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The digital age has significantly altered the way people interact with one another – with businesses of all shapes and sizes relying on a myriad of communication methods. For many (if not most) businesses, email remains an essential part of daily workflow and correspondence. In fact, email has been central to professional communication for decades. Regardless of industry, email is pivotal to sharing essential information both internally and externally. Despite such widespread use, however, many businesses are still largely unaware of the importance of properly managing their email systems. This applies primarily to the act of archiving emails and suitably retaining the data therein. It also applies to the process of deleting emails that are redundant, old or trivial. To operate at an optimum level, your business needs to be effectively managing email processes at all levels of operation - and following an official retention policy. Why is email management important? Information workers are swimming in email; many receiving over 100 messages per day.  Now, consider what that number looks like in an office of 100, 1000, or 5000 employees. Keeping track of emails on this scale—alongside the important information held within them—is a near impossible task. While sending and receiving emails is certainly a cost-effective and efficient method of conducting business, this abundance of digital mail comes with its own unique legal, storage and sourcing problems for employees and business owners alike. Proper email management is the solution to these problems. Compliance In any business setting, it is useful to track the correspondence held within emails. This is particularly important when information within an email pertains to business processes or is sensitive in subject matter.   Compliance regulations can take up a lot of time for your IT department. In different industries, countries and departments have varied regulations when it comes to retaining information, all businesses will open themselves up to the risk of litigation or penalties if they fail to follow standard policy. What’s more, if your business is involved in litigation, it’s important that data is preserved so that it can be submitted upon request. In following specific processes for storing important emails, you can save your business stress and time in producing records as and when necessary. Time management Email management also saves time in day to day processes. In effectively organizing emails, employees will be able to find what they are looking for with ease. Save precious time digging through messy inboxes and keep data within easy reach. Data recovery In the event that data is lost within mail servers, effective email management will ensure that backups are always available. This removes the risk of important information being lost forever – which means you can avoid disasters that could potentially jeopardize the very foundation of your business. But, are you deleting your emails? Whilst it’s certainly important to effectively store emails in a safe space, it’s also vital that emails are deleted when necessary. Not only does this clear up space for storage, it also makes it much easier to search for relevant documents in a timely manner. Let’s unpack these ideas a little further. The issue of storage Regardless of whether your emails are stored on-site or in the cloud – storage has a cost. All businesses will look for ways to keep costs down, which is why holding onto email data that is no longer needed is an ineffective use of IT assets. Search speed Though email servers are becoming increasingly robust, it’s always going to be quicker and easier to perform a search through a smaller dataset. This applies to both human search and computer search speed – it is faster to find information when looking at a shorter list. Valuable content should be stored elsewhere If a particular email contains key information about a project or client, is your email inbox the best place to store it? Having important information saved to a regulated and organized space is both more reliable and practical. That’s why harmon.ie captures and classifies business emails; making it easy to drag and drop files straight from your inbox into SharePoint.   Security Following on from the last point, it is also unwise to store sensitive information for any longer than your business needs it. Having sensitive emails to hand can open your business to potential risks, such as compliance breaches or data leaks. Either of these instances could have a harmful impact on the reputation of your organization and lead to expensive legal issues. Keep or delete? There is certainly something to be said for deleting as much as possible when it comes to your business emails. Though it’s vital to make the distinction between data that needs to be archived and data that can be discarded, it’s never a good idea to clog up your inboxes with redundant emails that simply serve to slow down your searches and open up your business to data breach risks. At harmon.ie you can easily surface your inbox content by business topics like products, services or projects. You can discover related emails, classify content with ease and find documents in seconds, in short, our goal is to ensure the success of your email management initiative.   

