Product Review: harmon.ie 4 – Bringing Office 365 to the Mobile Enterprise

With more organizations adopting Yammer or moving their SharePoint offering to the cloud, users need a way to seamlessly interact with colleagues and work with their SharePoint documents without going to disparate locations to perform their day-to-day tasks.  This was one of the cool new capabilities that harmon.ie has implemented into their latest product release – harmon.ie 4.0 – which was released earlier today.

Among the many new features in harmon.ie Version 4.0 include:

• Office 365 and SharePoint app for the Blackberry 10
• Mobile security enhancements
• Yammer support (Outlook and OWA only)
• Document preview (Outlook only)
• SkyDrive Pro integration with offline capability and synchronization
• Native office web apps support on iOS (Android coming soon)
• Support for Office 365 file sharing

Last October I wrote a product review for harmon.ie Connect that highlighted their suite of connected products that allow users to easily share documents and collaborate with colleagues wherever they happen to be, whether in the office, at home, or on the road.  To get up to speed on the core functionality of harmon.ie, I’d suggest reading that review first.  This review will only highlight some of the new features that have been added in harmon.ie 4.0.

harmon.ie 4 brings Office 365 to the Mobile Enterprise and provides a consistent user experience across devices and platforms

I don’t have a BlackBerry, so all testing for this review was done using my iPad as well as the desktop version of harmon.ie for Outlook.

harmon.ie 4.0 for mobile devices

One of the great additions in harmon.ie 4.0 is the ability to edit SharePoint documents on the iPad using Office Web Apps.  To test this out, from my iPad I saved a document attachment from my email program directly into SharePoint.  To do this, I opened the attachment from my email client and then selected Open in harmon.ie Ent.

It then prompted me to choose a location to save the document to SharePoint.

I can now edit and make changes to the document right from the iPad!  Users don’t have to purchase any other software to receive this capability; the only constraint is that Office Web Apps must be enabled on the SharePoint server that you are connected to.

Once I’ve made my changes I can save then check in the document, and my changes are reflected in SharePoint.

An important point to note is that although users can edit files from their iPad (or other mobile device), they cannot actually download or save the data locally due to the enhanced security features of harmon.ie 4.  They can only save back into SharePoint.

harmon.ie 4.0 for Desktop (Outlook version)

Next we’ll look at some of the new features in the Outlook version of harmon.ie 4.0.  A feature that I believe will prove to be very helpful to users who are looking for a particular document in SharePoint but aren’t sure they are looking at the right document is the preview functionality.  This allows users to see a preview of the file before actually opening it or attaching it to an email.  Simply right-click on a document and select Show Preview.

You’ll then see a preview of the document along with options to download, print, or embed the document.  Checking Keep preview window open will do just that; it will keep the window open so you can scroll through and preview multiple documents by clicking on them.

There have been some other enhancements to harmon.ie for Outlook that we’ll take a look at below, including Yammer support and SkyDrive Pro integration.

When viewing a user’s profile, you can click on the Yammer button, which will take you to that person’s Yammer feed.  You can even interact with them in Yammer directly from within harmon.ie.

You can hook up your SkyDrive Pro feed and then share a document, as well as view who it is currently shared with, directly from harmon.ie.

Right-clicking on a document and clicking Share will open a dialog that lets you specify who you wish to share the document with, as well as what permission that person should have on the document.

Lastly, clicking on the Yammer tab will open up your Yammer feed and allow you to interact with those in your Yammer network without even leaving Outlook.

harmon.ie has once again shown that they understand how the average business user works and rather than force them to deviate from that process, they’ve built tools that integrate with the tools that they most often use to carry out their work, which is often their email client.  Now with Yammer integration, users don’t even have to leave Outlook to monitor their real-time conversations and can keep up with what’s going on in the organization.  The added enhancements to their mobile offering corroborates their commitment to creating a consistent user experience from mobile, desktop, and now the cloud.

To read more about harmon.ie 4.0, please go to harmon.ie’s website.