Welcome and Introductions
Maya: Hello everyone. Welcome. We're so happy you joined us for today's webinar, re-Imagining Email Management for the AI era. Before we begin, just a few quick notes. You're welcome to send any questions you may have during the webinar in the chat window. We'll cover as many as we can during the q and a session at the end, and if we miss yours, someone from the harmon.ie team will follow up by email. We are recording the webinar and we'll send you the link in the next couple of days. Now I'm happy to introduce today's speaker, Ron Johnsen, VP of Customer Success at harmon.ie. Ron works closely with our customers to ensure they succeed with harmon.ie and email management, and he'll be sharing some great insights and upcoming innovations with us today. Ron, please.
Ron: Thank you Maya, and welcome everyone, and thanks again for joining us. As Maya noted, my name is Ron Johnsen. I've been with harmon.ie for a long time and had the pleasure to meet. I see some familiar faces out there, names out there. So I've had the privilege to work with our customers and partners around the world and in many different industries. Along this journey, I've had the opportunity to gather some insights on how harmon.ie is used in the world and in real world applications, and also getting to explore new requirements and new technologies. Today we're going to focus on ai, something that we all may have heard of or has touched us all in our worlds. Recently, our focus will be on how organizations can enhance their AI initiatives by unlocking the value of business emails. Now as a quick recap, harmon.ie has consistently been focused on helping organizations better manage emails and documents on Microsoft 365.
One of our core messages over the years has been emails are documents, and they need to be treated as such. Meaning if you're using Teams and SharePoint to manage content for projects. If business emails are not treated the same as the Excel spreadsheets, the word documents and not saved to the project folders, the project folder is incomplete, missing information, potentially impacting compliance and definitely impacting business efficiency. As AI becomes central to managing information, generating insights, improving productivity, one thing has become very clear. AI is only as good as the data you give it, and right now a significant amount of your data, your organization's most important data is stuck inside of Outlook inboxes. Let's have a look at why managing emails in this environment is such a challenge, and then we'll share with you our plans and roadmap and have a couple short demos highlighting our plans and progress, and we will look at the next version of New harmon.ie.
Why Email Content Management Matters for AI
So with that, we all want our AI tools to give us accurate answers and sound recommendations, but that's impossible. When your email data, the source of most business decisions is trapped where AI can't reach it. This is by design and out of necessity, emails contain private information. I've worked with several organizations that take open by default security policy for documents internally, of course, meaning emails have read access by default unless it's taken away. This approach provides more transparency, better collaboration, stronger AI insights as needed documents are labeled reducing access. However, even in organizations with the most aggressive open by default policies, inboxes are always closed by default. Email contains personal information, HR discussions, salary discussions, exchanges with managers, et cetera. Thus, emails pose an interesting challenge for ai. This close by default approach impacts AI's ability to see the full story. For example, your CFO is excited about a new customer, however, the pricing is nonstandard and costs are a little high.
So he does what we all do today and he asks Copilot, how did we arrive at the pricing for customer X and why are the costs so high? Copilot can only see the conversation in teams, maybe the pricing discussions, maybe some approvals and the documents safe to SharePoint pertaining to the deal. Final pricing, the agreement, the proposals, the contract, however, locked away in the sales team's inbox are emails with justifications and negotiations for the customer and maybe the reasons for the high cost. This example isn't so much about privacy, although the sales team might not want the CFO to know about the golf outings and the 20 dinner meetings. This example is more about inconsistent sharing. Basically, the sales team just didn't take the time to share those emails, the important emails. Anyway, the results. Weak insights, incomplete answers, raising doubts about the AI initiative. So let's have a quick poll question. Go ahead, Maya.
Poll: Copilot Adoption and Readiness
Maya: Okay, so here is our first poll question. Has your organization enabled Microsoft copilot? Please answer select one. No, AI tools aren't allowed in our organization. Yes, only for specific departmental roles. Yes, we have limited copilot, copilot chat only. For example, in Outlook or in teams. Yes, we have the full copilot version available organization wide or not sure or still being evaluated, still collecting your answers, and I'll share the results in a second. Okay, so let's see. Ron, can you see the results?
