Targetting law firms with a new document management and collaboration solution, Microsoft has previewed Matter Center for Office 365 at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) annual conference.

It aims to provide legal professionals a way to easily find, organise and collaborate on files without leaving the Office365 environment.

"Microsoft has built a security-enhanced, cloud-based document management application that allows our professionals to quickly locate and collaborate on documents with our counsel from virtually anywhere," said John Frank, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft. "We've decided to make this solution more broadly available at the request of our outside counsel, who want to utilize it in their own environments."

Matter Center works with OneDrive for Business, providing 1 TB of individual storage and a personal briefcase.

It promises integrated and automated document management, allowing users to drag, drop and save emails and attachments from Outlook into the right matter. Tagging and sharing each document separately is no longer necessary, as the matter documents are automatically saved with the right metadata, permissions and version control.

Users can be granted or excluded access to a matter and all subsequent documents associated with the matter will inherit the same permissions, thereby reducing the worry about ethical walls and data leakage.

"Matter Center for Office 365 is the product of months of collaboration between Microsoft's Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) division, outside law firms, and our Office 365 product engineering teams," said Tejas Mehta, group product manager for Matter Center at Microsoft. "We are very excited to bring Matter Center to market in the near future."

Matter Center for Office 365 is available in a limited preview. Interested customers can learn more about participating in a beta program at http://www.microsoft.com/mattercenter.