When it comes to Information Management, setting things up for success from the start can spell the difference between an uneven, underwhelming outcome and a smashing success.
Retroactive changes are always tricky and often incomplete and putting the onus on end users to make proactive requests to IT rarely results in widespread adoption. That’s why organizations see the most success when they take the initiative and make best practices the default mode of operation.
For many organizations striving for proper Information Management and true collaboration, email remains a challenge. Unlike any other type of file, emails almost exclusively remain in the inboxes and Sent folders of individual employees.
While convenient for the members of the email thread who already have those messages in their inbox, the rest of the organization is left in the dark. Those messages and the crucial details they contain remain outside the shared knowledge base on Microsoft Teams or SharePoint. This dilemma prompts many organizations to turn to harmon.ie for bridging the gap between Outlook and Teams by enabling end users to share—and discover—emails to Teams without ever leaving their inbox.
Not only does this switch up the dynamics of how colleagues think about emails (it’s not MY data it’s the organization’s data), but it also safeguards against business continuity and compliance issues that may arise in the future.
Setting the stage for success
While harmon.ie makes things easy for end users, truly getting the most out of your harmon.ie investment means optimizing the end-user experience in Teams and SharePoint as well.
When emails get shared to Teams or SharePoint using harmon.ie, it’s not just the message file being transmitted over the digital transom; a set of email headers are also now shared for each email, including:
- To
- From
- CC
- Subject
- Date
- Attachments (does the email contain attachments)
You can imagine how helpful being able to search, filter, and sort on some of those fields could be—it’s like working within your Inbox. Luckily, making that crucial visible and usable is simple with harmon.ie.
Instead of having to bug IT and wait for approvals and activation, harmon.ie can create an email view whenever any user adds an email to a directory in Teams or SharePoint. This automatic email header mapping frees up IT from having to get involved and instantly creates value for end users trying to complete their tasks as quickly and correctly as possible. As an added bonus, organizations implementing AI solutions have that much more metadata to work with.
Why an email view matters
An email-specific view of a Teams or SharePoint library may not seem like a big deal, but there are material benefits to offering this option on every library with an email in it.
First, switching to the email view filters out all the other documents and files, letting you focus on the key communications related to the matter at hand. With the email view and automatic email header mapping in place, it’s almost like you’re in a shared inbox with your colleagues, making it easy to reconstruct timelines by sifting through the emails based on subject and date.
A dedicated email view also simplifies figuring out which communication hasn’t been shared to Teams or SharePoint yet, such as contract negotiations or supplier pricing emails. This identifies information gaps that could prove problematic if key players leave the organization or get reassigned.
And when it comes to email retention and disposition, an email view that’s sortable by date is an invaluable asset.
Give end users confidence to share to SharePoint or Teams
One of the things often holding colleagues back from saving emails on Teams or SharePoint is a lack of confidence that the messages will be safe and easy to locate in the future. This is natural as no one else is ever in your inbox and you’ve likely devised your own unique filing system that makes it a snap to dig up a particular message.
But when every library in your tenant is automatically transformed into an email view when you save emails using harmon.ie and you can search and sort based on metadata, saving emails outside of Outlook doesn’t seem so scary or inconvenient. They’re now easy to find, share, and reference for everyone on the team.
Encouraging wider adoption
To further motivate sharing email messages to Teams or SharePoint, organizations can also limit local email storage capacity for end users and/or add a policy that all email messages still in Outlook get deleted after five or ten years (gradually shrinking that length of time to increase compliance and adoption). Deadlines and “use-it-or-lose-it” consequences are typically good motivators for holdouts.
Don’t miss out on all that harmon.ie has to offer! Tap into the power of email views with automated email header mapping today to further empower your workforce and level up your Information Management game.
