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Customer relationship management (CRM) is an important tool for businesses of all sizes. CRM systems effectively serve as a “home base” for key metrics pertinent to a sales cycle. For example, users can input specific dates when they have meetings with potential clients, which can help leadership understand how deals are progressing through the pipeline.
While there are a number of CRM and project management software tools, perhaps the most well-known is Silicon Valley darling Salesforce.com (CRM -1.66%).  Founded over two decades ago by tech wunderkind Marc Benioff, Salesforce quickly rose in popularity due to its innovative, user-friendly features. In a way, Salesforce.com was the original CRM. 
However, throughout its history, Benioff had the foresight to understand what direction technology was moving. As a result, Salesforce.com developed quite the appetite for mergers and acquisitions. While the company has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring competitors such as MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack (just to name a few), it now faces new challenges.
Competitors like Microsoft and Oracle are beginning to catch up. Furthermore, Salesforce.com’s latest earnings report certainly contained some eyebrow-raising concerns. Let’s look at Salesforce.com’s year-to-date financial results, how Wall Street views the stock, and its valuation.
Benioff has always had a knack for the spotlight. He’s not afraid to make headlines by spending billions of dollars to gobble up competitors that, on the surface, seem tangential to Salesforce.com’s platform at best. However, as a visionary, Benioff has a proven ability to understand important trends in the technology landscape and figure out ways to partner with the best in the business. As a result, Salesforce.com has been able to broaden its scope of services, thereby allowing it to cross-sell new products to a wider base of potential customers.
However, exactly two years ago, Salesforce.com spent a whopping $27 billion to acquire chat and document management tool Slack Technologies. While this appeared to be yet another savvy move by Salesforce leadership, the last two years have not been without heavy turbulence. Salesforce.com has faced corporate budget cuts due to the pandemic and lingering inflation, integration problems for Slack, and leadership shake-ups. All these variables contributed their own unique challenges to Salesforce’s business.   
During the fiscal 2023 third-quarter earnings call, investors learned quite a bit about the current state of Salesforce’s business. For the three months ended Oct. 31, Salesforce reported operating cash flow of $313 million, down 23% year over year, and free cash flow of $115 million, down 52%. The company’s CFO, Amy Weaver, explained that lower billings was the primary culprit straining the business. 
Weaver went into more detail as to why billings are lower. She stated:
You recall that last quarter we noted measured customer buying behavior really beginning in July. This led to elongated sales cycles, additional deal approval layers, and deal compression, particularly in enterprise. As Q3 progressed, we saw an even more challenging buying environment, driving intense customer scrutiny on every investment dollar to ensure the highest return possible.
There’s a lot of important detail to unpack here. Effectively what leadership is explaining here is that due to the current macroeconomic environment, companies ( particularly large enterprises) are taking a closer look at budgets and scaling back investments.
As a result, deals will stay in Salesforce’s pipeline longer, leading to higher pressure to generate new sales and renew existing customers. As deals remain open, billings remain outstanding for longer compared to prior periods, resulting in less cash collected and lower operating capital. Unsurprisingly, Salesforce has joined its tech counterparts in companywide layoffs.      
Image source: Getty Images.
Over the last two weeks, Salesforce.com co-CEO Bret Taylor resigned, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield also resigned, and the stock hit a 52-week low following its earnings report. While this may appear concerning, it’s not uncommon for leaders of acquired companies to depart after an agreed-upon exit date. Given that the Slack deal is coming up on its two-year anniversary, it’s not entirely surprising to see Butterfield leave.
Taylor’s departure, on the other hand, is a bit of a head-scratcher. As a serial entrepreneur, Taylor has a history of co-founding companies and successfully exiting via acquisitions. In fact, he sold his last company, Quip, to Salesforce in 2016 and quickly became a close ally of Benioff.
However, it should be noted that in addition to his responsibilities at Salesforce, Taylor was the former Chairman of the Board at social networking company Twitter. It’s been a volatile year for Twitter and its leadership, to say the least. At the end of the day, while Taylor’s departure is a blow for Salesforce, as investors we should also keep in mind that Benioff ran the company just fine for a decade and a half.   
At the moment, Wall Street seems divided on Salesforce stock. During a recent interview on CNBC’s Halftime Report, Jason Snipe of Odyssey Capital Advisors explained that his fund exited its position in Salesforce due to concerns over decelerating invoicing, longer sales cycles, and an overall bearish outlook on the software industry as a whole. It’s important to note that Snipe’s sell-off was before Butterfield’s exit, and he clearly stated that Taylor’s departure did not influence his decision. 
By comparison, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives appeared on CNBC yesterday and explained his thesis on why he is bullish on the software landscape. According to Ives, his research suggests that big-tech valuations are trading below the last five-year average levels. He named Salesforce.com specifically as his favorite cloud stock and noted the company is ripe for an activist investor. While he calls this a “moment of truth” for Salesforce, Ives stated that the growth potential of the cloud market, combined with Salesforce’s existing install base and product suite, make its current drop in valuation look favorable. 
Salesforce’s leadership did not exactly give investors a bright outlook. However, the company is taking tough but necessary steps to reduce costs in the form of layoffs. Moreover, as inflation continues to cool down, corporations will eventually ratchet up investments in digital transformation again.
There are a multitude of ways Salesforce can generate growth, and for long-term investors, it’s difficult to argue against buying a blue-chip stock as it hovers around its lows. Now could be an ideal opportunity to dollar-cost average into an existing long-term position, or initiate a small position at favorable valuation levels.  
Adam Spatacco has positions in Microsoft. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Microsoft and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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We know that legal matters involve in-depth attention to detail and technicality. Have a look at the best project management software for lawyers to get started.
There are many skills a lawyer needs to be successful. With so many things to manage, strong organization is a must. Even the smallest details are important in the legal world, which is why having the best project management software for lawyers can make all the difference.
When dealing with numerous clients every day, it can be difficult to keep all of the case information straight. To help you out, we’ve lined up some of the best legal project management software options for you to check out. For a broader list of options, check out our choices for the best project management software in general.
Legal project management software lets you organize your cases and tasks, track time, and provide updates on events.
Although there is a lot of software available for the legal industry to take advantage of, monday.com is our top recommendation. With monday.com, you can manage your time efficiently and stay ahead of your deadlines.
In the legal field, it helps to have all the information for different clients and cases at arms reach — which is where a top project management tool for law comes in. Here are our top five recommendations.
There are a number of factors to consider when looking for the best project management tool for legal purposes. Law firms often work with a team of lawyers, and one of the most important ingredients for team success is coordination to ensure a smooth workflow.
While you coordinate with your team, you need to balance the workload. An uneven assignment of tasks can result in imbalance and productivity problems. Assigning actionable tasks without overburdening your team members ensures that sufficient project progress is made and helps you stay on track. This is key to overall case management. 
Some legal cases can be wrapped up quickly, whereas others take time. You need to be able to track both your time and the status of every case, while getting constant reminders and updates regarding the next steps. A good legal management tool does not only help in managing your database, but also helps you in improving your efficiency.
Time management is vital in legal work. When looking for the right legal project management software for your needs, you want a tool with a fantastic user interface that helps you maximize efficiency. Here are five of the best project management tools for lawyers. 
