As SharePoint matures at a lot of organizations, companies want to be assured they are realizing an adequate return on their investment. Efforts to increase user adoption and information worker productivity are getting more traction and visibility.
Companies also want to make sure that important information and documents are very easy for users to find. As a result, they are focusing more on improving information governance, email management, records management, and compliance.
In addition, more and more companies want to make SharePoint available to their users outside of the office, and even while offline. Mobile usage in general has been increasing steadily in the last couple years and the growth shows no signs of slowing down.
For years harmon.ie has provided desktop and mobile tools that enhance productivity and make it easier for users to upload, classify, find, and collaborate on documents and email messages in SharePoint. Recently they have consolidated their award-winning products into a single, unified offering to make it easier for customers to take advantage of all the benefits of harmon.ie.
harmon.ie One
harmon.ie One is the unification of all the core harmon.ie products that you know and love, along with some new additions and features that make using SharePoint even easier than ever before. They’ve made several improvements to their desktop and mobile solutions, and have also extended the capabilities of their OWA client.
Over the past year, harmon.ie has seen an enormous uptake in interest of being able to save email messages in SharePoint. With the new unified offering, emails can be saved, tagged, indexed and searched just like any other document of record, from any device. This is great for eDiscovery as it makes managing and finding email messages a breeze, which is why ediscovery vendors are so highly recommended when it comes to finding and preserving important documents.
harmon.ie has also spent significant focus on optimizing the user experience, as well as with ease of storing and classifying content.
Some other new harmon.ie features include:
- Support for Mac Users
- Upload Multiple Images
- Offline Support
- Email and Document Preview
- Email Body Widget
- Access Office 365 Groups
- Draft Email Messages/Versioning
Support for Mac Users
Just as Windows users can, Mac users can also upload and share emails documents, send document links, and participate in Yammer discussions from their Mac from Outlook 2013 or 2016.
Upload Multiple Images
harmon.ie now allows users to upload multiple images from a mobile device directly to a SharePoint library.
A great use case to illustrate this is a construction or engineering firm that wants to take and store pictures of their construction sites. Imagine the old way of doing this – you take pictures with a digital camera or phone. Then you have to go back to the office, download to your computer, and upload to SharePoint. Then you have to assign metadata one by one.
With harmon.ie, you can now upload multiple photos from your mobile device (iPad, iPhone, or Android) in one go and assign all metadata directly from the device, including GPS coordinates!
Simply select multiple photos from your phone…
Then set metadata and save.
Offline Support
harmon.ie now offers offline support. If network coverage is not available, users can download SharePoint and Office 365 folders, libraries, and documents to their desktop or mobile device to view or edit. Even metadata is available while offline.
After adding the desired documents as favorites, you can manage offline settings in the Favorites properties.
Email and Document Preview
Users can preview emails and documents that are stored in SharePoint through the harmon.ie sidebar in Outlook without having to open or download the file. Right-click on the document or email in question and click Preview.
You can also preview files on your mobile device by selecting the file and clicking View Message or Show Document Info.
Email Body Widget
harmon.ie has a new email widget that appears inside the email body window, making it easier to add required metadata or save attachments. You can also specify whether you want to save the email and attachments to SharePoint, or only the attachments. You can even check-in directly from that window.
When composing a new email, you can easily add a document as a hyperlink from inside the widget. This is configurable so you could alternatively send the document as an attachment if you’re sending to someone outside your organization, for example.
When receiving emails with attachments, you can select which documents you want to upload to SharePoint.
Access Office 365 Groups
You now have easier access to Office 365 groups, as you can access them from the harmon.ie sidebar in Outlook. You can also access documents that were shared in the group without going to the browser.
Group files appear like a team site within the harmon.ie sidebar.
You can drill down on a group to access that group’s files. From here you can share group files or links just like you would with any other document in SharePoint.
Draft Email Messages/Versioning
harmon.ie allows users to create draft email messages in Outlook and store them in SharePoint until they are ready to send them. This allows team members to collaborate on an email before it gets sent.
By clicking Save Draft Message after starting an email, not only will the email be saved to SharePoint, but you’ll also be able to view version history to see what changed and by whom before being sent.
My Thoughts
harmon.ie continues to listen to their customers’ needs and deliver sought-after features that improve productivity by streamlining previously disjointed processes.
In my opinion, with this latest release they’ve added even more reasons to use an already stellar product. The primary method of interoffice communication is still email, and most people live in their email clients all day long, myself included. It only makes sense for users to be able to access their important SharePoint documents through the email interface, rather than going back and forth between Outlook and SharePoint.
They also continue to make improvements in their mobile apps so that you’ll get the same experience no matter which device you happen to be on at the moment. This consistent user experience also extends to the Mac, making it easier to more users to take advantage of harmon.ie’s benefits and features.
By adding features like Office 365 groups access, multiple image uploading, and previewing emails and documents without needing to download them first, they’ve made it easier for users to work and be more productive. And with the introduction of offline support, they don’t even need to be connected to a network to work on their documents.
To learn more about the new features of harmon.ie, please visit the harmon.ie website.
Product review is sponsored by harmon.ie, but opinions are my own
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