Harmon.ie has now released a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of the dominant enterprise collaboration tools. These include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. The goal is to increase user adoption of the broader collaboration platforms now available and stop sharing docs as attachments to email. The company was founded as Mainsoft in the 1990s but recently switched their name to align with their main product, harmon.ie.
I spoke with David Lavenda of hamoni.ie who offered some interesting research. SharePoint’s adoption by IT departments has been pervasive with close to 80% of the enterprise collaboration market. I have seen this consistently reported from several sources. However, what are the business users doing? Harmonie had an independent firm look at the issue. They found that eighty-three percent of business users continue to abuse email, ping-ponging document attachments back and forth, thus creating document chaos instead of using SharePoint, Google Docs or other collaboration suites. In addition, the study found that one third of survey respondents with access to SharePoint refuse to use it, or use it about once a month.
One of the main obstacles is that business users tend to ignore new IT tools that require them to switch contexts, juggle multiple browser windows, and learn new collaboration habits. I have seen this happen many times. So harmon.ie was launched to bring the social collaboration capabilities into email where business users already work. With one client the implementation of harmon.ie allowed them to go from a 30% adoption of SharePoint to a use by 70% of their business users in a few months.
Another client, Amway, company, has 6,000 email users working in their headquarters. They used to send 73,000 email attachments a day, on average. Since deploying harmon.ie for SharePoint, the company reports a 42 percent decrease in the average daily volume of email attachments.
Several versions of the social email capability are offered. There is harmon.ie for SharePoint Enterprise, which transforms Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with advanced access to SharePoint document collaboration, email management, and social features within the Outlook and Office Communications Server interfaces. This capability appears as a side bar within SharePoint. You can see a sample side bar below.
David showed me how it works. When you send an email with an attachment, a message pops up enabling you to put the document in SharePoint and send a link instead without leaving email as shown in the screen below.
Then others can go from email to work on the centrally located document within SharePoint. Access controls are in effect reducing the possibility of the attachment getting in the wrong hands. You can also see the profiles of the document author and all editors. Their presence can be observed and IM, video chat, or email can be sent to them as shown below.
You can also rate documents and sort them by ratings using that SharePoint capability but within hamon.ie within your email. Basically, harmon.ie brings many of the SharePoint capabilities within email.
For Notes users, there is harmon.ie for SharePoint, Notes Edition. Previously branded Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, this email sidebar transforms Lotus Notes into a collaborative workspace through access to SharePoint documents, email management, calendars, and enterprise social networks within the Lotus Notes® and Lotus Sametime® interfaces. They have found that there are many companies that have Notes as email and also SharePoint. Some of them are quite large. It works the same as the harmon.ie SharePoint version with a side bar on the right.
There is also harmon.ie for Google Docs Enterprise, which enables people to collaborate on documents over the cloud, in their native file formats, using Google Docs and the Microsoft Exchange® email infrastructure.
They offer both a free personal version and a commercial enterprise version. In both cases, there are over 3000,000 users. The commercial aversion has been implemented in over 80 companies.
The time savings here is quite obvious. David mentioned a recent comparison they conducted. More than one hundred IT professionals and business users found that harmon.ie’s drag-and-drop access to shared documents is six times faster than the native SharePoint interface, which entails switching contexts and juggling several browser windows. People averaged 61 seconds to publish an email message on SharePoint via the SharePoint interface. However, they completed the same task in just 11 seconds using harmon.ie. I can see this happening.
Comprehensive SharePoint adoption remains a challenge. As I have written about on this blog a number of firms are offering collaborative capabilities that sit on top of SharePoint to help with this challenage. Here is a different approach as the SharePoint capabilities are brought into the user’s prime workspace, their email accounts. I can easily see the value of this method. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
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