"Still using email? harmon.ie...is out to help email junkies who cannot kick the habit but also want to embrace social networking and collaboration tools."
"Reducing distractions, and finding times when you can avoid electronic distractions entirely to focus on the task at hand, has become a necessity. These six tips can help you to minimize distractions and work more productively."
"Adoption is one of those issues we all keep coming back to when we talk about social software in the enterprise...So solutions that try to bring social elements into existing applications, into existing workflows and contexts are the most interesting to me.... "
"harmon.ie, a Microsoft Outlook add-on that’s intended to make corporate email more social, is rolling out new social features to aggregate communication, connection and collaboration tasks in one place...."
"harmon.ie has released a new version of its email plugin that adds social and collaborative features to Outlook and Lotus Notes. Harmon.ie for SharePoint 3.0 allows users to collaborate with colleagues and external contacts on Outlook without leaving the email interface."
"harmon.ie's main claim to fame has been its software for integrating SharePoint documents and portal content into Outlook and Lotus Notes, but the new release includes deeper integration with SharePoint user profiles and activity streams."
"harmon.ie's main claim to fame has been its software for integrating SharePoint documents and portal content into Outlook and Lotus Notes, but the new release includes deeper integration with SharePoint user profiles and activity streams."
"Social email firm Harmon.ie will launch in the UK on Wednesday with a number of updates to its software....'Many business users select SharePoint for document sharing but often they find it difficult to to use. harmon.ie is a collaboration tool aimed at every business user struggling with SharePoint.'"
"[W]e found that people were staying connected at times that may be disruptive, rude or detrimental to business and personal relationships," said Jenna Dobkin, a spokeswoman for harmon.ie. "People need to learn when it's important to stay connected to the social networks and when it's time to turn off their devices."
"harmon.ie aggregates a lot of applications running around on your screen into one window. So we actually reduce the number of distractions that you have by aggregating the different pieces into a single window..."
"Harmon.ie has turned out to be some of the best money I have ever spent, and the enhanced search experience is gaining fans rapidly..."
"As with all tasks, there are tools out there that can transform the way you work and free up your time so you're more productive...harmon.ie for Google Docs extends the functionality to Outlook, giving you direct access to your Google Docs interface for the purposes of sharing your files via links instead of attachments, reducing the load on your inbox."
"Reducing distractions, and finding times when you can avoid electronic distractions entirely to focus on the task at hand, has become a necessity. These six tips can help you to minimize distractions and work more productively."
"Electronic media serves us well -- our cell phones text messages, email and social media -- but does it cut into our productivity? Jenna Dobkin with social email provider harmon.ie says it does..."
"Working in social media all day, it can be difficult to concentrate on doing the work I do...However, managing this is still my responsibility and I need to take it seriously if I want to stay employed. My employer should not have to come up with software solutions or new policies that block, manage, organize my time so that I can be productive. That is my job."
"A number of the tools you might be using at your business to increase productivity may be doing the exact opposite."
"What I found most profound about the survey feedback was the recurring idea that digital distractions are somehow the modern form of hanging around the water cooler....This totally misses the point. The water cooler is a controlled interruption. You choose to participate or you don't...On the other hand, when you trying to work on a document but you need to toggle through 9 different screens to share it with a colleague, there is no alternative; these 'interruptions' are an inherent part of the work process."
"With us now is Jenna Dobkin with the company harmon.ie, with some fascinating results from a new national survey of our social network use and how often we're interrupted and distracted at work as a result"
"Though they're meant to help us on the job, digital tools like Facebook, email and instant messenger are distracting employees and costing companies money, according to harmon.ie."
"New technology is supposed to streamline life and work, allowing people to operate more efficiently and productively. But sometimes, the opposite happens. "
"...in this social media-obsessed age, typical water cooler banter and pointless meetings are no longer the greatest time-wasters at work."
"There's a new study out suggesting that social media reduces worker productivity. My guest right now is David Lavenda, Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy for harmon.ie..."
"Many say that the Internet and computers these days help improve productivity. Because of digital technology, office meetings can be promptly held via Skype or GotoMeeting, a manager can issue announcements to his staff through a Facebook group page, or a secretary can send documents to his boss…. However, according to a recent survey, 53% of people waste at least an hour at work every day, and most of their distractions are digital."
"How much time do you spend each day being distracted by technology?"
