European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) Case Study
Industry
Transportation
Location
Cologne, Germany
About EASA
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), an agency of the European Union, is the centerpiece of the European Union's strategy for aviation safety. Its mission is to promote the highest common standards of safety and environmental protection in civil aviation. The agency develops common safety and environmental rules at the European level. It monitors the implementation of standards through inspections in the member states and provides the necessary technical expertise, training and research. The agency works hand in hand with the national authorities, which continue to carry out many operational tasks, such as certification of individual aircraft, or licensing of pilots.
The Challenge
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), an agency of the European Union, is the centerpiece of the European Union's strategy for aviation safety. Its mission is to promote the highest common standards of safety and environmental protection in civil aviation. The agency develops common safety and environmental rules at the European level. It monitors the implementation of standards through inspections in the member states and provides the necessary technical expertise, training and research. The agency works hand in hand with the national authorities, which continue to carry out many operational tasks, such as certification of individual aircraft, or licensing of pilots.
harmon.ie to the Rescue
EASA learned about harmon.ie from other European agencies that were already using harmon.ie. It was simple. According to the section manager, “We tried it out. It worked, so we decided to buy it. Normally, we develop requirements, do a market study, and then select a solution. But with harmon.ie, it was just perfect.”
harmon.ie was selected to simplify the move from drive storage to central storage. The thought was to link SharePoint to Outlook, “which is the natural environment workers are used to working with.” harmon.ie displays the SharePoint structure inside Outlook. “That’s what gave us the entry point, and that’s what we have used to make the switch easier,” added the manager.
“I was the pilot person here,” said another manager. “We added some business people because they were using SharePoint a lot more… then we added people doing invoice tracking. We then added our secretary assistant; she was a bit reluctant in the beginning, but she’s using it very often now. She never goes to SharePoint directly anymore…. that was our test period.”
“We saw harmon.ie as quite a straight forward way to get the documents directly within SharePoint,” said the document and records manager.
Another document and records manager noted, “For certain functionality, such as uploading of multiple documents or other operations on multiple documents, we found the harmon.ie interface nicer than SharePoint’s, and more user friendly.” With this ability of harmon.ie, uploading all old documents was quick and simple.
People who were reluctant at first to move to SharePoint, found that with harmon.ie they rarely needed to go to SharePoint, performing all operations from their harmon.ie add-in inside Outlook.
EASA uses harmon.ie to store emails in SharePoint as well as documents. “We have a lot of audit trails and requirements, so we basically store everything. Now it’s easily and centrally stored, and accessible to other people in the SharePoint environment. We would have made that a requirement, but without harmon.ie, I’m pretty sure it would have cost people a lot more time to properly do this,” noted the section manager.
Training
Training for harmon.ie is minimal – it can be completed in approximately half an hour as part of a two hour training for SharePoint.
The Future
The European Aviation Safety Agency is rolling out harmon.ie to the entire agency - more than 800 aviation experts and administrators.
Bring Everything Together in SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive
Unify your content – emails, documents, and conversations – drag and drop Outlook emails and attachments into SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive.
