harmon.ie SmartAssistant™

Microsoft Teams adoption is off the charts. Microsoft claims that over 75 million people are using Teams, up from 12 million only a few months ago. Wonder what people are doing with Teams? Official Microsoft numbers are a bit fuzzy, citing “more than 200 million meeting participants per day” which counts the same user multiple times if they join more than one meeting a day. More puzzling was the claim that “two-thirds of [users] have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams.”  Not quite sure what “collaborated” or “interacted” with a file means.  So, we decided to check. In the first installment of our What You Need to Know for Remote Working with Microsoft Teams webinar series, which kicked off this week, we asked the hundreds of participants about their organizations’ Teams usage.  First, we asked: It’s not surprising that the overwhelming number of users are using the ‘out of the box’ features from Teams, namely, meetings (video and audio calls) and chat.  The other features are less used because they require more setup, more training, and more customization. Since we are interested in understanding how people are using Teams for document and email management, we next asked:   From the results we see that approximately 1/3 are accessing documents frequently, about 1/2 of organizations are accessing documents infrequently, and the rest never access documents using Teams. It makes sense. This is a more advanced stage of Teams usage and organizations just aren’t there yet. Jared Sparato, CVP at Microsoft said “we have seen 2 years of transformation in 2 months,” but even this compressed timeline has not provided enough time for people to understand how documents integrate into their daily usage of Teams. There is still a way to go until organizations realize the full value of Teams. Finally, we asked,   and almost 100% said they are still using email to communicate with outside partners.  It just makes sense. Why is this…? Why Are we Still Using Email? Considering the enormous movement to Teams, you would think that email is going the way of the Dodo bird.  But our poll results didn’t surprise us. Email is the universal communications tool that businesses have been using for upwards of 20 years and it's not going anywhere anytime fast. Email’s ubiquity and the need to maintain important emails for record keeping purposes will keep the application in service for many years to come. If emails and Teams will need to co-exist, then there must be a way to connect the parallel conversations taking place in both universes. The way to connect disconnected Outlook email conversations and Teams chat conversations is by making it easy for workers to add emails to Teams files locations while supplying identifying metadata.  Because people don’t like learning new tools and procedures, harmon.ie makes the transition incredibly simple… harmon.ie has extended its tried and true ‘drag and drop’ capabilities from email to SharePoint, to Teams channels. Now, workers can simply drag and drop emails and document attachments from the Outlook inbox to their Teams channel ‘Files location.’ If there is required metadata, harmon.ie will prompt you for that along the way. By making it easy to do, harmon.ie drives Microsoft 365 collaboration using Teams and Outlook. For remote workers, who need to be self-sufficient while working at home, it has never been easier.  

The current lockdown hit you like a bolt of lightning. Your team wasn’t prepared to work from home… and the lack of notice sure didn’t help.  And you certainly didn’t have the tools in place to ‘work together while working apart.’ So, staying productive has been a huge challenge. Luckily, you had Microsoft Teams deployed. Unfortunately, people weren’t using it. Now they are, and it has been a godsend for keeping the team on the same page via its chat and meetings capabilities. On the other hand, integrating documents and emails into the remote work process continues to be a challenge. Document drafts are flying all over the place, bouncing back and forth between colleagues and outside parties like customers, suppliers, and partners.  Conflicting document versions and overlapping edits are rampant. But the real problem is email. While some of team continues to use email to communicate internally, everyone is using email to communicate with external parties. And while part of the business discussion is taking place in Teams conversations, a concurrent discussion is taking place in Outlook. Yikes. The good news is Microsoft Teams has tools to address this challenge, but you have to know how to use them AND you need to make the process easy for your employees, so it will ‘work as advertised.’ To learn how to bring email, documents, and Teams conversations together coherently, join the upcoming webinar entitled Email Management with Microsoft Teams: What You Absolutely Need to Know for Remote Working. During this joint harmon.ie / Solutions2Share webinar, David Lavenda, harmon.ie Chief Product Officer, will flesh out the underlying challenges in fusing email with Teams conversations; he will then show a practical solution for addressing the collaboration challenges, so you can ‘focus on work rather than on tools.’

harmon.ie is excited to be awarded “Verified Publisher” status by Microsoft at this week’s Microsoft Build Conference.  The announcement came as part of the launch of the Publisher Verification program, during which the following premier verified publishers were revealed: Why This is Important Publisher Verification helps customers verify the authenticity of app developers who use the Microsoft identity platform (Azure AD) to sign users in and call APIs like Microsoft Graph. When an application is marked as publisher verified, it means that the publisher has verified their identity using a Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) account that has completed the verification process and has associated this MPN account with their application registration. How Can You Know? A product that has been verified displays a blue "verified" badge on the Azure AD consent prompt and other screens. Here is how you will see that harmon.ie has been verified by Microsoft, when you authenticate for harmon.ie products: Why This is Important to Your Organization In addition to your own peace of mind that the apps you are using have been verified by Microsoft, there are benefits for your organization to using verified products. Publisher Verification gives IT administrators increased transparency into which apps being used by their organization are verified and unverified, and they can now configure consent policies based on verification status.  For example, admins can allow end users to consent to applications that have been publisher verified and require admin consent to apps that have not been publisher verified. To Learn More To learn more about the program, attend one of these Build sessions, entitled “Creating Trustworthy Applications with Microsoft Identity.”: aka.ms/M365INT108A (5/19 8:15PM PST)  aka.ms/M365INT108B (5/20 9:00AM PST) aka.ms/M365INT108C (5/21 2:15AM PST)