Ron: I can, yes.
Has your organization enabled Microsoft copilot?
No - AI tools aren't allowed in our organization: 9%
Yes - Only for specific departments or roles: 48%
Yes - Limited Copilot (Copilot chat only, e.g. in Outlook): 27%
Yes - Full version available organization-wide: 12%
Not sure / still being evaluated: 3%
Ron: Yep. So let's continue on. We'll take a look at some of the challenges. This is interesting input because, and it lines up with what we're seeing in the industry that most organizations are going to roll copilot out intermittently, probably phase it in over time and we'll take a look at, it's interesting because some of the business decisions we're making on the roadmap fit very well with this. So I'm going to go ahead and close the poll and let's continue on here.
Challenges with Manual Email Filing Today
So let's take a look at a bit deeper on some of these challenges. So most organizations face the same challenges, and that is that critical information lives in too many disc disconnected places, local drives, old file shares, unmanaged repositories. But again, the biggest repository, the biggest silo of information is outlook containing emails and emails attachments. If emails aren't saved to SharePoint teams, they never become part of your corporate knowledge base.
This is why harmon.ie has always focused on one thing, making it intuitive and efficient for users to save emails and attachments in the SharePoint and teams. When emails are saved to Microsoft 365, AI finally has the full context it needs. Thus, AI provides richer summaries, more accurate answers, more insights overall strengthening your organizational memory. And it's not enough just to save emails to SharePoint teams. The power AI solutions you, your data must have or must be traceable, governed, secure, and properly retained when emails are stored in SharePoint and teams with metadata and structure, your organization gains better auditability, better retention, and better storage Compliance AI begins with centralized, governed data inclusive of emails and email attachments. So Maya, let's run our second poll, and this is the final poll question.
Poll: Time spent triaging emails
Maya: So our second question for you today is how much time do you estimate that you spend each day sorting through and saving emails? Less than 30 minutes, between 30 and 60 minutes, more than one hour or way too much.
Ron: I know I fall into the way too much category.
Maya: I see that people are still answering. So in a second I'll share the results. Okay. Let's see.
How much time do you spend each day sorting through and saving emails?
Less than 30 minutes: 59%.
30-60 minutes: 23%
More than one hour: 10%
Way too much time: 8%
Ron: Excellent. So let's take a look at this and we will start to explore a little bit of our mission here, but just to highlight some of the poll question, this fits in, and I'll share an example with you where somebody actually was “way too much” and the customer shared the example with me. It's coming up here in a second. So thank you for taking the time to fill out the poll and let's, I'm going to go ahead and close that and jump in.
The harmon.ie Mission: Remove Friction
So really this brings us to harmon.ie's mission. So from day one, our goal has been simple, remove friction, humanize technology, and provide a best in class user experience for managing content on Microsoft 365. Again, teams and SharePoint, and if we're being honest, I think we can all agree on one thing when it comes to consistently saving important emails and attachments, and that's a key.
The important emails, not every email, and when we save them, when we're asked to save them to our corporate management system, the weakest link is us. It's the humans. Okay? We get busy, we get distracted, we forget to upload important emails, and when we do upload those, a lot of times we upload those to the wrong location. And why is this? It's pretty simple because triaging emails is boring. It's necessary, but it is boring. To highlight this point, and this gets back to our poll question a little bit about weight. And on the last option, option D, I think it was way too long, and this is an extreme example. I was speaking with a customer a couple of weeks ago, and they had recently surveyed their executive admins and found that they spend two plus hours every morning, not just one of 'em, or not all of them, but every one of them managing and triaging emails.
It's essential work for them, but not exactly the best use of their time. And with the advances we've seen in ai, the idea of automatically identifying which emails are important in determining where they should be saved is no longer farfetched and it is achievable. I wish I could say we were there today, we're not. But our focus for 2026 is clear. Continue removing friction, reducing human error, and making the process of managing emails and attachments effortlessly. And who knows, by the time we're done this journey, you might even start to enjoy it. So Maya's going to show start a quick video, a short demo, and show you the concepts and the progress we've made.