Assembling a strong board of directors is a strategic part of the harmon.ie company transformation, following the recent management buyout. So we are proud to announce that two recognized industry experts, Yoram Yaacovi and Shalom Passy have become directors of harmon.ie, bringing with them many years of valuable knowledge and experience. Yoram Yaacovi Yoram Yaacovi has a long and rich history working within the Microsoft ecosystem, lending him a unique insight into our product. Having held roles like General Manager and CTO of Microsoft Israel’s R&D center, his experience is extremely valuable when it comes to harmon.ie’s close relationship with Microsoft. Not only did he manage a team of over 2,000, Yoram developed technology for Microsoft that’s still in use today. His passion for not only intelligent technology, but the technology community, saw him create the Israel Advanced Technology Industries Multi-National Companies forum. Here, the leaders of multi-national R&D centers discuss their shared objectives and form a closer, high-tech community in Israel. Yoram also serves on the Board of Collective Impact, an organization advocating for greater Arab representation in the Israeli job market. His work with the local startup community shows just how dedicated he is to advancing technology and sharing knowledge. A company with a vision Yoram joined the harmon.ie Board of Directors because of his belief in CEO Yaacov Cohen’s vision. He says of his decision: “I make investment and job decisions based on people. I met Yaacov years ago, and I’ve always believed in his vision.” It’s obvious that he chooses to work with companies he truly believes in. Having hired Yaacov himself years ago, Yoram knew that harmon.ie had the leadership it needed to truly succeed with Yaacov at the helm. “harmon.ie fills a vital gap in the market by collating the information people need in one location.” Yoram explains. “It has over 1000 customers and it’s doing very well – it’s going places.” Shalom Passy Shalom Passy has also joined the harmon.ie Board of Directors, after beginning life at harmon.ie as a Senior Consultant for Strategy and Operational Excellence. Shalom’s experience with technology spans over 40 years, beginning with software programming and design. During his tenure at Amdocs, he performed in almost every role: in 20 years he was Head of Development in the US, Business Division President for half of Europe, and Amdocs Account Manager for Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). The wide range of experiences Shalom had at Amdocs inspired him to strike out in 2010 and begin offering consultation services for small to medium sized businesses. Today, he offers his expertise to Sapiens, Allot, harmon.ie, and Go-Arc, bringing his considerable business and strategy experience to the table in a tailored way for each company. Shalom is also a Managing Partner and Director at AfterDox, an angel investment group who aim to create value in Israel’s high-tech sector. His experience in operational management and strategy allow him to see the bigger picture and plan for the future.   Focusing on the right priorities Shalom notes of his first impression of harmon.ie: “I was impressed by the company’s journey and their decision to share the business with their employees”. His first priority when he began working with harmon.ie was to begin building their business strategy. harmon.ie’s vision appealed to Shalom because he wanted to contribute to the overall goal of helping people in every industry get more meaningful work done – “I was happy with the vision, and I wanted to help their build their strategy to help people manage their priorities. Topic computing offers the ability for workers to focus on doing what’s important, not what’s most prominent on their to-do list.” As harmon.ie grows, our priority is always to acquire the talent who will help us stay at the forefront of topic computing and intelligent email management.

We are thrilled to announce that harmon.ie has secured a top 5 position in Fifty Five and Five’s Digital Marketing Excellence Top 50 Report 2019/2020! The independent report, released this July at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, analyzes the websites, blogs and social media efforts of nearly 39,000 Microsoft Partner companies across the technology sector.   Our jump, from 13th place in 2018 to 5th place, highlights the hard work our team at harmon.ie put into our content and inbound marketing performance over the last 12 months. This puts us in the top 0.02 percentile of Microsoft Partner’s worldwide and places us at the forefront of digital marketing excellence.  The report highlights, “harmon.ie’s impressive marketing tactics have gained attention for a number of years, and they are a consistent example of how a truly three-dimensional digital strategy can make such a vital and important difference.” “We were delighted to learn that we have once again finished in such a fantastic position,” said David Lavenda, Chief Product Officer of harmon.ie. “Placing 5th is a real testament to the efforts of our marketing team.” This year, we really drilled down into the crux of the problems that businesses face and tailored our inbound and content strategy to help them overcome those issues. We truly believe that harmon.ie can help Office 365 and SharePoint users achieve their goals in the pursuit of digital transformation – and our messaging reflects that. We have worked hard to ensure all our channels combine to get our message out there in the most effective manner. We designed our website so that customers can simply navigate to the answers they’re looking for, while getting a real feel for our entire brand. Our blog looks to engage our audience with informative, interesting content that provides value outside the products we have to offer and shows customers we are true thought leaders on relevant subjects. Social media gives us the chance to interact with our customers and followers to answer questions, solve problems, and build stronger relationships. Digital Marketing Excellence report 2019/2020 Fifty Five and Five released their report at Microsoft Inspire, in Las Vegas. If you missed your opportunity to grab a copy at the event, fear not, you can download an electronic copy here. “This report is a great resource for partners looking for examples, case studies and best practices from their peers. By comparing websites, blogs and social media practices, partners can see how their marketing efforts compare to benchmarks set by the best in the Microsoft Partner Network.” - Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Foreword and interview about the current digital marketing landscape from Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft. Insights and key findings from the 39,000 partners we analyzed.  We are extremely pleased to be recognized for our work and look forward to continuing our successes into the future. Our focus is our customers and through our marketing efforts we hope to continue providing them with real value and insight.

