The end of the year is approaching, in this last newsletter of 2024 we bring you our latest news

Newsletter December 2024

Epona's development team
Meet the Masterminds
We introduce our Development Team, which, led by Marco Dissel, works on our products to allow you and your employees to work together as efficiently as possible and also faster.
Who are the brilliant minds shaping the future of Epona’s software? Meet Willem, Rens, and Rik, the trio driving innovation, creativity, and quality in everything we do.
- Willem van Hooijdonk: team lead, strategist, and AI enthusiast. Willem thrives on creating a dynamic, inspiring environment where innovation meets structure. Outside work? You’ll find him running or immersed in his favorite thrillers.
- Rens Rijvers: detail-oriented innovator. Rens is passionate about optimizing user experience and crafting web applications with staying power. And when he’s not coding, he’s diving into game design or hitting the gym.
- Rik Vos: the team’s perfectionist and quality guardian. Rik ensures our software runs like a dream. In his downtime, he’s either tinkering with microcontrollers or exploring new hobbies like basketball and long-distance hiking.

News from Microsoft regarding the ‘New Outlook’
Although Microsoft will support the current version of Outlook until at least 2029, Microsoft will push customers to switch to the New Outlook. One of the major issues with the New Outlook is that it doesn’t support COM plugins. The DMSforLegal and DMSforSharePoint functionality within Outlook is provided by a COM plugin. Switching to the New Outlook, will immediately disable this functionality but a lot of other COM plugins too. Fortunately, Microsoft is aware of this issue and therefore offers support until at least 2029 as well offers information on how to keep working with your current Outlook version. Of course, Epona is aware of this change and started developing a DMSforLegal/ DMSforSharePoint successor, without COM Plugin, in cooperation with Microsoft two years ago. The new product, Epona365, is rolled out to selected customers in the past few months.
Epona DMSforLegal product roadmap
We introduced support for BundleDocs in the first quarter of this year and added support for Draftable in the second quarter.
With BundleDocs you can create well designed PDF bundles from different sources in seconds. Add your template to that bundles and ship the result to courts and clients. When the source documents are updated, you could recreate the PDF bundle using the same bundle choices and update your PDF on the fly. Draftable support is currently the most advanced document comparison integration Epona offers.
Compare versions of Word documents with PDF files, create redline comparisons on the fly and automatically start an e-mail that includes the versions compared and the redline comparisons based on those versions on a single click.
In DMSforLegal 24.2 you now have the ability to select which external document comparison tool you prefer to use and how you want that tool to be used by default.


DMSforLegal 23.3 includes a lot of fixes and updates that are critical to keep your DMSforLegal integration running without problems with new versions of Office, Windows and SharePoint. We strongly advise to regularly update your DMSforLegal software and ensure that the integrations work as designed. In the third quarter we also released a version that supports the Hebrew language, and we focused on Arabic language support for our clients in the middle east.And now with the end of the calendar year in sight, DMSforLegal 23.4 is released to selected clients and will become available to all clients soon. In the fourth quarter we added support for Brazilian Portuguese and delivered the first ‘headless’ version of DMSforLegal.
Some of our clients are starting to use the New Outlook instead of Classic Outlook. This New Outlook will replace Classic in the next years and will probably be the Outlook standard in 2028 onwards. New Outlook does not support installed or integrated software like DMSforLegal.
The familiar DMSforLegal data file on the left side of Outlook will be replaced by Epona365 Web and the DMSforLegal ribbon in the menu bar of Outlook will simply not exist, because that requires software installation which Microsoft will no longer support in New Outlook.

For clients working with the New Outlook we offer DMSforLegal 23.4 to support their Word templates integrations with the DMS and the PDF integrations that rely on installed software technology. In DMSforLegal 23.4 configuring your connection to SharePoint is done using a separate application installed on your workstation called Configurator. This way applications like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit integrating with DMSforLegal will know how to connect to your SharePoint based DMS.

Epona 365 Office
& Web
We introduced a completely new class of software solutions to support future versions of Outlook and allow Legal AI integrations to be delivered to your workplace in a safe and controlled manner.
Epona365 Office is the new Modern Add-in integration between Outlook, Office and the DMS. The application does not need to be installed on your workstation, it is placed in an APP store and users can deploy it to their workplace on demand similar to APP/PLAY stores on Apple and Android telephones. Epona365 Office is always up to date. New versions are deployed to your environment on a weekly basis and no reinstallation on workstations is required. Mixed with Epona365 Web the new APPs offer a Search driven view on all of your DMS content, showing you all the recent documents you and your team worked on.

Epona365 and AI
The new Epona365 will be the starting point of your teams AI integration with Microsoft Copilot. Please ask our sales teams for a personal demonstration of the AI capabilities of Ask Epona, the integration with Microsoft Copilot, our support for Microsoft Search AI RAG semantic search and the abilities to integrate Epona365 web with custom AI solutions such as DocBldr, Henchman, Lawlift, Lexgen, or Leya. But please do start integrating your DMS with our Copilot Light integration. Select documents in your Matters and submit them to secure Azure OpenAI services that keep your data safe within the boundaries of your Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure environments. AI results can be saved easily in the DMS and re-used for interactions with your team and your clients.
AI functions could also be used to improve document search by added Document metadata (eg Document Type, Document Language) to all of your DMS files automatically.
The next step is adding AI semantic search capabilities to selected Matters, such as KMSforLegal matters using the latest Microsoft OpenAI RAG search technology, of course in a secure manner and also within budgets and permissions defined.
Controlled Legal AI rollouts in Epona365 will be our priority in the next year, changing our file and full text search DMS into a next generation AI based intelligent DMS. Our colleagues would love to demonstrate the 7 steps to turn your DMS into an AI driven DMS with you!
Wrapping up the year with gratitude and growth
As the holiday season approaches, we take a moment to reflect on an incredible year of innovation, collaboration, and progress. At Epona, our mission to bring order in the chaos of digital documents remains at the heart of everything we do.
This year, we’ve have not only expanded the team. We also pushed boundaries, built stronger partnerships, and introduced new tools to make your work smarter and smoother. But above all, we’re grateful for our amazing team and the trust of our clients who inspire us to keep moving forward.
Here’s to a joyful holiday season and an organized, productive new year ahead!
We wish all of you, your families and teams a wonderful holiday season.
Let’s continue to create clarity in the digital world, together, also in the new year to come.