More details about monday.com:
Pros:
Cons:
With monday.com’s easy-to-use UI, project management becomes straightforward and stress-free. It’s packed with features to help you stay updated and keep a close eye on all your cases. A drag-and-drop feature helps you easily arrange your case files and relevant documents.
monday.com helps promote seamless collaboration through clear visibility and improved communication. You can help your team and clients stay in the loop throughout the whole case process. Use monday.com’s tools to seamlessly create tasks, organize, add files, attach messages, manage staff members and report status updates.
Security-wise, the company is SOC-2 Type II certified, and it uses TLS when transferring your data to AWS, a company with great security but with a history of leaky buckets.
monday.com provides a set of premade templates, which you can customize based on your needs and requirements. It saves a lot of your time, and you can easily access all relevant case files with a simple click. With a variety of available views like Kanban boards and timelines, monday.com can help you see the case from another angle.
Small legal teams can choose monday.com’s free plan. However, there are some limitations; you cannot have more than two individuals on an account, and there’s a max limit of 1,000 tasks and 500MB of file storage. 
For legal teams, we think the Pro plan is best, as it offers time tracking, private boards and documents, and 25,000 automations and integrations per month. It also comes with 100GB per user, unlimited guests and a one-year activity log. You can always try the 14-day free trial. Check out our monday.com review to learn more.
More details about ClickUp:
Pros:
Cons:
ClickUp lets you access almost all of its majority features for free. There are over 15 different view options for your data (like Gantt charts, calendars, timelines, etc.) and many customizable features. While you have access to various features, the extent to which you can use them is limited.
You can either choose and customize an existing template from the template center, or create, save and customize your own templates to be more adaptable to your style of work. Using its advanced whiteboard and mind map features, you can document important notes on the case and quickly track the information that needs more legal research and focus.
ClickUp has no known history of breaches and, like monday.com, it also stores your data with AWS, so you can trust that the storage is secure.
ClickUp’s whiteboard feature provides an easy and quick overview of all your cases and their stages. You can link tasks, establish dependencies between multiple tasks and navigate to other tasks with ease. Create additional columns and subtasks to assign them to your team and get a bird’s eye view on the progress of every case.
ClickUp’s free version comes with full-fledged accessibility to some major features. However, it’s worth noting some limitations. There’s a 100MB file-size limit, a limit of 100 automations as well as restrictions to the dashboard and Gantt chart views.
 Moreover, if you wish to collaborate and integrate data (such as a timesheet) with external apps (such as Google Drive or OneDrive), or have access to client collaboration, you should consider upgrading. 
For legal teams, the Business plan would be best, as it includes advanced time tracking, workload management, timelines and unlimited storage. For more details, take a look at our ClickUp review.
More details about Wrike:
Pros:
Cons:
Wrike provides an excellent user-friendly interface that can be easily understood and adapted by anyone. Its advanced project management features help you create a clear outline of all your cases. 
You can save time with the project templates and improve efficiency by using its tools for different tasks. You can also navigate through any files, documents and attachments by creating a specific folder for them.
By tracking edits, you can stay up to date on case activity, and compare updates and changes. Wrike also lets you generate detailed reports from various views, such as the Kanban board and Gantt chart, and the software automatically offers suggestions to improve your efficiency.
Wrike is one of the few services to host its own data, and encrypts it using AES-256 both at rest and in transit. This means Wrike offers excellent security. 
With Wrike’s cross-tagging feature, you can categorize and manage the workload of your team as well as their relevant case files. By adding agenda items to a shared list, you can receive and discuss team updates. Cross-tagging helps you save time and improve visibility without compromising on the details and clarity of your cases.
Wrike gives you access to some generous features, such as creating and managing tasks and subtasks. However, there is a limit of 2GB of storage, and a cap of 200 tasks that can be actively used. The paid plans can be a little expensive, but you should consider upgrading if you want to unlock features like multiple views and extra cloud storage. 
The Business plan would be the best option for lawyers, as it includes advanced reports, guest approvals and time tracking. However, note that this plan includes only 5GB per user, which is minimal compared to ClickUp’s unlimited space on paid plans or monday.com’s 100GB per user on the Pro plan. Learn more about the tool in our Wrike review.
More details about Asana:
Pros:
Cons:
Compared to the other entries on this list, Asana’s tools are more focused on deliverables and task management. Legal matters require proper communication, discussion and analysis throughout all stages, and Asana helps provide a complete overview of each activity. 
You can assign dependencies to the created tasks and delegate them to your team based on the available resources. This makes it a perfect tool for improving efficiency and balancing your team’s workload.
Asana’s workflow management and shared calendar ensures that you do not miss anything. You get to analyze your cases in detail with the help of hierarchical charts. You can review the case as a whole and even a particular task to get complete statistical information.
Like monday.com and ClickUp, Asana uses AWS. It holds certificates for SOC 2 Type I and II, and that data is encrypted with TLS when in transit. 
Using Asana’s strategic goal-setting feature, you can ensure that time is not unnecessarily wasted on irrelevant tasks. Clearly defined goals can guide your legal team in the right direction and free you of costly distractions.
With the universal reporting feature, you can track the progress of your cases from the dashboard and prioritize tasks based on available time and resources. You can also use the expense tracking feature to assess your operational costs.
Asana’s free plan provides some good basic features, and lets you collaborate with up to 15 members. You also get unlimited storage in the free plan. However, the file size is capped at 100MB per file. 
If you want to unlock advanced features like customizing fields and building workflows with the admin console page, consider upgrading to the Premium or Business plan. For more insight, check out our Asana review.
More details about Basecamp:
Pros:
Cons:
Lawyers come across rapid new developments in their cases every day. With Basecamp, you can communicate information with your team and assign tasks based on their category. Features include a message board, to-do list, group chat, schedule, automatic check-ins and file sharing.
With Basecamp’s advanced communication tools, you and your team can work remotely when out of town. However, only the basic calendar view is available; other advanced views such as Gantt charts or Kanban boards are not available.
Basecamp uses AWS, but encrypts data in transit and at rest with a reliable cipher. In 2014, extortionists carried out a DDoS attack against Basecamp, and in 2019 attackers staged a mass login attack — both times the company increased its security and also came forward with the news and advised users what to do to protect themselves.
As a legal counsel, your busy schedule can lead to missed meetings and calls. Basecamp’s advanced communication tools can help catch you up. With real-time communication, stay in the loop and ensure that you don’t miss out on any crucial information when you are otherwise engaged.
Basecamp usually provides a free trial for 30 days, where you get storage of up to 1GB with 20 users. However, Basecamp has a special offer where you get 12 months of free access for the first three users. You can extend your document storage capacity up to 500GB and create unlimited case projects. Read more in our Basecamp review.
Running a legal firm or being a lawyer can mean taking on increasingly complex projects. Efficient workflows help you stay on top of your deliverables. Now that you know the most important features of a great legal project management software, finding the right one that suits your requirements will be easier. 
If you want to simplify your workflow, improve efficiency by organizing your tasks and case files, and fulfill your firm’s requirements with great ease, we highly recommend choosing monday.com or Asana. 
We recommend ClickUp or Wrike if your workflow involves multiple levels of tasks and dependencies. If communication is of utmost importance to you, you can try Basecamp. 
Which among the mentioned software on this list did you like the most? Are there any we missed? What elements of legal work do you use these tools for? Let us know in the comments, and thank you for reading. 

