Welcome to our “Friday Feature” series: a new space to highlight exceptional features unique to Aderant products. Check back every Friday as we introduce new ways to improve your firm’s efficiency and ease of operations.
Today, Derek Schutz, Product Manager at Aderant, is highlighting the Pipeline feature of Aderant’s Drive software.
What is the Pipeline feature in Drive?
In a nutshell, the Drive Pipeline is a feature within Aderant Drive that populates the information and web components for a Drive site. Drive is a legal client portal where a firm’s clients can come for financial information, calendar information from a docketing system, client contact information, matter phase updates, documents, etc. The Drive Pipeline grabs data sourced from multiple, disparate sources via the Handshake toolkit and content designer, along with any code or instructions on how to present that data in a meaningful way, and pushes it to a specifically provisioned SharePoint Online site. We can then securely present the data to those explicitly identified to receive it, both within the firm and their designated clients.
What problem does the Drive Pipeline feature solve for Aderant clients?
Automating the secure uploading of information. The Pipeline populates information on a timely basis within a certain schedule, or cadence, as determined by the firm. For example, a firm may populate new documents nightly, including financial information, invoices, upcoming event schedules, or any data necessary to be shared with a client. The Pipeline pushes information to the site where it waits for a client to access and utilise it as they see fit. This solves a firm’s need to ensure client data is secure, and that a site compiles the necessary information as it is built. A firm can have multiple Pipeline instances, or jobs, that push information. The Pipeline understands which information a client needs and which site to upload the information to. It does this not only securely, but efficiently. When you have thousands of sites, your needs are more complicated. The Pipeline is built specifically to handle as many sites as a user wants or needs to create. Each job within a Pipeline will associate appropriately to the pre-determined cadence dictated by the firm.
How does the Pipeline engage not only with Drive, but also with Aderant’s other software offerings?
The Pipeline is also the portion of Drive that makes sure that things are working how they should. We have analytics tied to Pipeline jobs, so that in the rare case that something goes wrong, we can address it instantly. We can also update the Pipeline job with new pieces of information as necessary. Each Pipeline job is tied to a specific site template – without the Pipeline job, it would be difficult to build sites to any sort of scale, which is at the heart of what Drive does. Legal client portals need to be secure and contain various levels of functionality. The Pipeline leverages the content that Aderant Handshake already procures, so by publishing that information via a Drive site, we’re able to seamlessly fulfil both firm and client needs.
