harmon.ie SmartAssistant™

What a difference 6 months make… Who could have predicted back in January the global lockdown, the sheltering in place mandate, and the immense impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. During the last six months, the global business community has learned to work from home, compressing the slow marathon to the digital workplace into a brisk sprint for the finish line. In the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” During the last six months, we have seen the rapid adoption of Microsoft Teams, going from just north of 10 million users at the top of the year to 75 million daily active users by April.  And as workers hunkered down at home, tools like Microsoft Teams became lifelines to the remote workplace. The ability to check in with colleagues, customers, suppliers, and partners via virtual meetings and chat became the fuel that powered the remote working engine. While at home, workers have had to become self-sufficient with technology, as they could no longer turn to colleagues in the next office or cubicle, or on-site IT staff for advice. harmon.ie to the Rescue During this crisis, harmon.ie has been a godsend for organizations who rely upon Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook to run their businesses.  For the remote workers who need to be self-sufficient, harmon.ie makes it easy to capture, classify, and share emails and documents with colleagues. Now, with the added reliance of Microsoft Teams, harmon.ie has become more important than ever, because harmon.ie empowers organizations to run smoothly in the new, remote business environment.   Some key harmon.ie milestones achieved during the last six months, include the following: New customers now benefit from harmon.ie’s ability to connect remote business workers. New marquee customers added in 2020 include Arthur J Gallagher Services, Manulife, EBN BV, as well as Business Development Bank of Canada, EPA Victoria, and a host of other government agencies from a variety of nations. Acceptance to the Microsoft Content Services Partner Program, deepening harmon.ie’s relationship with Microsoft. Announcement of new customer case studies including the story of how harmon.ie helps Drass Technologies in their mission to supply live-saving COVID-19 equipment to hospitals worldwide. Looking Forward As we look ahead to the second half of 2020, harmon.ie will continue to make ”the right thing the easy thing” for business users of Microsoft technologies, so they can focus on business instead of manipulating the underlying tools.

Does this look like a familiar email received from outside your company discussing important business issues; in this case, an email and document attachments discussing a possible merger? Now, Annie’s thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just drag this email and attachment with the merger information and documents I received from my client directly into the Teams conversation where the merger is being discussed by our internal team?" Connecting Outlook to Teams Well, now you can! Because harmon.ie now makes it easy to add emails and document attachments to Teams conversations, so you can continue the discussion in one place. You simply drag and drop the email into the harmon.ie sidebar. And the discussion immediately appears in the Teams conversation.

With more than 200 million meeting participants using Microsoft Teams daily, it’s clear that the Teams video and audio meeting capabilities are helping many people stay connected during the current COVID pandemic. And while Microsoft does not provide usage figures for the Teams chat function, a recent harmon.ie poll found that 71% of Teams users are using its chat functionality to communicate with internal colleagues. With so many people working from home and little prospect of returning to the office anytime soon, people will continue to rely upon collaboration tools to help them be self-sufficient while staying connected to colleagues, customers, suppliers, and partners. Teams can play an even bigger role in filling this void because it has a lot more to offer than just meetings and chat.  But, surfacing those additional features and training users to use them is not so simple, especially when doing it remotely. To get the full value out of Teams will be an evolutionary process, with people slowly discovering new, useful features. The next step in the evolution of Teams usage as an enterprise collaboration platform is ironically not a Teams feature at all. Rather, it is inclusion of emails into Teams conversations. And that’s because Teams does not provide a flexible, scalable communications channel for external partners. So, to communicate with external partners, people will continue to rely upon email for the foreseeable future. Two is Not Better Than One Communicating internally with Teams and externally with email is expeditious but it makes it hard to follow the conversation, because parts of the discussion are taking place into two different places. It is like watching a movie on two different screens, where some scenes are shown on one screen, and other scenes are shown on the other screen. To follow the movie plot, you need to put all scenes on a single screen, in the correct order. So, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to take external emails and insert them directly into a Teams conversation, and then follow the entire enterprise ‘movie plot’ from there?  Well, now there is. With harmon.ie, you can simply drag an email directly from your Outlook window into a Teams conversation and continue the discussion from Teams.