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Stock Analysis
Xerox Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ:XRX) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next four days. The ex-dividend date is one business day before a company's record date, which is the date on which the company determines which shareholders are entitled to receive a dividend. It is important to be aware of the ex-dividend date because any trade on the stock needs to have been settled on or before the record date. In other words, investors can purchase Xerox Holdings' shares before the 29th of September in order to be eligible for the dividend, which will be paid on the 31st of October.
The company's next dividend payment will be US$0.25 per share, on the back of last year when the company paid a total of US$1.00 to shareholders. Calculating the last year's worth of payments shows that Xerox Holdings has a trailing yield of 7.0% on the current share price of $14.33. Dividends are a major contributor to investment returns for long term holders, but only if the dividend continues to be paid. So we need to investigate whether Xerox Holdings can afford its dividend, and if the dividend could grow.
See our latest analysis for Xerox Holdings
Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Xerox Holdings paid a dividend last year despite being unprofitable. This might be a one-off event, but it's not a sustainable state of affairs in the long run. Considering the lack of profitability, we also need to check if the company generated enough cash flow to cover the dividend payment. If Xerox Holdings didn't generate enough cash to pay the dividend, then it must have either paid from cash in the bank or by borrowing money, neither of which is sustainable in the long term. It paid out 87% of its free cash flow as dividends, which is within usual limits but will limit the company's ability to lift the dividend if there's no growth.
Click here to see the company's payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.
When earnings decline, dividend companies become much harder to analyse and own safely. Investors love dividends, so if earnings fall and the dividend is reduced, expect a stock to be sold off heavily at the same time. Xerox Holdings was unprofitable last year and, unfortunately, the general trend suggests its earnings have been in decline over the last five years, making us wonder if the dividend is sustainable at all.
The main way most investors will assess a company's dividend prospects is by checking the historical rate of dividend growth. Xerox Holdings has delivered an average of 3.9% per year annual increase in its dividend, based on the past 10 years of dividend payments.
Get our latest analysis on Xerox Holdings's balance sheet health here.
From a dividend perspective, should investors buy or avoid Xerox Holdings? First, it's not great to see the company paying a dividend despite being loss-making over the last year. On the plus side, the dividend was covered by free cash flow." With the way things are shaping up from a dividend perspective, we'd be inclined to steer clear of Xerox Holdings.
With that in mind though, if the poor dividend characteristics of Xerox Holdings don't faze you, it's worth being mindful of the risks involved with this business. To that end, you should learn about the 2 warning signs we've spotted with Xerox Holdings (including 1 which is a bit concerning).
A common investing mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a full list of high-yield dividend stocks.
Find out whether Xerox Holdings is potentially over or undervalued by checking out our comprehensive analysis, which includes fair value estimates, risks and warnings, dividends, insider transactions and financial health.
Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
Xerox Holdings Corporation, a workplace technology company, designs, develops, and sells document management systems and solutions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and internationally.
The Snowflake is a visual investment summary with the score of each axis being calculated by 6 checks in 5 areas.
Read more about these checks in the individual report sections or in our analysis model.
Undervalued average dividend payer.
Simply Wall Street Pty Ltd (ACN 600 056 611), is a Corporate Authorised Representative (Authorised Representative Number: 467183) of Sanlam Private Wealth Pty Ltd (AFSL No. 337927). Any advice contained in this website is general advice only and has been prepared without considering your objectives, financial situation or needs. You should not rely on any advice and/or information contained in this website and before making any investment decision we recommend that you consider whether it is appropriate for your situation and seek appropriate financial, taxation and legal advice. Please read our Financial Services Guide before deciding whether to obtain financial services from us.