"So what does it all mean? Well, it means...wait a minute, four of my Twitter friends just tweeted something. I'll be back after I check it out..."
"People are just being pushed to the limit..." Lavenda said. "There is a feeling that we are always being inundated with information."
"Nearly 60 percent of work interruptions now involve either using tools like email, social networks, text messaging and IM, or switching windows among disparate standalone tools and applications."
"For all of us, it’s time to take back the Internet and find ways to control our digital addiction," said Yaacov Cohen, co-founder and CEO of harmon.ie.
"If you find yourself surrounded by rude and unproductive colleagues, there is a good chance technology is to blame."
"An interview with Jenna Dobkin with harmon.ie, who conducted a survey on technical distractions at the workplace and how it affects us employees tells us a lot more now..."
"A survey suggests that digital interruptions - social media, email, searching for stray documents etc - distract employees for 'at least' an hour a day. Who knew?"
"Talking with a handful of downtown Minneapolis employees, they say they’re distracted by a variety of different things including social networking, email, web surfing and conversations with co-workers."
"The familiar picture of managers checking e-mails in meetings is only part of a picture where workers report they leave their devices on during church, movies or even [in bed]..."
"The survey of more than 500 employees showed that respondents spent at least 30 minutes daily to search for documents including emails. The cost of that searching comes to $3,900 per employee per year…"
"Distractions caused by social media, e-mail and badly designed office technology may cost a 1,000-worker company more than $10 million a year, a survey says."
"The majority (57%) of work interruptions now involve either using collaboration and social tools like email, social networks, text messaging and IM, or switching windows among disparate standalone tools and applications."
"While people become addicted to Facebook in the home, a new survey by harmon.ie found that more than half of U.S. workers waste an hour or more a day on 'interruptions'."
"Among the harmon.ie study's findings: More than 50 percent of workers waste an hour or more a day on interruptions, with the largest percentage coming from electronic devices and emails. Forty-five percent of workers said they can't go more than 15 minutes on average without an interruption."
"The very tools we rely on to do our jobs are also interfering with that mission. Were clearly seeing what psychologists call `online compulsive disorder' spill over from our personal lives to the work environment", he said.
"Does social networking harm productivity? It’s a question still on the minds of IT departments and HR chiefs, many of whom feel valuable work hours are being lost to the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn."
“The needs of mobile workers are unique. In this article, David Lavenda, VP Marketing and Product Strategy at harmon.ie offers a fresh look at what it means to collaborate on the road, and opportunities that can't be missed.”
"Distractions could be costing larger companies millions of dollars each year, according to a survey of 515 white-collar workers done by the polling group, uSamp, and the software company harmon.ie."
"Cutting the time required to do essential tasks by 4-6 times is impressive. Great work by harmon.ie on capturing and sharing the data in a meaningful way. By fixing the execution of these essential tasks, harmon.ie is seeing much better adoption rates of SharePoint among their organizational clients. You could make a strong argument that by offering a product that fails to simplify and streamline essential tasks, users will reject using it for wider and more interesting things."
“Common sense is the best tool to stay focused,” Lavenda said. But, he acknowledged, “Changing people’s behavior is the most difficult part.”
"Are documents still relevant in the world of Enterprise 2.0? Web 2.0 pundits have argued that wikis, activity streams and real time status updates will soon replace the “archaic” document concept. But they’re wrong, and here is why…"
"Comprehensive SharePoint adoption remains a challenge...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."
"Maybe instead of trying to lure people away from corporate email, technology managers should be looking for ways of leveraging email. That's the philosophy behind the collaboration suite from Harmon.ie, one of four firms honored in an innovation showcase at the Enterprise Connect conference earlier this month."
"harmon.ie is a plug-in that works with Sharepoint and Google Docs. I rarely say this but the service has all the makings of a great app. It meets all the criteria that in my book makes for an excellent service."
"The mantra behind the offering is One window, one context. Obviously, this appeals
to us as the creators of the One Environment Rule...
harmon.ie really shines is the way in which it deals with poor e-mail behavior."
The Vancouver Sun: "Average worker now glances at email 30 to 40 times an hour and changes activity every three minutes"
Harmon.ie was at Enterprise Connect demonstrating how Sharepoint usage can be a more natural part of a knowledge worker's workflow than how Outlook natively does it now. It supports Exchange, Lotus Notes/Dominoe, and Google Apps.
