2023 was a very eventful year for harmon.ie. As we turn the page to 2024, we want to pause and look back at some of the major moments and share our plans for 2024.
All Teams on Deck
Microsoft Teams has continued to be the platform of choice to enable colleagues to communicate and work together on documents whether they’re across the hall, across town, or across an ocean.
All that activity has made Microsoft Teams a bit of an unorganized mess. We call it – “Teams Chaos.” Helping IT teams empower end users to organize things correctly from the start and make metadata tagging a habit has been a major focus for our product development priorities and our customers.
That’s why Information Management has been at the top of our trend list all year and a major focus for our latest release, harmon.ie 10. As we’ve worked with our customers and studied the market, it’s become clear that no Information Management initiative will succeed without an end-user experience that adds value for them while making them even more efficient and productive.
AI for Information Management
2023 was the year when Artificial Intelligence graduated from hype to real-world opportunity. Chat GPT and Google Bard have hogged the headlines, but every industry is taking this revolutionary tech seriously.
Here at harmon.ie, we are working hard at building an organization-specific AI solution for Information Management. Our aim is set to redefine email management and compliance, by suggesting to users which email messages should be retained, and where.
It’s important to emphasize that our AI model will run on customer tenants, without sending information outside the tenant.
But regardless of how far along an organization is on its own AI journey, it can lay the groundwork now and get a headstart on things by incorporating metadata into its Information Management workflows via a user-friendly UX.
A big release and a sneak peek of the future
In the spring of 2023, we launched harmon.ie 9.5, which introduced better integration with Microsoft Teams and email views across Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive that display all the relevant email metadata. We then capped off the year with harmon.ie 10, which is chock full of enhancements.
New capabilities in harmon.ie 10 include displaying files shared in Teams chats or channels in the harmon.ie window, drag-and-drop support for shared Teams channels, and prompting users to post shared files to a Teams channel. We also now support GCC High, allowing usage on the U.S. sovereign cloud and for additional sectors of the U.S. federal government.
Last, but definitely not least, 2023 gave us a sneak peek into the future. The new Outlook hasn’t been rolled out yet, but we already have a functional preview of our product that demonstrates some of the new capabilities and improved user experience this game-changing Outlook release will have for harmon.ie, and our customers. Take it for a free test drive now to get a glimpse of what’s to come in 2024 and beyond!
We chatted with industry experts
Our webinar series continued to bring insightful thought leaders to your screens in 2023. These insightful webinars explore how current trends are driving priorities and innovation in the Information Management space.
We spoke with Microsoft’s Juan Balmori about the new Outlook’s add-in model, which we’re excited to leverage in upcoming releases of harmon.ie. We also discussed how information governance and business performance can coexist with Benjamin Niaulin, VP Product of ShareGate, and how to transform Microsoft Teams into an Information Management heaven with Vivek Bhatt, CTO of Infotechtion.
Customers share their success stories
While harmon.ie had its share of success this year, we were far more excited to share the experiences of some of our customers using our solutions to address real-world challenges.
German insurance and financial services giant Allianz shared their experience using harmon.ie to roll out an Information Management solution across a 185,000-person global workforce. This solution had to navigate a complex web of international regulatory and legal email retention and destruction requirements counterbalanced with business unit desires to simply keep everything forever. harmon.ie helped Allianz transform the end-user experience to comply with these Information Requirements, letting users drag-and-drop emails and files into the appropriate SharePoint directories, automatically extracting key metadata while prompting end users to enter other key values.
New Zealand accounting firm Add iT uses harmon.ie to maintain a file organization system that enables instant access to a specific client’s files in seconds. Using SharePoint IDs to create a comprehensive hierarchy for each client and fiscal year, Add iT then uses harmon.ie to ensure all relevant files and emails end up in those directories the moment they’re received. Then, using harmon.ie’s search function from within Outlook, Add iT can locate and retrieve any file they need within 30 seconds.
German architectural planning and construction company assmann gruppe shared another success story of using harmon.ie to achieve Information Management goals. In their case, the challenge was getting all of the important—and large!—plans, blueprints, and other documents out of individual end-user inboxes and onto Microsoft Teams. This broadened access to files for collaborators and helped solve extremely challenging version control issues that could be very costly if missed.
harmon.ie on the road
Getting out of the office and speaking with the market is essential to delivering solutions that meet real business needs. The highlights of our 2023 event calendar were two Microsoft events where we had an opportunity to demonstrate our product’s capabilities while gathering valuable feedback from attendees.
At this year’s BUILD, Microsoft’s signature developer event in Seattle, we presented alongside Juan Balmori, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager for Office Extensibility. We focused on how the new Outlook unlocks additional features and capabilities for the harmon.ie solution while also educating IT professionals on how to best approach building plug-ins for Outlook. Watch the full presentation here.
On the other side of the world, we attended the European Collaboration Summit in Düsseldorf, Germany, where—as Microsoft Gold partners—we got to present our solution to attendees. It was also an opportunity to highlight our local partner dc.AG, a German consulting firm and agency. They offer a full-service harmon.ie experience for organizations in Germany and Austria, including consulting and support services to ensure customers maximize their return on investment, along with providing localized content, training, and support.
harmon.ie also got out of the office and into the desert when we took our staff to the Negev for an off-site team-building experience that included rappelling, 4×4 excursions, and camping under the stars. The outing provided unique bonding experiences for our staff, which will foster creativity and collaboration on the exciting work ahead.