Demo: New harmon.ie and Smart Filing Concepts
New harmon.ie lives right inside Outlook. As a handy sidebar, when you open an email, harmon.ie works with Copilot to decide whether it should be saved to Microsoft 365. It also explains the reasoning so you know why saving makes sense. Next, harmon.ie suggests the best places to save the email based on the message content and how you've saved similar emails before you simply pick the right location. If there are attachments, you choose which ones to save. harmon.ie saves the email and selected attachments and ads categories indicating the email was saved and its save location. New harmon.ie - reinventing email management using AI.
harmon.ie’s Planned AI Features
Okay, give me one second to share my screen. Hopefully that made some sense and it's a quick look at where we're headed in the progress. So let's shift gears a little bit and talking about some of the environment and all that and the industry direction. And let's take a look at some of the features we have planned for the first half of 2026, and we're going to start with what you just saw in the video. Smart filing. With copilot, we're able to automatically determine whether an email is an important or a business critical email, essentially answering the question of what needs to be saved. And once we know what should be saved, copilot can help us determine where it should be saved. Think about this in terms of suggested locations, and we're designing two approaches to this, and this again fits back into one of the poll questions, and we're looking at two ways to do suggested locations, one with copilot and one without, because we understand that not every organization's going to license copilot, and in some scenarios it's a bit of overkill.
So in the first approach and the use case around this is really harmon.ie activity, and this focuses on repeated conversation patterns. Most inboxes contain threads around the same topics or from the same senders. So if you've saved emails from Joe to folder X, there's a high likelihood that the next email from Joe will belongs in that same location. harmon.ie will start to surface those suggested locations. The second approach, as you saw in the video, was copilot powered suggestions. So if you think about from this standpoint, copilot understands the context of the email, understands your SharePoint and team structure, and has access on those SharePoint and team locations to emails previously saved, including the metadata. This enables copilot to provide the most appropriate or suggest the most appropriate locations. Together, these two capabilities start to solve or address the two main questions that business users ask today.
What should I save and where should it go? Next up is automating that process. One of the most frequent requirements we get, and it's typically from customers that augment their legal matter management systems or client engagement systems, project management initiatives, is once I save the initial email in a conversation, I want to auto save the entire conversation. All future replies all forwards with automatic conversation. Saving harmon.ie will capture the replies and forwards without the user needing to do anything. They will simply need to save the initial email and market as tracked this insured or will ensure every email in this thread is stored together in Microsoft 365, consistent, governed and searchable. Okay, next up email categories. And for those on the call familiar with Classic harmon.ie, these are the save email save indicators that we put in your inbox when you save an email. The idea here is to provide visual clarity inside of Outlook so users can instantly see what has been saved and where it was saved with new harmon.ie. We're going to extend this, and this is something that I'm sure the folks on there that have used classic or the folks on the line have used Classic harmon.ie for years are going to be happy to hear this is we're going to make the email categories shared, meaning all recipients on an email will have their inboxes updated so that they see these tags. This helps everyone to stay aligned, reduces duplicate work and duplicates of the emails, and it keeps us all so that we don't lose track of what's been saved.
Metadata, which has always been a key feature, the harmon.ie product is also important, and it's another task that your business users tend to dislike. However, metadata is critical for content to be truly AI ready harmon.ie today. And again, to go back to those folks online that have used classic harmon.ie, we automatically capture email header information to from subject date receive conversation topic. This has been an important feature of harmon.ie since we first launched years ago with Copilot. We are planning to extend this auto tagging to include custom metadata fields using copilot. In the context of the email, we can prefill the custom metadata fields. As you see in the screenshot, the project name is prefilled with the project name Gamma, and the document type is preset. The planning, this again simplifies the work for business users while meeting the organization's desire to have emails and documents properly tagged, again, enabling copilot to deliver more accurate answers and contextual insights. And finally, we pull this all together with search.