Is email central to the running of your business? For many of us, the answer is yes. With that in mind, we wanted to provide you with some useful Outlook email management tips. These can help you avoid app overload and improve your productivity, but also ensure accurate records management and provide employees with the modern user experience they have come to expect.   But first… We know that for many organizations, email is at the heart of everything they do. Whether that is internal communications or external correspondences, email is how work is completed. Naturally, it comes as no surprise that a significant part of our days is spent in our email client. For ourselves, our customers, and millions of people all over the world, Outlook is the email client of choice. In this post, we look at Outlook, and how the Office 365 suite with SharePoint can drive email management success.   4 Outlook email management tips 1. Make searching for documents easy The amount of time people spend searching for emails has been written about a lot. Harvard Business Review found that we waste 30 minutes per day re-reading emails over and over again. The biggest trigger is when people start searching for an old email. One answer to this problem is the use of metadata, especially for organizations using SharePoint for document and email management. When metadata is correctly added, it can make surfacing emails much easier. There are plenty of situations in which this is essential: Collaborating on work with colleagues Managing long-running cases and clients Compliance audits Referring to previous correspondences with a client/customer Picking up a client’s case from a colleague when they are on holiday FOI requests How harmon.ie helps harmon.ie ensures you can meet all these requirements and fulfil these obligations every time, which will make it easy to discover old email in SharePoint when you need them. It does all this without requiring you to leave Outlook.   2. Let your users take action immediately When it comes to managing your email, carrying out admin as soon as possible is key. The easiest thing to do is to do things quickly, at the point of receiving or sending an email. Otherwise, important information locked inside emails can quickly be forgotten about or lost. Organizations need to make email management as easy as possible for their employees, because when the right thing is the easy thing, users are much more likely to carry out the desired action. This way you can avoid issues like lost emails, siloed information, multiple versions of documents, and non-compliance with internal or external standards or regulations. How harmon.ie helps harmon.ie’s Outlook sidebar provides a wide range of functionality for knowledge workers in their email client. Without having to lose focus on core work, workers can capture, classify, store, and discover emails and important documents directly from Outlook.   3. Avoid app overload Today, many knowledge workers suffer from app overload – where the need to move between apps actually inhibits their productivity and distracts from the task at hand. What you should be doing is giving users the ability to capture emails as documents of record from anywhere they work – from Outlook, from Office apps, or from a mobile device. A great example of this is case management. Case workers will spend the majority of their day in email, receiving and sending a constant stream of emails with clients. However, important documents relating to cases are saved elsewhere – notably in their document management system, SharePoint. But also internal communications occur in Microsoft Teams and other apps. Switching between all these apps can prove a distraction, removing the context of the work you are focused on, and it can take time to figure out where the information you need is stored. How harmon.ie helps With the harmon.ie sidebar in Outlook, users can search for important documents without having to switch apps. They can quickly attach a document into an email they are sending to a client. Also, they can drag and drop emails received from clients into SharePoint and apply metadata at the point of receiving/sending an email. But, alternatively, if users spend most of their time in Office apps, then the harmon.ie app for Office can offer SharePoint functionality in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.   4. Organize emails with ease Every day, knowledge workers are bombarded with emails, instant messages, documents, notifications, meeting requests, and so on. This can make it impossible to focus on the task at hand and find relevant information when it is required. How harmon.ie helps harmon.ie’s solution helps knowledge workers organize information consistently across their organization, by putting an emphasis on correct storage in SharePoint. For example, the solution recommends where emails should be filed so that they can easily be found later.    Now it’s your turn Getting email management right can dramatically improve the productivity of your business. These have been our four Outlook email management tips for success. Use harmon.ie to help knowledge workers manage their emails efficiently. .