Email retention with Microsoft 365

Can M365 be used for email retention?

Many Information Management business cases made to senior management are often challenged with this question: “Can’t we do this with all the technology we already have?”

Fortunately for organizations standardized on Microsoft 365, the answer is yes. And with harmon.ie added to the mix, email retention can be done largely using systems and technologies like SharePoint or Teams that organizations already invested in IT is familiar with.

Using Teams and Sharepoint for Email Retention

SharePoint is a hierarchical file sharing system, very similar to File Explorer or Finder, but designed for use by multiple users to share and exchange information. For this reason, SharePoint is a logical place to store and share emails due to most workers existing familiarity with SharePoint and its use. Add in harmon.ie and SharePoint can be even more seamless to adopt.

Microsoft Teams, in contrast, weaves together existing technologies like SharePoint, video conferencing, chat, and collaboration into a unified offering. Within Teams, channels is a friendly user interface layered on top of SharePoint. As files are shared organically, the Files default location in SharePoint can become cluttered and disorganized. Chat, in contrast, stores any shared files in the user’s OneDrive location, meaning that they can’t be found or easily shared with others. Harmon.ie can be a critical part of the solution to keep Teams organized and efficient to use.

Existing, familiar, in-house technology

SharePoint and Microsoft Teams both contain the structural raw materials for retaining and sharing emails. harmon.ie takes the existing Microsoft environment end users already know and makes it seamless to store and share emails on SharePoint or Teams all from within Outlook, providing a robust email retention solution.

Outlook integration via harmon.ie

Traditionally, saving an email in Outlook requires opening the email, clicking the File menu, and then selecting either Save or Save As, then navigating to the right location, and finally clicking the Save button. Not nearly as easy as swiping that email over to a folder in an inbox where it stays, unshared, unmanaged, and living on until the recipient’s mailbox is deleted or the recipient decides to delete it.

harmon.ie, however, removes much of that friction by letting users drag and drop any email or attachment to a SharePoint or Teams location, ensuring it is saved, managed, and shared in far fewer clicks and with metadata as well. Because, as IT and information managers know well, changing human behavior is hard, making new habits that fit seamlessly into something they already do is the key to adoption.

Searchability/discoverability

In the past, email archiving required users to trade off saving space with convenience, as archived messages aren’t as easily searchable. With harmon.ie, emails get retained but are still searchable from any end-user’s Outlook, whether they’re on SharePoint, Teams, or still in the inbox.