’s Senior Consultant, Keith Vallely. “In 2005, it merged with an IT Services company, combining software development with DMS design and deployment services.” The company established Epona USA in 2011, and has been working on leveraging SharePoint as a DMS ever since.
The current version of Epona Matter Center is an alternative to traditional document management systems, offering the same functionality that law firms and corporate legal departments have come to expect, but at a much lower price point. It is a particularly good fit for small and mid-sized firms who are already using Microsoft Office 365.
One such firm is McCourt Global, a diversified investment firm. Holt Satterfield, McCourt’s Director of Information Technology, had a background in traditional on-premise document management, but was looking for a DMS that was better aligned with Office 365. He cast a wide net, looking at all the cloud-based systems on the market. “Epona had the simplicity I desired, SharePoint as a back end, Outlook as the front end, and had hooks into Office,” he says. Knowing that information governance is sometimes met with resistance within an organization, one key criteria was the ability to access the documents relatively easily if adoption of the DMS did not go as planned. “Well, I could if SharePoint was the back-end,” Satterfield says. He also likes the fact that Epona is working very closely with Microsoft’s developers “to make sure they are compatible with anything and everything Microsoft is doing.”
Epona’s Vallely says the future for their Matter Center product includes further enhancements to the COM addin, which will provide tighter integration with the Microsoft Office suite, as well as stronger web-based capabilities such as the ability to file emails within Outlook Web Access. Integration with Microsoft’s new “Teams” chat application is also in the works. Epona is determined to pick up where Microsoft left off with Matter Center, and continues to develop it into a full featured DMS for Office 365.