"This week at the Enterprise Connect conference is the inaugural Innovation Showcase: Four young companies showing...with an innovative product or service improving enterprise communications."
"According to Cohen, the Sabbath is "a very good digital detox strategy....And it's from 5,000 years ago"
"For mobile and social media trends, 2010 was explosive, Yaacov Cohen, CEO, harmon.ie, told CNBC. “We are now carrying social networks in our pockets,” he said. 2011 will be the year of context, and taking back control of the internet."
"Cohen's advice...'To solve the Adoption gap for collaboration in the enterprise, avoid focusing on innovation and selling. Focus instead on actual usage. It's there that you should find your answers....'”
“Anyone who's a heavy user of both Google Docs and Outlook will want to download harmon.ie for Google Docs right away.”
“Email will evolve into ‘social email,’ which is a console that integrates best of breed collaboration tools.”
“Google and Microsoft may be at war, but that doesn't mean you have to be a victim. For anyone who uses both Outlook and Google Docs, harmon.ie for Google Docs is a handy tool.”
“Those of us who live on the edge of the technology easily adopt modern tools even before they enter the beta stage. But if we peep outside the Silicon Valley technology bubble, we will see many people still using Microsoft Outlook religiously."
“Email is an important component which needs to evolve. So the question is not so much how email will die, but how it will evolve and change in order to adapt to this new world of social interaction..."
“People are drowning in digital overload. According to a New York Times/CBS poll, we’re switching applications 37 times an hour! Too much information and too many useful-but-disjointed tools make it harder to get our work done. Aggregation will reduce the number of context switches...”
“From a human standpoint, social e-mail may be the answer to that overwhelming stream of communications - and distractions - that technology now provides,” said Yaacov Cohen, chief executive officer of enterprise softwaremaker Mainsoft Corp. of Milpitas.
“I think they've developed a much smarter, quicker and probably more efficient way to tap into SharePoint's collaboration capabilities without forcing the…e-mail devotees – to give up e-mail.”
“Sometimes it’s to much trouble to check a file out of SharePoint and you just email a copy. But what if I had a solution that let you access your online documents from a sidebar in Outlook? That would be pretty cool…”
“I believe the unifying platform for the foreseeable future will be ‘social email.’ Here’s why:”
“Old habits, as we all know, die hard. This is especially true of ingrained business processes. I suspect that's at least partly why most folks cling to e-mail, even though almost everyone can agree it falls short as a collaboration tool…”
“Adoption gaps are nothing new, but they’re huge issues for companies making everything from baby steps to big strides in embracing new technologies.”
...The plug-in links an e-mail application to a collaboration platform such as Google Docs, and to a person's social networking profiles, calendar applications, voice over Internet protocol software, and so on...
The new harmon.ie enterprise suite includes components for Microsoft Office, Outlook and SharePoint, as well as IBM’s Lotus and Google Docs.
E-mail: It's isn't going anywhere, but it's definitely not staying the same. Mainsoft's new-ish harmon.ie product for Outlook and Lotus Notes is a prime example.
"The key to driving user adoption is bringing these tools into people's day-to-day workplace, which is email and harmon.ie transforms Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes into a rich collaboration and social workspace, called 'social email'."
Mainsoft Corporation has released a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of Microsoft SharePoint and Google Docs. harmon.ie transforms Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes into collaboration and social workspaces.
"Mainsoft's harmon.ie is a family of products that aims to bring that kind of concept to the enterprise and drive user adoption of SharePoint and Google Docs."
"...harmon.ie customers report significant productivity gains and an increased ability to focus on the task at hand as people incorporate ‘social email’ into their enterprise collaboration strategy..."
"... one of the challenges ... is getting people to change their user behavior, because now you have to learn a new application, a new interface and do different things in order to be able to use that product."
"...As Yaacov Cohen, founder and CEO of Mainsoft says, social email gives you the best of both worlds, email is extensible and robust, and an interface that you know very well. It also contains your social graph."
"Workers are used to e-mail... They've been using it for document management and collaboration, and for other things that e-mail wasn't even intended to be used for."
"One of the things I'm most looking forward to…is the Future Ideas Launchpad, where we'll highlight the companies and products that are seizing the opportunities in the human cloud."