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John RoachOct 12, 2022
When designers at the toy company Mattel were asked recently to come up with a new Hot Wheels model car, they sought inspiration from DALL∙E 2, an AI system developed by OpenAI that creates custom images and art based on what people describe in plainspoken language.
Using the tool, designers can type in a prompt such as, “A scale model of a classic car” and DALL∙E 2 will generate an image of a toy vintage car, perhaps silver in color and with whitewall tires.
As a next step, the designer could erase the top of the car and then type, “Make it a convertible” and DALL∙E 2 will update the image of the car as a convertible. The designer can keep tweaking the design, asking DALL∙E 2 to try it in pink or blue, with the soft-top on, and on and on.
DALL∙E 2 is coming to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, by invitation, allowing select Azure AI customers to generate custom images using text or images, the company announced today at Microsoft Ignite, a conference for developers and IT professionals.
The availability of DALL∙E 2 through Azure OpenAI Service provides customers such as Mattel cloud AI infrastructure that blends the cutting-edge innovation of text-to-image generation with the compliance, responsible AI guardrails and certifications that Azure offers, Microsoft says.
The Mattel designers were able to generate dozens of images, each iteration sparking and refining ideas that could help design a final fleshed-out rendering of a new Hot Wheels model car.
“It’s about going, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about that!’” said Carrie Buse, director of product design at Mattel Future Lab in El Segundo, California. She sees the AI technology as a tool to help designers generate more ideas. “Ultimately, quality is the most important thing,” she noted. “But sometimes quantity can help you find the quality.”
Microsoft is also integrating DALL∙E 2 into its consumer apps and services starting with the newly announced Microsoft Designer app, and it will soon be integrated into Image Creator in Microsoft Bing.
The rollout of DALL∙E 2 across Microsoft products and services reflects how the company’s investment in AI research is infusing AI into everything it builds, produces and delivers to help everyone boost productivity and innovation.
Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen this transition in technology from proving that you can do things with AI to mapping it to actual scenarios and processes where it’s useful to the end user.
The trend is the result of nonlinear breakthroughs in AI capabilities achieved by bringing more compute to more data to train richer and more powerful models, according to Eric Boyd, Microsoft corporate vice president for AI Platform.
“The power of the models has crossed this threshold of quality and now they’re useful in more applications,” he said. “The other trend that we’re seeing is all the product developers are thinking through and understanding the ways that they can use AI in their products for both ease of use as well as saying, ‘Oh, I can make my product work better if I use AI.’”
DALL∙E 2 was trained on a supercomputer hosted in Azure that Microsoft built exclusively for OpenAI. The same Azure supercomputer was also used to train OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language models and Codex, the model that powers GitHub Copilot and certain features in Microsoft Power Apps that run on Azure OpenAI Service. Azure also makes it possible for these AI tools to rapidly generate image, text or code suggestions for a person to review and consider using.
The addition of DALL∙E 2 builds on Microsoft and OpenAI’s ongoing partnership and expands the breadth of use cases within Azure OpenAI Service, the newest in the Azure Cognitive Services family currently in preview, which offers the security, reliability, compliance, data privacy and other enterprise-grade capabilities built into Microsoft Azure.
Other AI technologies developed by Microsoft and available through Azure Cognitive Services such as language translation, speech transcription, optical character recognition and document summarization are showing up in products and services such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365.
“Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen this transition in technology from proving that you can do things with AI to mapping it to actual scenarios and processes where it’s useful to the end user,” said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft corporate vice president of business applications and platform. “It’s the productization of these very large language models.”
These AI capabilities are aimed at eliminating tedious work and enabling employees to focus on higher-value tasks, such as freeing sales associates to engage in conversations with customers without having to take notes, Lamanna said. These new tools can also automate processes that currently eat up hours of people’s workdays such as writing summaries of sales calls and adding them to a client database.
“We can now inject AI that listens to our conversation and helps people be more productive by creating transcripts, capturing action items, doing summarization of the meeting, identifying common phrases or doing analysis about, ‘Am I a good listener?’” said Lamanna. “That required the advancement of the state-of-the-art AI and the advancement of these digital collaboration tools.”
Lamanna is focused on creating tools that enable anyone with a computing device to create their own AI-powered applications using the Microsoft Power Platform. For example, his team is rolling out a feature in Power Automate with AI powered copilot capabilities that allow people to use natural language to build workflow processes that connect various services running in the Microsoft cloud.
“Users in normal language can say, ‘Hey, whenever I get an email from my boss, send a text message to my phone and put a to-do in my Outlook,’” Lamanna explained. “They can just say that, and it gets generated automatically.”
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This ability to turn a sentence into a workflow dramatically expands the number of people who can create AI-powered software solutions, he said. People with a touch more technical know-how can further customize and refine their applications with low-code tools and graphical interfaces available in the Power Platform such as the intelligent document processing technology in AI Builder, he added.
A lawyer could use this technology to build a customized application that is triggered whenever a new contract is uploaded to the firm’s SharePoint site. This app could extract key information such as who wrote the contract, the parties involved and the industry sector and then email a summary of the contract with these details to lawyers in the firm who cover the sector or clients.
“That’s kind of magic,” said Lamanna, contrasting this type of AI automated workflow to how such tasks are typically accomplished today. “You check the SharePoint site, open a new file, and skim and try to summarize it to see if you have to do anything with it. AI is getting people out of this monotony and getting computers to do what’s best for them to do anyway.”
The digital transformation of the past several years has added to the flood of content that people around the world produce. Microsoft customers, for example, now add about 1.6 billion pieces of content every day to Microsoft 365. Think marketing presentations, contracts, invoices and work orders along with video recordings and transcripts of Teams meetings.
“They’re creating documents, they’re collaborating on them in Teams and they are storing them in SharePoint-powered experiences,” said Jeff Teper, Microsoft president of collaborative apps and platform. “What we want to do is integrate AI technologies with this content so clients can do more structured activities like contract approvals, invoice management and regulatory filings.”
That’s why Microsoft created Microsoft Syntex, a new content AI offering for Microsoft 365 that leverages Azure Cognitive Services and other AI technologies to transform how content is created, processed and discovered. It reads, tags and indexes content – whether digital or paper – making it searchable and available within specific applications or as reusable knowledge. It can also manage the content lifecycle with security and retention settings.
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For instance, TaylorMade Golf Company turned to Microsoft Syntex for a comprehensive document management system to organize and secure emails, attachments and other documents for intellectual property and patent filings. At the time, company lawyers manually managed this content, spending hours filing and moving documents to be shared and processed later.
With Microsoft Syntex, these documents are automatically classified, tagged and filtered in a way that’s more secure and makes them easy to find through search instead of needing to dig through a traditional file and folder system. TaylorMade is also exploring ways to use Microsoft Syntex to automatically process orders, receipts and other transactional documents for the accounts payable and finance teams.
Other customers are using Microsoft Syntex for contract management and assembly, noted Teper. While every contract may have unique elements, they are constructed with common clauses around financial terms, change control, timeline and so forth. Rather than write those common clauses from scratch each time, people can use Syntex to assemble them from various documents and then introduce changes.
“They need AI and machine learning to spot, ‘Hey, this paragraph is very different from our standard terms. This could use some extra oversight,’” he said.
“If you’re trying to read a 100-page contract and look for the thing that’s significantly changed, that’s a lot of work versus the AI helping with that,” he added. “And then there’s the workflow around those contracts: Who approves them? Where are they stored? How do you find them later on? There’s a big part of this that’s metadata.”
The availability of DALL∙E 2 in Azure OpenAI Service has sparked a series of explorations at RTL Deutschland, Germany’s largest privately held cross-media company, about how to generate personalized images based on customers’ interests. For example, in RTL’s data, research and AI competence center, data scientists are testing various strategies to enhance the user experience by generative imagery.
RTL Deutschland’s streaming service RTL+ is expanding to offer on-demand access to millions of videos, music albums, podcasts, audiobooks and e-magazines. The platform relies heavily on images to grab people’s attention, said Marc Egger, senior vice president of data products and technology for the RTL data team.
“Even if you have the perfect recommendation, you still don’t know whether the user will click on it because the user is using visual cues to decide whether he or she is interested in consuming something. So artwork is really important, and you have to have the right artwork for the right person,” he said.
Imagine a romcom movie about a professional soccer player who gets transferred to Paris and falls in love with a French sportswriter. A sports fan might be more inclined to check out the movie if there’s an image of a soccer game. Someone who loves romance novels or travel might be more interested in an image of the couple kissing under the Eiffel Tower.
Combining the power of DALL∙E 2 and metadata about what kind of content a user has interacted with in the past offers the potential to offer personalized imagery on a previously inconceivable scale, Egger said.
“If you have millions of users and millions of assets, you have the problem that you simply can’t scale it – the workforce doesn’t exist,” he said. “You would never have enough graphic designers to create all the personalized images you want. So, this is an enabling technology for doing things you would not otherwise be able to do.”
Egger’s team is also considering how to use DALL∙E 2 in Azure OpenAI Service to create visuals for content that currently lacks imagery, such as podcast episodes and scenes in audiobooks. For instance, metadata from a podcast episode could be used to generate a unique image to accompany it, rather than repeating the same generic podcast image over and over.

