Clio Operate integrates with Microsoft Office 365 for four purposes:

• Authentication. Users sign in to Clio Operate with their Microsoft Entra ID account, using single sign-on.
• Document management. Clio Operate accesses and manages documents held in your SharePoint Online document libraries, so SharePoint Online acts as your document management system.
• Inbound email. Clio Operate ingests email from Exchange Online and turns it into tasks.
• Outbound email. Clio Operate sends email through Exchange Online.

You can use any combination of the four. The Where to go next section below lists the article for each, plus the Microsoft Entra setup that three of them share.

How Clio Operate secures the connection to Office 365

All Office 365 integrations use the industry-standard OAuth 2.0 protocol, so Clio Operate never stores your Office 365 credentials. An administrator or end user signs in to Microsoft, and Microsoft issues security tokens to Clio Operate. Think of these tokens as temporary passes that you can revoke at any time.

Clio Operate stores tokens in its database, encrypted with 256-bit AES.

Because each account is linked to an interactive Microsoft sign-in, your existing identity controls still apply. Accounts can have MFA enabled, and Microsoft evaluates the sign-in against your Conditional Access policies in the same way as any other sign-in. No account needs an app password, and no account needs to be excluded from your security baselines.

What order to set things up in

The integrations are independent, so you can set up any of them without the others. Two things are worth knowing before you start.

Authentication comes first if you want it. Users need a Clio Operate record with an attached identity provider, so configure authentication before adding or provisioning users.

Three integrations need an app registration in Microsoft Entra, but they can share one. Authentication, SharePoint Online and outbound email each need one. A single registration can serve two or three of them, but only if you add every redirect URI and every permission that those integrations use. See Create an app registration for Clio Operate.

A typical order is:

1. Create the app registration, or decide which existing one to extend.
2. Configure authentication, then test a sign-in.
3. Add users by hand, or set up SCIM provisioning.
4. Configure SharePoint Online as your document management system.
5. Configure outbound email.
6. Configure inbound team email.

Where to go next