"...Accessing SharePoint with harmon.ie is five to six times faster than having to switch contexts and access SharePoint from a browser, bringing SharePoint to every business user..."
"...The most progressive organizations won’t be afraid to explore the innovative communications and collaboration models enabled by new devices and social services allow their employees to generate innovative ideas by experimenting with them..."
"We are in a time of great research on social cognition, but the biggest testing ground is on the web, where literally billions of people are connecting on an unprecedented scale."
"Instead of trying to encourage adoption of new tools and processes, Mainsoft's solution lets users do things the way they've always done them. And it seems to be working. One of Mainsoft's clients, the infamous multilevel marketing company Amway, claims to have seen an e-mail attachment reduction of 42% since deploying harmon.ie."
Many users find it time consuming to access either SharePoint 2010 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 and continue to use e-mail to send documents back and forth. Using harmon.ie for SharePoint, a free Outlook sidebar from Mainsoft, users were able to share documents more quickly than with the browser interface.
"...Using harmon.ie for SharePoint, an Outlook sidebar from Mainsoft, people completed the same tasks in 11 seconds, which was five to six times faster than using a browser..."
"The people over at Mainsoft have conducted a study over at SP Technology conference in Boston to find out how much faster you can work with SharePoint using their tool...In total, participants saved 61 minutes accessing SharePoint using harmon.ie versus using the browser."
The Linker took “The SharePoint Challenge” at SPTechCon at Mainsoft’s booth.... By doing simple drag-and-drop, The Linker saved 75% of the time spent doing traditional e-mail ping-pong.
"Nearly everyone can find a use for Google Docs, and many users rely on Outlook every day. Combining the two improves each; quick access to your Google Docs directly from Outlook saves time, whereas Google Docs add capabilities to Outlook. With harmon.ie for Google Docs, it's a win-win situation."
"Email is dead? Hardly. Four reasons why email is ideally suited to bring web 2.0 innovations to the enterprise."
"Are you stuck using Microsoft Outlook for email, but want a better way to share documents and collaborate with your coworkers? harmon.ie by Mainsoft..."
"[harmon.ie] is a great addition to the SharePoint ecosphere; I can’t believe this didn’t exist before..."
"The old days are over for Outlook. It's now entering an era where the degree of collaboration will center around a hyperlinked environment more so than document-based systems."
"While Google was purchasing DocVerse this week, Mainsoft was releasing a free Beta that lets you access and share Google Docs documents from within Outlook. The tool isn't from Microsoft, but it does put Google Docs users back in the Microsoft ecosystem, so I'm sure it's a tool that must at least make the folks in Redmond smile..."
"Sharing a Google Docs file for group collaboration can be a lot more useful than emailing individual copies to an entire team. harmon.ie makes opening, sharing, and managing Google Docs from inside Outlook a natural fit."
"harmon.ie gives Microsoft users the best of both worlds, much like Docverse did with Microsoft Word documents and web-based files. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Google Docs, the plug-in seems like a no brainer to download. Plus its conveniently free."
"Is SharePoint + Google Docs: An Oxymoron? Not anymore, and this is an announcement that even I... am getting excited about."
"There are two things we like about Mainsoft's (news, site) latest solutions: 1) they enable us to connect our Outlook client with SharePoint or Google Apps and 2) they are free."
"Mainsoft notes that email is still the most popular business communication tool, even with so many alternative forms of communication available. With this in mind, the company's goal with harmon.ie is to help turn Outlook into a collaboration console, adding document sharing functionality to the software's email capabilities to create a single collaboration and communication hub."
"'E-mail is becoming the collaboration console,'" says Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen. "'If you make the browser and the Outlook client work together, you have better attention management and don't have to switch to browser window and be opening tabs. '"
"How can you more effectively use Outlook to store and share documents with co-workers? Instead of storing documents on your hard drive and sharing them as e-mail attachments, you can use the free harmon.ie plug-in from Mainsoft Corporation..."
"harmon.ie is an interesting addition for Outlook users who prefer to use Google Docs for online document collaboration and storage. Mainsoft's new sidebar also plays nicely with others, and in my tests, I didn't see any conflict issues between harmon.ie and Xobni--another popular Outlook sidebar."
"Software integration company Mainsoft today is introducing harmon.ie, software that will enable users to collaborate on documents stored in SharePoint via Microsoft Outlook e-mail. "