Using Azure, Office 365, C# and Xamarin to Make a Multiuser, Multiplatform Extensible Law Practice Management Cloud Application

Abstract

Besides the strictly legal duties and tasks of legal professionals, law practice requires also management; keeping track of cases and their related resources, such as files, deadlines, clients, and tasks. Managing these resources can be simplified with specialized software, which also provides collaboration and resource sharing capabilities to support working groups and organizations. The scope of this thesis is to design and implement a low cost law practice management software prototype. While such software solutions already exist, we will show that there is still room for improvement by integrating it with some of the most commonly used productivity tools and technologies, namely Microsoft Office 365. Many users and organizations use Outlook for their emails, OneDrive for their file system, and probably more such tools. So, the objective of this thesis is to allow them to keep using these tools along with a specialized law practice management tool, instead of creating an entirely new platform.

To achieve this goal, we leverage cloud development. We integrate Office 365, using Microsoft Graph API, with a custom PaaS (Platform as a Service) service implemented on Microsoft Azure, to provide a unified cloud backend service. Cloud services, design patterns and the relatively recent technological advances, such as Xamarin, simplify multiplatform development. We also provide two client applications, a Windows Desktop (WPF) client that offers full functionality, and an Android mobile client that offers lightweight functionality, as well as a basic ASP .NET website.