Along similar lines, a person who is listening to an audiobook on their phone would typically look at the same book cover art for each chapter. DALL∙E 2 could be used to generate a unique image to accompany each scene in each chapter.
Using DALL∙E 2 through Azure OpenAI Service, Egger added, provides access to other Azure services and tools in one place, which allows his team to work efficiently and seamlessly. “As with all other software-as-a-service products, we can be sure that if we need massive amounts of imagery created by DALL∙E, we are not worried about having it online.”
No AI technology has elicited as much excitement as systems such as DALL∙E 2 that can generate images from natural language descriptions, according to Sarah Bird, a Microsoft principal group project manager for Azure AI.
“People love images, and for someone like me who is not visually artistic at all, I’m able to make something much more beautiful than I would ever be able to using other visual tools,” she said of DALL∙E 2. “It’s giving humans a new tool to express themselves creatively and communicate in compelling and fun and engaging ways.”
Her team focuses on the development of tools and techniques that guide people toward the appropriate and responsible use of AI tools such as DALL∙E 2 in Azure AI and that limit their use in ways that could cause harm.
To help prevent DALL∙E 2 from delivering inappropriate outputs in Azure OpenAI Service, OpenAI removed the most explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train the model, and Azure AI deployed filters to reject prompts that violate content policy.
In addition, the team has integrated techniques that prevent DALL∙E 2 from creating images of celebrities as well as objects that are commonly used to try to trick the system into generating sexual or violent content. On the output side, the team has added models that remove AI generated images that appear to contain adult, gore and other types of inappropriate content.
We’re designing the interfaces to help users … use this tool to get the representation they want.
DALL∙E 2 is still subject to a challenge that many AI systems encounter: the system is only as good as the data used to train it. Without the benefit of context that provides insight to user intent, less descriptive prompts to DALL-E 2 can surface biases embedded in the training data – text and images from the internet.
That’s why Bird is working with Microsoft product teams to teach people how to use DALL∙E 2 in ways that help them achieve their goals – such as using more descriptive prompts that help the AI system better understand what results they’re after.
“We’re designing the interfaces to help users be more successful in what it’s generating, and sharing the limitations today, so that users are able to use this tool to get the representation that they want, not whatever average representation exists on the internet,” she said.
Buse recently joined the Mattel Future Lab, which is exploring ideas such as the metaverse and NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to expand the reach of the toy business. She’s using DALL∙E 2 as a tool to help her imagine what these virtual experiences could look like.
“It’s fun to poke around in here to think about what would come up in a virtual world based on – pick a descriptor – a forest, mermaids, whatever,” she said, explaining that DALL∙E 2 is helping her team predict this future. “How do you predict the future? You keep feeding yourself more information, more imagery and thoughts to try and imagine how this would come together.”
Boyd, the Microsoft corporate vice president for Azure Platform, said DALL∙E 2 and the family of large language models that underpins it are unlocking this creative force across customers. The AI system is fuel for the imagination, enabling users to think of new and interesting ideas and bring them alive in their presentations and documents.
“What is most exciting, I think, is we’re just scratching the surface on the power of these large language models,” he said.
Related:
Sign up to receive the latest updates on how DALL·E 2 is being used in Azure OpenAI Service and across Microsoft
Learn more about Microsoft Syntex and Power Automate
Read: How AI makes developers’ lives easier, and helps everybody learn to develop software
Read: New Z-code Mixture of Experts models improve quality, efficiency in Translator and Azure AI
Read: New Azure OpenAI Service combines access to powerful GPT-3 language models with Azure’s enterprise capabilities
Top image: Mattel toy designers are investigating how to use images generated by DALL∙E 2 in Azure OpenAI Service to help inspire new Hot Wheels designs. By typing plain language prompts like “A DTM race car like a hot rod” or “A Bonneville salt flats racer like a DTM race car,” they can generate multiple images to help spark creativity and inform final designs. 
John Roach writes about Microsoft research and innovation. Follow him on Twitter.
A conversation with Kevin Scott: What’s next in AI
From Hot Wheels to handling content: How brands are using Microsoft AI to be more productive and imaginative
Microsoft open sources its ‘farm of the future’ toolkit
How data and AI will transform contact centres for financial services
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Machine learning operations (MLOps) is an approach to managing the entire lifecycle of a machine learning model — including its training, tuning, everyday use in a production environment and retirement.MLOps, which is sometimes referred to as DevOps for ML, seeks to improve communication and… View Full Term
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An electronic document management system (EDMS) is a software system for organizing and storing different kinds of documents. This type of system is a more particular kind of document management system, a more general type of storage system that helps users to organize and store paper or digital documents. EDMS refers more specifically to a software system that handles digital documents, rather than paper documents, although in some instances, these systems may also handle digital scanned versions of original paper documents.
An electronic document management provides a way to centrally store a large volume of digital documents. Many of these systems also include features for efficient document retrieval.
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Document Management System
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Last November, the document management company NetDocuments acquired Afterpattern, a no-code toolkit that law firms and legal teams can use to build apps and automate legal documents and workflows, promising at the time that it would be natively integrated into the NetDocuments platform.
Today, that promise comes to fruition, as NetDocuments releases PatternBuilder, a document and workflow automation tool that enables law firms, legal teams, and the public sector to automate their expertise and processes so they can be repeated predictably.
While PatternBuilder’s functionality is much the same as the Afterpattern product, the significant difference is that it is native to the NetDocuments platform, meaning that it is directly available for NetDocuments’ customers to use directly within the platform in which they are already working.
PatternBuilder’s App Builder provides several built Page Blocks to choose from, making it easier to build apps while also enabling users to create the complex interactions needed in legal document automation such as looping and iterations.
“Built directly into the NetDocuments platform, organizations of all sizes will be able to leverage this new capability while inheriting all of the security, governance and accessibility benefits of being in the cloud,” said Josh Baxter, NetDocuments CEO.
The core use case for PatternBuilder is to enable legal professionals to replicate and automate their unique templates and processes so that they are done consistently every time.
With the product built natively into NetDocuments, it enables firms to embed document assembly directly within the document management system, populating user inputs into Word and PDF documents and then automatically saving those documents into the folder or workspace the user chooses.
PatternBuilder Global Apps Page enables apps to be run from within the NetDocuments browser interface. All menu options shown are rights dependent and fully configurable at a granular level.
NetDocuments says that PatternBuilder has several unique features that make it easy for its customers to get started with automation:
“Being able to automate both simple and complex documents and tasks, as well as manage and implement these new applications, is critical for legal professionals and their support teams,” said Dan Hauck, NetDocuments chief product officer. “PatternBuilder gives organizations the ability to scale their expertise and consistently deliver their best work.”
PatternBuilder is officially launching today in the United States and will be rolled out to other regions during September, the company said.
It is being sold as an add-on product with the NetDocuments’ DELIVER solution, which consists of tools and features designed to enable legal organizations to safely organize, package and share content with clients, customers, outside counsel, and other internal and external groups.
NetDocuments says it plans to continue to enhance and add features to PatternBuilder. Over the next few months, it said, it will release the ability for users to:
Current Afterpattern customers will be able to continue using the product. However, Afterpattern will no longer accept new customers.
 
Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.

Bob Ambrogi is a lawyer and journalist who has been writing and speaking about legal technology and innovation for more than two decades. He writes the award-winning blog LawSites, is a columnist for Above the Law, hosts the podcast about legal innovation, LawNext, and hosts the weekly legal tech journalists’ roundtable, Legaltech Week.

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LawSites is a blog covering legal technology and innovation. It is written by Robert Ambrogi, a lawyer and journalist who has been writing and speaking about legal technology, legal practice and legal ethics for more than two decades.

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October 25, 2021 03:09 ET | Source: Fortune Business Insights Fortune Business Insights
Pune INDIA
Pune, India, Oct. 25, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The global document management services market is likely to reach USD 57.56 billion by 2027 owing to rapid adoption of cloud-based technologies. Besides, the market will register a CAGR of 6.9% between 2020 and 2027 according to Fortune Business Insights, latest report, titled “Document Management Services Market Size, Share, Growth, Insights & COVID-19 IMPACT Analysis, By Services (Archiving and Storage, Imaging and Scanning, Printing, Mailroom Services and Others), By End-user (Medical, Financial, Government, Audit & Consulting, Corporate, Telecommunication, and Insurance & Re-insurance) and Regional Forecast, 2020-2027” 
The emergence of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill. We understand that this health crisis has brought an unprecedented impact on businesses across industries. However, this too shall pass. Rising support from governments and several companies can help in the fight against this highly contagious disease. There are some industries that are struggling and some are thriving. Overall, almost every sector is anticipated to be impacted by the pandemic.
We are taking continuous efforts to help your business sustain and grow during COVID-19 pandemics. Based on our experience and expertise, we will offer you an impact analysis of coronavirus outbreak across industries to help you prepare for the future.
Request Sample PDF Brochure: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/request-sample-pdf/document-management-services-market-102848
List of the Companies Operating in the Document Management Services Market:
Document Management Services Market Share Report Scope and segmentation:
Document management services are vital to organize all the important document and data in one place. In addition to this, these services efficiently keep a track on all the important documents, while speeding up the performance of an organization. Furthermore, it is accurate and provides access to the documents at any given time from any part of the globe. Today, there has been a paradigm shift towards digitalization that is propelling the companies to move beyond paper document and adopt electronic document management systems (EDMS). Moreover, the electronic system has automated the complete work process, thereby, saving time and effort.
Have Any Query? Speak To Analyst: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/speak-to-analyst/document-management-services-market-102848
Regional Analysis:
Presence of Major Companies in North America to Bolster Growth
Geographically, the market comprises of several regions affecting the market growth during the forecast period. They are:
North America: The region held the largest share at USD 13.76 Billion in 2019 and is expected to dominate the market during the projected horizon. This is ascribable to factors such as presence of major companies such as Oracle Corporation and Access. Furthermore, rising adoption of the services by the end-user industries such as healthcare and BFSI is expected to propel North America to hold highest document management services market revenue between 2020 and 2027.
Asia-Pacific: The market in this region is likely to rise significantly during the forecast period. This is attributable to factors such as improved IT infrastructures in countries such as China, and India. Furthermore, advancement in business process services in Asia-Pacific will positively affect the market growth in the forthcoming years.
Europe: On the other hand, Europe is anticipated to register augmented growth owing to adoption of strategies such as collaboration by the companies to expand their business during the forecast period.
Drivers and Restraints:
Adoption of Technology Such as Cloud-Based amid COVIID-19 to Spur Demand
Technological advancement has led to emergence of efficient and reliable services such as cloud-based management. Additionally, cloud-based applications provide a seamless user experience and provides high-level flexibility to manage work for the organizations across the globe. The global pandemic, COVID-19 has gripped the whole world with widespread effects over several economies. Several governments around the world have called for lockdown to contain the disease and majority of people are working remotely. This has surged the demand for cloud-based services manifold in this testing times. Major companies are adopting the services that are robust and reliable to keep continuing the operational activities of their businesses. For instance, in May 2020, King & Wood Mallesons, a global international law firm, announced its adoption of iManage Cloud for its offices in Europe, Middle East, and United States. Darren Brown, IT Head of the company, said on the sidelines of the development, “Our firm is a strong believer of the future belonging to cloud, and are impressed with iManage cloud’s tremendous impact on our productivity, significant reduction in operational overheads, and its ability to access remotely.”
Ask For Customization: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/customization/document-management-services-market-102848
What does the Report Include?
The Document Management Services Market report includes an exhaustive study of several factors such as drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities that will affect the growth of the market in the forthcoming years. The report covers regional demographics that include qualitative and quantitative information about the regions that are further divided into nations that are contributing to the growth of the market between 2019 and 2026. Furthermore, the competitive landscape has been discussed in-depth that include information of several players operating in the market. Moreover, information on the adoption of strategies such as merger and acquisition, collaboration, partnerships, and joint ventures by the companies that will drive the growth of the market has been included during the projected horizon.
Competitive Landscape:
Merger and Acquisition by the Companies to Stoke Demand
According to the report, there are several companies operating in the market striving to gain major market share and outshine their rivals in the competitive marketplace.  They are doing so by adopting strategies such as merger and acquisition, collaboration, and joint ventures, among others and maintain market stronghold in the forthcoming years. For instance, in April 2018, Exela Technologies Inc., a U.S.-based automation provider, announced its acquisition of the German-based document management company, Asterion International Group. This acquisition is expected to expand the company’s operation and product offering across Europe. Furthermore, it will enable access to Asterion’s consumers to Exela’s document management solutions.
Quick Buy – Document Management Services Market: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/checkout-page/102848
Table Of Content:
TOC Continued…!
Have a Look at Related Research Insights:
Email Marketing Software Market Size, Share and Industry Analysis, By Channel (Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Customers (B2C)), Deployment (On-Premise and Cloud), By Enterprise Size (Large Enterprises, Small & Medium Enterprises), By Application (Email Lead Generation, Sales Reporting, Customer Management), By Industry (Banking, Finance, Security and Insurance (BFSI), IT and Telecommunications) and Regional Forecast, 2020-2027
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Tiki Wiki CMS (opens in new tab) is a powerful open-source content management system that can be used to create websites, intranet, and web applications. It’s known as Tiki for short.
Tiki functions particularly well as a web-based collaboration tool, and its modular nature allows you to create all manner of websites. For instance, you can add articles, forums, image galleries, quizzes, chats, webmail, and FAQs to your Tiki site.
As Tiki is open source, you can install and use it on your own web hosting at no cost. To better facilitate this, TechRadar has teamed up with Hostinger (opens in new tab) to offer a free shared hosting deal.
The quickest way to start using Tiki is to install it using Hostinger’s Auto Installer. In the Hostinger web administration panel menu, browse to Auto Installer and choose Other. Select Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware from the list.
On the first page of the wizard, you’ll be asked to enter a name for your website and to set administration login details. You can specify the site to be installed in a subdirectory and choose which MySQL database to use.
The second page of the wizard asks which version of Tiki you want to install and whether you want the software to update automatically. Click Install when you’re finished choosing your preferred settings.