When all business knowledge, emails, documents, chats, decisions, all live in teams and SharePoint, copilot can finally answer questions with exact precision, your AI becomes significantly smarter because it has access to the full story and this copilot capability will be exposed within New harmon.ie instead of text-based searches. You want to search for the term Riverside, you want to search for the term lease. Users will be able to submit natural language searches as shown in the example here. Find emails from Sean about pricing for Gamma. Okay, we're pretty excited about this. Hope this piques your interest a little bit. We've got a lot of work to do or a bit of work to do, but, and before I share with you the timeline for when this is going to be available, let's switch over and take a real look at New harmon.ie. And for those that are new to harmon.ie, I'll show you around the product a little bit.
Demo: New harmon.ie
I have a quick demo and then we'll go wrap things up a little bit. So this is New harmon.ie and I'm going to show you new harmon.ie in new Outlook today for those. And I know a lot of us are still, including myself, are still running classic Outlook. New harmon.ie is available in classic Outlook along with our classic harmon.ie products. So in just to complete the picture there, new harmon.ie Works in classic Outlook, new Outlook, outlook online and Outlook on a Mac. This will look familiar if you've used Classic harmon.ie, you have access to all of your Microsoft 365 content areas, OneDrive, SharePoint teams. And the way I like to position this today is everything in Microsoft 365 from content standpoint are site collections today. So these interfaces, it's really how in the nomenclature of how you access those. So if you go through the teams interface, you're going to see teams and then the underlying channels.
And if I want to take an email over there, I just simply drag and drop it onto the channel and that uploads it. And that is the same channel folder that's available in your team's location. If you open the Teams app, if I go through the SharePoint sites, you're going to see Subsites, you're going to see the underlying libraries. Then you get the folders if you have folders, and then you'll see the underlying content. And again, as I mentioned, harmon.ie will capture all the email hitter information for you when you upload. So if I switch here to the View, you can see that I can have subject from too. So this becomes like a mini inbox. I can open the email directly in Outlook from here. If it's a Word document, PowerPoint, PDF, I can open it in the company app or the particular app for that.
Okay? You always have tools out here on here to manage the sites. So again, just to step back on harmon.ie for a second, harmon.ie is a client application. It connects directly to your Microsoft 365 environment. There's no harmon.ie backend servers. There's no Code Server, site code running. This is a true Server app. So all or I mean, yeah, a true client app. So this is connected directly to Microsoft 365. Your content remains within inside. So from a privacy security standpoint, all your content remains within inside of your Microsoft 365 environment. In fact, when we integrate with Copilot, that will stay true when you manage teams, you can come over here and start to type. So I can just type the first letter and I want to, and you can see that search as you type in there. That again, I'll talk about on the roadmap a little bit, is something that we're going to expand throughout the product to make it easier to find content.
So if you think about from a search as you type, if I have thousands of sites here, it becomes easy to find those. If I have thousands of project folders, it becomes easy to search. You should type and find those. So very simple to add, you can do the same thing in the SharePoint interface. Most of our clients, once they have the teams and SharePoint sites that they want added, they'll work through favorites. And again, favorites provide two functionality. One is a quick access, so I just double click and jump to the favorited location. And two is I can drag and drop right on here. So this drag and drop capability is brand new in harmon.ie 1.5. We've had it working in previous new versions of New harmon.ie. In classic Outlook, Microsoft released update to the underlying development framework enabling add-ins like harmon.ie to do drag and drop within New Outlook.
Now that gets uploaded to that location, you'll notice the new tags that are being added. This is something we've had a number of clients ask about with New harmon.ie. So you can see that there's two tags added. One says it was saved, one gives you the location, it was saved. Then you also at the top here, let's do a quick, let's do it this way. We're going to open a new email so I can come over here. And one thing you'll see up top here is you have the new send and save functionality. I'm not going to use it right now, but you can. As I'm addressing this email, I could easily just save and send it. I'm going to go over here. I want content from my team's environment or my SharePoint environment. So let's go over here and just type in my favorite word Riverside there.
