Hear Ye, Hear Ye, all IT folks.

In case you missed it, you must absolutely check out this week’s Microsoft Intrazone podcast, featuring our own Chief Product Officer, David Lavenda, together with Daniel Stuch, Senior Project Leader Application Development and Rollout at Bosch, the global engineering company. The pair discussed Bosch’s email management and IT governance project, which uses harmon.ie and SharePoint to ensure Bosch’s millions of business email records are 100% compliant with the company’s IT governance regulations.

The Intrazone podcast is hosted by Mark Kashman, Microsoft Senior Product Manager and Chris McNulty, Microsoft Director of Product Marketing. This week’s episode is titled “Drag and Drop: Outlook to SharePoint.” In the podcast liner notes, the hosts describe harmon.ie’s capability to “drag and drop within an app, without switching context and being compliant" as ‘a game changer action for employees.’

A game changer action for employees…

What’s the big deal? Well, to dig into the story, let’s take a look at the Bosch email management and IT governance journey with harmon.ie and SharePoint.

The Bosch Email Management Journey with harmon.ie and SharePoint

Like all organizations, Bosch relies heavily on email to conduct its global business. In fact, 9-10 million business emails are exchanged across the company on a daily basis. And like many companies, at Bosch, business records and other important information are frequently exchanged via email. Emails related to company activities in sales, purchasing, accounting, engineering, quality assurance, and human resources are just a few examples of critical email uses.

SharePoint was selected as the repository for centrally storing important email records because SharePoint dovetailed with Bosch’s plans to migrate its infrastructure to the Office 365 cloud starting in 2020.

With a broad and heterogeneous user community, Bosch realized it would need an additional product to make it easy for typical business users to capture and classify important business emails in SharePoint, as well as easily locate important emails, which is an important element of Bosch’s information governance and compliance program.

harmon.ie to the Rescue

After a rigorous product selection process, harmon.ie was selected to assist business users to capture, classify, and find email records, as well as support future audits and e-discovery.

By making it easy to use, harmon.ie has increased the adoption rate of SharePoint. Stuch explains, “harmon.ie makes SharePoint more accessible for people, and with improved adoption rate and increased use of SharePoint, we also have attained those benefits that we wanted from SharePoint in the first place.”

A side benefit of the SharePoint solution is that Bosch sees a reduction in documents sent as email attachments. This not only decreases data volume, it also prevents document versioning chaos. As a result, productivity has improved.

harmon.ie has also proved to have an economic value – “we found that although the financial gain was not the primary reason to purchase harmon.ie, you simply save up to 70% of the steps, or gain 70% of productivity when you drag and drop emails.”, says Stuch.

During the podcast, Stuch summed up the business value that harmon.ie brings to Bosch:

“harmon.ie gave us the opportunity to create an internal, win-win situation between [associates and] the company that has formal requirements and wants good information, lifecycle management or records management, and wants to be 100% compliant with all regulations to fulfill our duties. It's part of our value set and we live up to it… harmon.ie helped us make access easier, and make the process easier by enhancing the associate user experience.”