Reclaim time in your digital investigations with Magnet One: Part 3 – Collaborate with ease

This is the third entry in a four-part series showing you how Magnet One helps your digital forensics lab save time and effort in your investigations. Read our previous entries, Part 1: Combining speed with accuracy and Part 2: Accelerate your workflows.

The right evidence uncovered at the right time can make or break a case. But investigating, interpreting, and acting on that evidence quickly has become increasingly dependent on how well investigative teams work together. One of the biggest challenges facing agencies today isn’t just managing evidence, it’s team collaboration—ensuring everyone involved in the digital investigation can access it, understand it, and act on it together.

Unfortunately, most investigative teams are still struggling with the same old roadblocks: limited access to case data outside the lab, disconnected team members working from different locations, and delayed communication that slows everything down. These aren’t just workflow issues—they’re barriers to solving crimes and protecting communities.

Agencies need more than just another tool—they need a unified approach to collaboration on digital investigations. The Magnet One platform is built to solve the most persistent collaboration challenges in modern digital investigations. It’s not just a product—it’s a shift in how agencies work across teams to close cases faster with greater confidence.

Magnet One empowers teams with real-time collaboration that enhances team performance by enabling instant, secure access to case data for everyone, from anywhere. This dramatically reduces the time and effort required to keep everyone in the loop while also improving consistency and clarity to ensure the best possible outcome for your cases.

A better way to work together

As part of a digital forensics team, you’ve likely experienced some of the following situations in working with your investigative teams:

• A request for examination, but with unclear or incomplete information
• Constant requests from investigators asking about case status
• Case communication chaos – scattered across phones, emails, text messages, Post-it notes, etc.

If you’re still relying on manual means of communicating on your cases, ensuring timely and clear collaboration amongst your teams can be extremely tedious and time-consuming, requiring effort which could be much better spent working to uncover critical evidence.

Magnet One includes powerful collaboration features that you can leverage today—for free!—to help your investigative teams streamline communications to improve productivity and reduce delays across your investigations.

Easily kick off your cases

Ensure your investigations run as smoothly as possible, starting with the initial work request submission to the lab.

Instead of taking the time and effort to manually submit written investigation requests to the lab, investigators can use Magnet One to complete the requests electronically, from wherever they are. This not only significantly reduces the burden on everyone but also ensures their request goes to the lab as quickly as possible, with all the information needed by the lab to get started.

Investigators can also use Magnet One request forms to add evidence to their request, populating key details about their evidence item and even print their own physical labels for devices like mobile phones to further reduce work for the lab.

Once the request has been submitted, a case with all the included details will automatically be created, saving examiner effort. The lab can then approve the request, immediately assign the work to the appropriate team members, and investigators will be notified that their investigation is underway, all from Magnet One.

You can customize Magnet One’s request form to suit your agency’s current conventions so your investigative teams can get up and running easily.

If a device isn’t supported today, Magnet One will track it automatically – no need to keep checking. You’ll be notified the moment it’s ready for extraction, ensuring valuable evidence is processed without delay.

Effortlessly keep everyone in the loop

Once your investigation is underway, Magnet One makes it easy to ensure the entire investigative team is updated on its progress at every step.

By connecting your tools like Magnet Axiom, Magnet Graykey, and Magnet Review with Magnet One, you can provide your team members with automatic, real-time status updates so they can easily monitor the progress of their cases themselves, eliminating the frustrating back and forth interactions with phone calls, emails, or text messages between them and your lab.

Within their case, team members can view a case status that immediately shows them the key details of their investigation and up-to-the minute progress, with detailed step-by-step progress shown in the Events pane.

For example, investigators will be able to see when a mobile device they’ve submitted to the lab has begun the extraction process with Graykey, follow it through to processing in Axiom, and then when it’s ready for them to review in Magnet Review.

Enable seamless team communications

With Magnet One, you can say goodbye to the hassles of managing case communications across inefficient methods like phone calls, email, and texts! Magnet One includes robust notification and messaging features to help your teams communicate efficiently and effectively throughout the course of the investigation.

Magnet One’s built-in messaging pane provides an intuitive way for team members to easily ask questions, update each other on important case information, and keep track of all the messages related to their case.

Magnet One can also proactively notify team members of important events, such as when they’ve been added to a new case.

Empower your teams with real-time collaboration today

All of these powerful collaborative features are available to you for free today with Magnet One! Simply activate your free Magnet One account and connect your forensics tools to experience the benefits of seamless, real-time collaboration across your investigative teams.

In the fourth and final entry in this blog series, we’ll explore the growing challenge of digital forensics data management, the advantages of centralized cloud storage, and why it’s becoming essential for modern digital investigations.