And that's going to do a search across all locations. And then it becomes very simple to either add that as a link or I can now go back and add it as an attachment. So very easy to find content, be able to reuse that content and all. So a couple more things I want to show you in the demo here. Let's go back out of here and go to the home location. So one of the things that search is used for a lot in harmon.ie is not so much finding the content, the agreement, the lease, whatever, the financial spreadsheet, but it's used to find a case, a legal matter, a project, and these new filters here filter on all the main containers in the team SharePoint environment. So I can come over here and say, okay, I need to filter on folders, and then I want to find the project folders.
And then again, a simple click here and it goes to location. I can pick what view I want. And again, this is another good architecture question or statement for harmon.ie is our goal is to make the platform better. It's not to replace the platform. So the whole idea, as I mentioned earlier, is best in class kind of user experience. When I'm looking at views, these are SharePoint views or team views. They're available on the platform. When I'm looking at the content, this is content in real time on the platform. Okay? When I do a search, it says Search call to SharePoint. And we're going to see, as I just mentioned, search with natural language search. You're going to start to see where it's not just simple text searches I'm doing, I can do any kind of search natural language searches in here. Okay, one last thing to show you based out of necessity, we launched and close that window, but we launched the ability to pop out harmon.ie into a browser window.
And when I say based on necessity, there were some limitations in new outlook around drag and drop and resizing the window that by popping it out into a browser we could overcome. So you can drag and drop in this. We've received such great feedback on this ability and we've had this request for a number of years. We decided we opted to commercialize this or make it a real product. So you're going to see that harmon.ie as part of your harmon.ie suite. You'll have the option to run new harmon.ie as a desktop Windows application. You'll be able to pin it to your trade on air or the task bar, and this will become your window or file explorer into your legal matters, your project management, DMS, your case management, DMS. And so let's wrap up the demo With that, I'm going to jump back in and reshare the slide deck.
New harmon.ie: 2026 Roadmap
Jump ahead here. So let's take a look at the roadmap on that. So our 2026 roadmap is pretty simple in principle. It's basically our goal is to move from user driven filing to AI assisted and eventually AI automated filing. In the demo I showed you, I gave you a look at 1.5. I think it's either releasing tonight or later this week. You now have drag and drop capability and new outlook. You have the email tagging with email categories showing save, location and indicator. When we get to group one or group one, I screwed that up there. Group by or Q1 2026, we're going to add group by support and column filtering. So again, more content management features to complete the product search, as should type. As I mentioned in the demo, you can do it. And when adding sites and teams today, you're going to be able to do it in all views.
So if you're looking at a long list of projects, you're looking at a long list of files, it becomes very easy to find those. One thing I forgot to show in the demo currently when you edit, if you've used New harmon.ie, when you notice, when you pop up the property editor to be able to capture either custom metadata fields when uploading, it opens in a browser window, we are going to replace that. We use the Microsoft component to start. We found a few limitations we're not thrilled about. So we're investing now in building our own custom property editor. If you're familiar again with Classic harmon.ie, this will look very familiar to you. The property editor will open in the context of the harmon.ie sidebar. We're doing this for a couple of reasons. One is better control, so we can support kind of required metadata fields, better bulk uploads, better bulk uploads and tagging, I should say better.
But also it gives us a framework for supporting the copilot integration. So when we want to Prefill Fields, having our custom property editor gives us that ability. And then again, in Q1, as I showed the pop out will be the ability to pop harmon.ie out or run it. You'll be able to run this as a new harmon.ie as a standalone Microsoft 365 app. So think of it as a Microsoft 365 Explorer, getting to your OneDrive, your teams, and your SharePoint content very easily. And keep in mind that gives you the ability to create new documents. Search for Word documents, PowerPoint. So if you're looking for a legal agreement that needs to be modified, you open the harmon.ie standalone app, search for it, find it, upload it, or update it in Word, and it's saved directly back to SharePoint teams for you. And then Q2, Q2 is when you start to see the features that we just spent the last half hour talking about.
