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Welcome to the New harmon.ie!
The last two years have been a roller coaster, for the industry and for harmon.ie as well. While the world was hit with a global pandemic and business went into lockdown, changing how business get done, harmon.ie also experienced a renaissance, which has reached its climax today, with our new rebranding announcement! From today, you will see a new harmon.ie logo, a new website, and an updated branding on all harmon.ie’s products. But our rebranding is much more than an esthetic facelift. The rebranding reflects the seismic changes that have transpired at harmon.ie, all meant to improve our ability to serve and support our loyal customers.   Here are some of the big changes from harmon.ie: Management Buyout harmon.ie leadership undertook a management buyout, turning harmon.ie into an employee-owned entity. This change has enabled us to focus on delivering maximum value to customers, which is reflected by a 97% retention rate from our over 1500 enterprise customers in 2021. New products 2021 saw the release of harmon.ie 365 – our biggest and most ambitious product update in years. Featuring an updated harmon.ie for Outlook plug-in, this new release is designed to serve today’s ‘at-home’ and ‘in-office’ hybrid workers, who now need to live not just in Outlook but to toggle between Teams and Outlook. harmon.ie 365 brings Microsoft Teams within Outlook and enables remote workers  to find and access important emails and documents across all the Microsoft 365 content repositories – SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. harmon.ie’s new Email TeamMate product also took off in 2021, tackling the same “living in two apps” challenge, by bringing Outlook emails within Microsoft Teams. Email TeamMate enables Microsoft 365 users to pull important emails directly into a Teams conversation. Without having to toggle between Outlook and Teams, Email TeamMate keeps workers focused on the work, rather than technology. New Customers The most important indication of harmon.ie’s success is our exceptional customer satisfaction, reflected by our 97% customer retention rate. To share how customers are using harmon.ie, we continued to publish new customer case studies, spotlighting how organizations use harmon.ie products to further their business goals. In 2021, we added these new customer case studies, showcased by the following customer quotes: “Every tour we do features harmon.ie, because it does make working with documents and SharePoint so much easier and we actually have statistical evidence that once people see harmon.ie, they want it.” Cassy Freeman, Digital Workplace Lead at Babcock International  “harmon.ie enables our employees to do information management (IM) without knowing they are doing information management... And that makes all the difference.” Alexandre Singh, Exec. Dir. Business Solutions and IM, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC)  “harmon.ie gave us the opportunity to create an internal, win-win situation between [associates and] the company that has formal requirements and wants good information, lifecycle management or records management, and wants to be 100% compliant with all regulations to fulfill our duties. It's part of our value set and we live up to it… harmon.ie helped us make access easier, and make the process easier by enhancing the associate user experience.” Daniel Stuch, Senior Project Leader Application Development & Rollout at Bosch  “People are not going to change. If you want them to use SharePoint, you have to make it easy for them to capture, classify, and find emails and documents. harmon.ie is the key.” Mario Gaulin, Director of Enterprise Information Solutions at Canadian Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food (AAFC) Microsoft Partnerships harmon.ie is a valuable member of key Microsoft partnership programs, including being a Content Services partner, a Gold Development partner, and a Microsoft co-sell ready partner. Our close relationship with Microsoft was spotlighted in a Microsoft Intrazone podcast from earlier this year, in which, Mark Kashman, Microsoft Senior Product Manager and Chris McNulty, Microsoft Director of Product Marketing, called harmon.ie’s capability to “drag and drop within an app, without switching context and being compliant, ‘a game changer action for employees.’” New Digs In 2021, harmon.ie moved into new, centrally located, flexible workspace in Modiin, Israel. Designed to accommodate the hybrid workforce, the new location is situated adjacent to the central train station. The modern workspace inspires an energizing vibe while providing easy access to employees who rely upon public transportation. New hires Key new hires across all company departments are injecting energy and innovation horsepower to take the company to the next level. New employee additions have been made in the R&D, QA, Marketing, Finance, and Operations departments. And, This is Just the Beginning As 2021 winds down, big plans are afoot for 2022. In Q1 2022, we will be announcing our newest product addition to the harmon.ie family – harmon.ie Accord (previously code-named, ServiceMate). This product is built for account and client managers who need to support clients and want to leverage Microsoft Teams’ collaborative powers to do so. With Accord, account teams can pull important client emails into Teams and start a collaborative Teams task to make sure the client gets the best and most authoritative response. Accord eliminates the inevitable email chaos that ensues when multiple people receive the same ‘shared’ email. Also, look forward to new announcements about strategic partnerships, key new hires, and of course, new customer stories.  Happy New Year!