On the Auto Installer page, right-click on Tiki and choose Manage. You’ll be taken to the home page for your Tiki installation. You can edit this page later. For now, click on Log in and enter the administrator user credentials you created in step 1.

You are now offered several options for setting up your Tiki site further. Click Start the Wizardry to begin the Configuration Profiles Wizard. 
This wizard presents several commonly used template sites to choose from. For instance, you can choose to apply the Company Intranet profile to set your Tiki site to include sections for company news, file repository, and wiki. Or, you could choose Personal Blog and Profile so your site will include a blog, image gallery, RSS integration, and a video log.
Besides these large template profiles, you can also choose to apply smaller profiles that only change certain elements of your Tiki site. You can apply multiple profiles at the same time to customize your site further.

After applying your preferred profile(s), log out and log back into your Tiki site. Select Start Configuration Wizard. This wizard includes all the most common preferences you’ll typically want to change on your Tiki site to make it your own.
The wizard has 18 pages in total, but the pages available to you depend on the features you currently have enabled. For example, if you applied the Small Business Presence profile in step three, File Storage settings will not be covered in the Configuration Wizard because you’re not using that feature.
Run through each page, choosing the right option for your project, and click Save and Continue until you’ve completed the Configuration Wizard.

Further configuration can be performed in the admin menu. Click on the blue cog at the top of the page and click on Features. Here, you can choose a list of features to enable or disable.
By clicking on Control Panels in the System Menu, you can alter the settings of each of the features you enabled.

Browse to any page on your Tiki site and you can click on the Edit button to alter the page’s content.
Tiki uses wiki syntax for formatting. For example, surrounding text in two underscores (e.g., __text__) means the text will be displayed in bold to website visitors. Tiki includes an editor that makes wiki syntax easier to generate as well as a pop-up help tool to remind you of all the available wiki code syntax.

In this guide, we’ve covered how to install Tiki Wiki CMS, a powerful web-based content management system with strong team collaboration features. Tiki requires more initial configuration than the average website application because it offers so much versatility. Ultimately, the ability to fine-tune your website so much leads to a site that better serves your specific purposes.
Versatility is Tiki’s greatest asset. Not only is it a great online collaboration tool (opens in new tab), it is also a powerful content management system (opens in new tab). Tiki can be used as a document management tool (opens in new tab), to build a corporate website (opens in new tab), or for personal blogging (opens in new tab). By giving Tiki the time it deserves to understand its varied and complex systems, it can be used as the foundation for a huge range of internet and intranet applications.
TechRadar created this content as part of a paid partnership with Hostinger. The contents of this article are entirely independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of TechRadar.
Richard brings over 20 years of website development, SEO, and marketing to the table. A graduate in Computer Science, Richard has lectured in Java programming and has built software for companies including Samsung and ASDA. Now, he writes for TechRadar, Tom’s Guide, PC Gamer, and Creative Bloq.
TechRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site (opens in new tab).
© Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.

