Actionstep in Richmond offers their flagship legal practice management software as an end-to-end solution, containing both matter management tools and business administration automation, with an internal billing and accounting system.
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Microsoft Entra ID
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory or Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution supporting restricted access to applications with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built-in, single sign-on (SSO), B2B collaboration controls, self-service password, and integration with Microsoft productivity and cloud storage (Office 365, OneDrive, etc) as well as 3rd party services.
ActionStep is a powerful CRM and matter management tool. It provides many other good benefits too. For example powerful accounting and billing, time tracking and document management. Only in highly specific areas, like multiple many to many contact relations has it fallen short. But even in this highly specialized area, so many other benefits are provided that it hardly matters.
That one is tough. It's just easy to integrate the sign-on portion with other products from other companies. Like BluePoint or Podint. It's very easy to integrate the user information with others. Using Android ID to register an application with other companies' applications.
The first thing is that it's a really good platform to make a whole inventory of your hardware and software that you already have in the organization. It's very simple. It's very easy to look at what you have in the whole organization. And after that, start applying, for instance, some policies, some solutions in terms of zero trust access using MFA as a second form of authentication. So, these are the ways we use the MTIV platform.
ActionStep is difficult to setup. I suggest working with a consultant which increases cost.
Needs mobile app.
One of our practice areas, Property Law, request we have a many to many contact relation. ActionStep cannot accommodate this. However, no other software I have reviewed can do this either. ActionStep is the most robust that I have seen and comes closest to making this work.
There is one thing that we lost since we migrated from Active Directory and it is the user expiration date. If I have an external that I know will work for six months, I have to manually check or put some kind of reminder. I cannot set an expiration date in Microsoft Entra ID. I still don't know why.
MSFT Entra ID has been essential for managing our geographically dispersed team. We're confident that it will scale with us as grow, and we'll be able to take advantage of additional security and ID management features as they become necessary. Being able to centrally manage our user access from anywhere with a small support team is such a relief.
It's not complex. It works as configured, right? There's a lot of granular rules, and it'll get very specific if you need it to. But for many of our security capabilities, especially for mid-market enterprises, I think you can get all the capabilities you typically need with OnStar.
I have not needed to engage support for anything at this time. I have been able to find the answers either online or in a knowledgebase. I tried to skip the question but it would not let me, so I rated a 9 based on other interactions with Microsoft support I have had
Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.
I have worked with a lot of software. Each one has a different focus. ActionStep is better at workflow and task automation that the items above, in my opinion. However, having gone through many different deployments, what really matters is identifying your key requirements and needs. Then evaluation software against those. Once you have your requirements and software, focus on using that software to fix issues in existing workflow. This, when compared with ongoing training, is what it means to invest in software. Simply purchasing ActionStep or any software without identifying needs, problems in workflow or an investment in training is not a good plan. Neither is comparing the vendors to one another without knowing all of your specific needs.
Microsoft Entra ID is not as stand-alone product as competitors like Okta. It may lack some of the features that competing products have but on the other hand it integrates both technically and license wise with other Microsoft cloud services and is easy to deploy. It is also the easiest way to extend identity management to the cloud if you already have Microsoft Active Directory in use.
Microsoft Professional Services' technical knowledge is appreciable as consultants design the solution as per customer requirements. Mapping of features per user specifications and assisting Customer IT engineers to implement so they can manage and administer the services.
I love the workflows that can be deployed for practice areas to ensure consistency. This has reduced new employee onboarding time and increased the speed at which we can complete matters.
Since ActionStep lives in the cloud, and we have O365 our firm is very mobile without spending lots of money in TS or other such infrastructure.
Creating the workflows is a bit complex, so this increases the overall cost and makes an ROI take longer. I suggest spending a bit more initially to get everything setup and working with a consultant to learn how to do this on your own during that initial setup.
Definitely, I can consider this one a positive because, as I mentioned earlier, it's a tool that can help our internal ID team track end users' activities in their sign-in logs and a lot of other things, which is really good and helpful for us.
