The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the way accounting and consulting firms do business, quickly turning connected firm management software from a luxury into a necessity. At a recent Intapp technical briefing for accounting and consulting leaders, Jose Lazares, Senior Vice President of Product and Business Management at Intapp, explained: “[The pandemic] really drove remote work tools to a new level, and really accelerated the adoption of Microsoft Teams. People had to think about the next generation of work and what it actually means when working in a distributed fashion.”
Intapp recently announced it had signed an agreement to acquire Repstor, creator of Microsoft 365–based enterprise content management and team collaboration tools. Since then, the Intapp and Repstor teams have worked closely together to determine how best to combine and leverage their strengths to help clients improve profitability in this post-pandemic market.
“[Repstor and Intapp have] a shared view of the importance of building purpose-built solutions for the unique needs of professional service firms,” said Mark Holman, President of Accounting and Consulting and Chief Strategy Officer at Intapp, during the technical briefing. “Repstor provides extension to our capability to better enable integration and leverage of core Microsoft products.”
Alan McMillan, CEO of Repstor, discussed the success of his company and its products, stating that many of the solutions were inspired by Repstor clients. “We’ve taken some of [our clients’] ideas and mixed them with our own expertise,” he explained. “We add value to [the Microsoft 365] platform, and by joining with Intapp, that value is completely multiplied.”
Repstor solutions leverage firms’ existing Microsoft 365 investments to deliver a truly connected, industry-specific experience with secure, frictionless collaboration and content management. The software offers:
- Engagement-centric collaboration with Microsoft Teams
- Content management with Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Outlook
- Secure external collaboration with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint
Toby Woodhead, Head of Technology at Armstrong Watson, is just one of many satisfied Repstor clients. He shared his experience with Repstor during the technical briefing. Woodhead stated that leaders at Armstrong Watson were frustrated by both the cost of their previous DMS system and its inability to properly connect with Microsoft products. Woodhead soon discovered Repstor, and was immediately impressed by what it had to offer.
“[Repstor was] able to meet that need of building on, better augmenting, and improving the SharePoint platform, enabling us to do DMS with it,” Woodhead said. “I was able to go back to my board and demonstrate that I had increased our ROI on Microsoft Office 365 because we were able to use the SharePoint online functionality that we had already bought.”
Woodhead was further impressed by the way Repstor handled the migration of Armstrong Watson’s data. “We had about 3 million active documents, 300,000 active workspaces, 7 million closed documents, and 6,600,000 closed workspaces — about 5 terabytes in total,” Woodhead said. “Repstor helped us identify a partner we could work with that would do that migration for us, which had been a massive weight on my mind.”
Intapp and Repstor are now joining forces to create Intapp Collaboration & Content, a new Intapp suite designed to help streamline collaboration and help teams work smarter. The suite will consist of three components:
- Intapp Workspaces provides engagement-centric intelligence and automation within Microsoft Teams to enhance collaboration, leading to better business outcomes
- Intapp Documents orchestrates document management across all content sources for full lifecycle visibility and engagement-centric collaboration
- Intapp Client Collaboration boosts client transparency and empowers fee-earners to deliver exceptional client experiences
Fergus Wilson, Chief Technology Officer at Repstor, gave a demonstration of Intapp Collaboration & Content toward the end of the briefing, allowing attendees to see how the software functions and integrates with Microsoft products.
“A lot of our focus at the moment is around Microsoft Teams functionality — and making that experience perfect — and around connecting you to the appropriate systems,” Wilson said.
Learn more about Intapp Collaboration & Content: Download the recording of the Intapp Technical Briefing for Accounting and Consulting Leaders.