Things like smart filing, suggested location, automatic conversation saving. So as we move closer to our long-term goal, the system automatically knows what needs to be saved, where it should go, reducing reliance on us, the humans, and ensuring a complete AI ready data set. So why is this important? It helps us keep our organization aligned. It simplifies compliance and governance. It saves employees, as we said in the example, tons of time, amount of time, and it creates AI ready data for copilot. So copilot can deliver meaningful insights. And with that, let's take a few questions. I'm going to switch over before we start. The questions. Here are a couple QR codes available. If you're interested in a deeper dive, we're happy to meet with you. Just click on the one code and schedule a meeting with us. Or if you want to simply take harmon.ie for a test drive, here's a link to a free trial. Maya, do we get a couple of questions?
Q&A
Maya: Yeah. Yes. Okay, let's start. Okay, first question, will you need a Microsoft Copilot license to use the new AI features coming to harmon.ie?
Ron: So great question, and I think I covered that a little bit in conversation and my camera's giving me a little bit feedback there, but no, you will not. And we're still exploring this because Microsofts keep changing kind of licensing where you can have it with kind of a chat bot and then integrated with office and all that. But the goal is to be able to run harmon.ie without copilot. But if you want some of the copilot, advanced copilot features, you'll need to have it licensed. Yes.
Maya: Okay, we're using harmon.ie Classic right now. Should we purchase New harmon.ie if we want to switch to the new Outlook?
Ron: So great news is that if you have classic harmon.ie and you've got an active subscription or license to New Classic harmon.ie, that suite includes access or entitlements to the new harmon.ie app. So you have access to both. So most organizations we're working with, we're seeing them phase in or they leave the switch, the slider available for the business users to select which version of Outlook they want to run. So they have the option to run new harmon.ie if they're using new Outlook, or you can continue with classic.
Maya: Okay, thanks. This question is about the auto automatic saving of the email thread. Will all responses be managed as separate documents or can it recommend replacing the last email with the new one if the complete thread is included in the last response?
Ron: That's a great question. I don't have a great answer for you right now. As of now, my understanding it'll create separate documents or emails for each one. However, that seems like a very good requirement to be able to replace the last one or the one that contains all of the information with it. So love to continue that conversation offline and look at that requirement with you. But as of now, my understanding is it will, as we're implementing this, it will kind of create new documents for each email that is saved.
Maya: Thanks. Our company still hasn't approved using copilot. Can you explain about improving email management automation without copilot?
Ron: Yeah, so the goal there, as I mentioned in the demo and you saw a little bit, is that if you have repeated things in your inbox, so emails from, as I use any example from Joe regarding a project, you're going to have repeated conversations with Joe around that same project. So we can track that activity and save that activity and match Joe to a folder or the project. As we mentioned in the Project Gamma, maybe the email, the subject or the domain that the incoming email has a keyword in it, we can use that keyword to match to a folder or location in SharePoint. So the idea is to be able to use those activities to basically better predict where you would be filing emails and that again, you don't really need copilot for domain mapping, kind of sender mapping, subject line mapping types of things.
Maya: Thanks Ron. And the last question for today, when can we try the new AI features?
Ron: So as I mentioned, they're going to start rolling out in the Q2 timeframe, so we would love to, if you want, click on one of the QR codes, schedule time with us. We will be releasing some of that earlier. We'll have some beta staging environments available to start looking at this and better testing it. But you're going to see things start rolling in from copilot integration, probably get into Q1 March timeframe into Q2, June, July timeframe.
Summary
Maya: Thank you, Ron. And thank you everyone for joining us today. We hope you found the session helpful and got some new ideas for improving email management with ai. As a reminder, you'll receive an email in the next couple of days with a link to the webinar recording. And if we didn't get your question, we didn't answer all of the questions today. But don't worry, someone from the harmon.ie team will follow up with you shortly. Have a great day, and we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar.
Ron: Great. Thanks All. Thanks Maya.