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 8.9 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.
Microsoft Entra ID provides powerful and reliable identity and access management capabilities that enhance secure authentication and authorization for cloud systems. Offer modern security features, including MFA, conditional access, and threat intelligence, to protect identities and prevent unauthorized access. Single Sign-On allows us to access multiple apps with just a single login.
Single Sign-on helps ease the user experience, allowing users to avoid typing multiple passwords.
The identity and management are straightforward to use and easy to connect to other applications, as well as third-party applications.
The support of remote work. Nowadays, many people work from home and need to access their accounts. Microsoft Enterprise ID gives secure access to the company data.
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.
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.
Simply because of what I mentioned earlier, the feature set sort of keeps changing and they do a lot of, they integrated with a lot of the other tools and so for users who are not as well seasoned, it may be a little bit more complicated for them to begin working within the tool.
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.
Yeah, so basically that product to be honest, was more of a getting comfortable with cloud identification management. So that was a product I used. It has all the policies for desktops and doing updates and all that central directory identity provisioning stuff for users. Users and I will have an advantage because right now you get it from the time you get email, you get it, it is there, right? I mean you don't have to pay for anything. And then Microsoft, depending on your interest file license you have Access to Defender and all of those other nice products that compliment Entra ID. So I think that Entra ID is more rich. There's more potential as the business scales if that other product, you can't really scale as much as it was good because I deal with a lot of small medium size enterprises. I do a lot of more consulting type firms. They don't have more than 20 consultants and they just need a system whether it's for their legal activities, finance activities, et cetera. But in terms of having an email is very important to so many companies. So it's so easy to use the Entra ID and easy to expand more value for money for clients.
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.
I think it's had positive. It's enabled us to make authentication easier and more streamlined across the organization from frontline workers to back office workers.
It's allowed us to really adopt authentication policies and methods that suit that user and their work environment.