December 2021 | harmon.ie Team
Conquering Information Chaos with Microsoft 365 and harmon.ie
Over the last year, much has been written about remote work, with the bulk of the discussion focusing on the need to bring people together in virtual meetings, using tools like Zoom and Teams. But one aspects of remote work that has been largely overlooked, is the (new) challenge of managing content when workers are geographically dispersed. In a recent report, Gartner noted that “As organizations rapidly scale their remote work capabilities and deploy new technology, IT capacity is increasingly strained. … [they] are still struggling to successfully implement and enforce data governance frameworks. As they accumulate new types of data and rely on fragmented storage systems, they are more exposed to regulatory, ethical, and data security risks." Fragmented storage systems could be as simple as saving email attachments and downloading files to a local hard drive.  In fact, in a recent webinar, The Canadian Department of Education and Social Development (ESDC), reported their employees were doing just that. When lockdown hit, IT at ESDC discovered email inboxes were ‘exploding’ as employees who were suddenly disconnected from shared drives, were stockpiling important documents in email and on their local drives, leading to endless document versions and… ‘information chaos.’ Like many organizations, ESDC quickly migrated to Microsoft 365, and that was wildly successful for meetings – with 30,000 employees moving to Teams in just 3 months. To address information chaos, the next step was getting documents in order using the Microsoft 365 tools already in place. But getting document in order with Microsoft 365 is not straightforward because Microsoft 365 includes multiple apps with document repositories. Case in point; Microsoft 365 emails and documents may be stored in Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and even Teams. So, with many workers toiling away from home office ‘silos,’ where emails and documents actually end up is anyone’s guess. The question is, “How can you implement information governance with such a dispersed workforce?” Information governance Enforcing information governance is a problem, in part, because many emails are ‘documents of record’ that need to be retained for compliance or regulation requirements.  And with Microsoft 365, finding important emails and documents across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook is a not easy … for remote workers, as well as for information and compliance managers.  So, while Microsoft 365 might be part of the problem, when used together with the new harmon.ie 365, it is also the core of the solution… Because harmon.ie 365 makes it easy to capture, classify, and then discover emails and documents across multiple Microsoft 365 apps; SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook. 
November 2021 | harmon.ie Team
Announcing harmon.ie 9.2 – Microsoft 365 Has Never Been More Accessible
harmon.ie is proud to announce the latest harmon.ie Outlook desktop release – version 9.2. Driven by customer and societal demands, this release adds critical accessibility features. Accessibility opens the world of information to individuals with and without disabilities. Providing better access to content allows a greater variety of workers to contribute to business processes and be productive, regardless of their individual needs. In today’s increasingly digital world, accessibility is critical because it means extending information to all people so they can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with electronic information and be active, contributing members of the digital workplace. As such, version 9.2 includes support for: WCAG 2.1 keyboard JAWS Narration The following sections provide additional detail for each capability. What is WCAG 2.1? Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 covers a wide range of guidelines for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general. WCAG 2.1 standard keyboard support In version 9.2, all product functionality is operable through a keyboard interface according to WCAG 2.1 Section 2.1. JAWS Narration Job Access with Speech (JAWS) is a popular computer screen reader program for Microsoft Windows that allows blind and visually impaired users to read the screen either with a text-to-speech output or by a refreshable Braille display. JAWS is produced by the Blind and Low Vision Group of Freedom Scientific. When entering a command, JAWS declares the command and location on the page. Speech can be stopped with the control key, lines are navigated with the up/down arrow keys, and the tab key moves between links and controls. Specific letter keys on the keyboard can be pressed to navigate to the next or previous element of a specific type, such as text boxes or check boxes. Version 9.2 supports JAWS narration; namely, audio feedback is provided for all keystrokes and command entries. Availability Version 9.2 will be available at the end of November 2021.
November 2021 | harmon.ie Team
Babcock Case Study
When you are a leading provider of critical, complex engineering services, employing 35,000 associates worldwide, it’s easy to understand why IT operations are the business’ lifeblood. So, when Babcock hit a wall using shared drives and other repositories for document storage and management, it is obvious why they turned to SharePoint. With 40 terabytes of data and no classification system, finding important emails and documents was a nightmare. SharePoint presented a centralized document management system with an organized methodology for classifying content using metadata. But getting knowledge workers to use SharePoint was not a slam dunk. Changing worker’s daily habits of how they stored content was a challenge. Plus, now there was an extra step of adding metadata to content so it could be found later. Which is why Babcock turned to harmon.ie. harmon.ie makes it easy for Babcock information workers to capture and classify emails and documents in SharePoint. Furthermore, harmon.ie makes it easy to upload and classify multiple documents in one operation, and make sure they are checked in so others can view and edit them. But harmon.ie provides more. It also enables Babcock employees to avoid ‘document chaos’ by empowering them to send document links instead of email attachments, thereby ensuring everyone is working on the same version of the document. And harmon.ie makes it easy to search and find SharePoint content. All this can be done without leaving the familiar confines of Outlook; the place where employees already spend their work time. In the words of Janet Robertson, Digital Workplace Analyst at Babcock International, “harmon.ie gives you that window into SharePoint right from Outlook… it saves me a lot of time… so, it is a really good tool.”
October 2021 | harmon.ie Team
harmon.ie 9.1 is Now Available
New harmon.ie version 9.1 follows on the heels of our extremely popular 9.0 release. Codenamed harmon.ie 365, harmon.ie 9.X enables information workers, for the first time, to capture, classify, discover, and share emails and documents across multiple Microsoft 365 apps – SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive. Building on the success of harmon.ie 9.0, harmon.ie 9.1 introduces the following important new capabilities: Our new migration tool announced in June, is now bundled in the harmon.ie 9.1 release. This tool enables you to migrate your harmon.ie ‘sites’ and ‘favorites’ URLs from on premises SharePoint locations to SharePoint Online locations. This is a boon for organizations with many SharePoint locations, to make the migration process transparent for harmon.ie users. harmon.ie 9.1 adds support for private Teams channels (in addition to the previously supported, public channels). This means you can now upload and share documents and emails from Outlook to private Teams channels. You will recall that private channels create focused spaces for collaboration amongst a subset of a team. They are useful when you want to limit collaboration to people who have ‘a need to know’ or if you want to facilitate communication between a group of people assigned to a specific project, without having to create an additional team to manage. harmon.ie 9.1 extends your ability to share Microsoft 365 folders and document sets with external parties using new Microsoft 365 Share capabilities. Previously, only sharing documents was supported. Check out the What’s New in harmon.ie for Outlook page to see a complete list of what’s new in harmon.ie 9.1 and to view important upgrade information.
September 2021 | harmon.ie Team
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