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Polish startup building a solution for traditional document management transition to web 3.0 world, DoxyChain has raised €2.2 million to speed up security, transparency, and business workflow automation.
The early seed round was led by Level2 Ventures and backed by CV VC, Satus Starter, and Müller Medien. The fresh capital infusion will support further product development and foreign expansion to the European and U.S. markets.
Founded in 2019, DoxyChain offers infrastructure for documents, combining traditional frontends with Web 3.0 features. Talking about what’s in the pipeline in the coming months, Gabriel Dymowski, CEO and Co-founder of DoxyChain informed: “In October, we are launching DoxyCert and DoxyConnect. DoxyCert is a toolkit that allows clients to issue blockchain certificates, also as NFTs, which will be used as undeniable proof of authenticity or ownership. The second major platform feature is DoxyConnect, which will serve like a data room. Built on the blockchain, it lets the parties of a document exchange transact in a secure and easy way never seen before.”
Piotr Żelazko, CTO and co-founder of DoxyChain said: “The startup is now building a modular infrastructure that allows clients to develop their own tailored advanced workflows and use cases on top of it. Such an infrastructure will be our seed milestone.”
“The main economic value relies on process automation with smart contracts. Instead of building costly blockchain foundations software developers will focus on improving processes and user interfaces, leaving entire decentralisation and automation to DoxyChain,” added Adam Rudowski, co-founder of Level2 Ventures fund.
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Published: 13 Dec 2022
There are many ways that project management can contribute positively to audit quality. It can assist with the management of the audit team and associated resources, with aspects of audit planning, execution and completion, internal and external collaborations and communications, optimising the economics of engagements, and more. When the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) reviewed results of root cause analysis (RCA) of audit weaknesses the shortlist of findings included ‘ineffective project management’.
In a previous Audit & Beyond article, we looked at How to improve audits with project management (at tinyurl.com/AB-Project-Manage). We considered the importance of audit project management, what a framework for this might look like and offered tips to assist firms in shaping and enhancing their approach. In this article we turn our attention to software.
Software can potentially be used to address various aspects of audit project management and this is reflected in the many different types of software and tech-enabled services that may be used to support and enable this. The approach you take will depend on many factors relating to the specific circumstances of your firm. These include, but are unlikely to be restricted to:
It may seem obvious, but for the avoidance of doubt it’s worth stating that when considering technology to enhance aspects of audit project management, the options are not limited to the sorts of tools that come neatly labelled or categorised as ‘project management software’ or specifically signpost their ‘project management’ functionality. For those who want to research and assess a range of options, a brief overview may be helpful.
Depending on the particular circumstances, preferences and priorities of your firm, you may or may not want or need to consider software and services from some or all of the following product groupings (being mindful that some products or services may sit comfortably in more than one grouping). To increase the utility of the following groupings, some of the many available products are offered as ‘examples’, but inclusion does not equate with recommendation.
1. Accountancy-specific and audit-specific systems with functionality that can (be accessed or switched on to) assist with aspects of audit project management.
Examples include the suites of tools provided by the likes of CaseWare and Iris, offering tools for practice management, audit automation and a great deal more accountancy-specific assistance. Karbon is another example, with its collaborative work management platform for accountants. Then there are audit management systems such as Circit and Wolters Kluwer TeamMate, and digital audit platforms such as Inflo.
2. Specialist project management systems that are not sector-specific. The term ‘project management software’ is used to describe software that can be used to manage a project with a start date, an end date and a deliverable (often including workflow automation functionality). You’ll also find the term being used to describe tools for managing ongoing work/workflow and collaboration (although the latter is also in category 3, below).
Examples of project management systems include: Asana, Ganttpro, Height, Hive, Microsoft (MS) Project, Monday, Teamworks, Trello, Smartsheet and Zoho Projects.
3. Software that addresses specific problems or use cases that could assist with some aspects of audit project management.
Some of these function in isolation, and some can be connected to work with other systems, and some ‘add-ons’ operate only when connected to another system or systems (often, with the support of the application programming interfaces, more widely referred to as APIs).

When it comes to the automation of aspects of audit project management, examples range far and wide, from tools that can be used to manage and automate parts of the bank confirmation process (Confirmation), through those that keep engagement financials on track (Dayshape), to tools that enable secure online document sharing – and they are just a few of the many possibilities.
The latter product category alone includes myriad variations on the theme. Suralink, for example, offers a request list and document workflow platform that auditors can use to automate and organise their requests, share documents and track progress. There are also numerous data room and data vault tools and platforms that can be used to securely share and track documents. At one end of the spectrum are relatively simple solutions such as Dropbox Vault; at the other end are the various multifaceted options offered by providers such as Citrix and Microsoft.
4. General-purpose spreadsheets, some of which offer built-in and/or bolt-on functionality that may be used by auditors (and other professionals) for aspects of project management.
As well as the ubiquitous MS Excel, spreadsheet examples include Apple Numbers, Google Sheets and Zoho Sheets, to name but a few.
If your firm is an MS 365 subscriber, you may want to explore MS add-ins for Excel and Teams; this may come in useful for some aspects of audit project management, such as task allocation. Look out for Planner, Tasks by Planner and To Do, which will eventually be renamed as Tasks. Why pay for additional products and services if you don’t need to?
By virtue of its flexibility, the spreadsheet offers almost limitless possibilities. It could be as simple as entering your budget, task list, audit phases, man hours and other things you want to track into multiple sheets. Or you may want to create a visual timeline chart to help you map out a schedule and phases for each audit engagement. If you think a Gantt chart might help with progress tracking, use Excel to create one.

5. Low-code and no-code workflow and business process management tools and platforms that can be used to model, develop/build and deploy automated workflow and processes – both simple and complex – by people with little or no formal coding expertise. These typically work on the ‘drag and drop’, visual design principle. Pre-built functionality and re-usable components that represent particular steps or capabilities can all be connected to create workflows, automate processes and build complex applications. Some of the categories above offer this potential for use with their products so that users can extend and or tailor the functionality already on offer. There are also standalone low-code and no-code tools available.
A recent two-page Audit & Beyond article explored the audit automation possibilities of no-code and low-code tools, so we won’t go into any more detail here.
None of the grouping types or products mentioned are necessarily better or worse than each other, or better able to meet your firm’s needs; there are simply too many variables to consider.

As with many software-related decisions, somebody in your firm will need to do some research. When assessing and comparing products, be sure to consider matters such as: ease of use and implementation, features, functionality, privacy and security, customer support and cost. These can all vary widely.
At some point on your journey, try to make time to explore products that are available as free versions and/or for time-limited free trials, particularly if you are a sole practitioner or in a small firm. It’s worth noting that some of the most expensive products are also the most fully featured and the most complex, so the price and the learning curve can be pretty high.
There’s a great deal of information available online to inform your decision-making process. Watch free demonstrations and check out what’s being said by members of user groups and product groups on social media. There are numerous product-related tutorials available from providers and ‘how to’ tips from users, and you can learn a lot from reviews. Hopefully, this article will equip you with some basic information to get you started.
“Be warned, project management is about a lot more than using software to plan and coordinate activities. IT is a useful tool, but can’t do the entire job for you.”

“Project management tools show us where things are with the audit, to avoid late surprises. They mean audit teams have a better understanding of the status of the audit at any point in the audit process.”

“Using workflow software to set up predefined sequences of steps for some processes and tasks can make things easier for those who are new to the audit team or less experienced.”

“We’ve got better at communicating our expectations to clients during the audit. Better project management technology means we can say: ‘You know what, you’ve not given us these things yet.’”
“If you haven’t used project management software, it’s hard to understand the appeal. There are free online offerings you can play with.”
“A lot of our time is spent in project management. We’ve got a lot of project management tools, so we can actually see the status of the audit.” 
“Our project management tools monitor the status of the repository for deliverables and automatically send alerts to remind the client what’s outstanding.”
“When project management is not given the focus it needs, this can lead to inefficiencies within our audit work, which can have both commercial and, more importantly, risk implications.”
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