Imagine a large government agency with thousands of employees and millions of documents. Many of these documents are sensitive in nature and stored haphazardly in email inboxes across the organization. They take up precious storage space, putting data security at risk and stifling collaboration.

This is not an uncommon situation.

Government agencies worldwide operate in a digital-first environment, and they all face a similar problem in Information Management: retention or disposition?

In other words, which documents should be kept and filed away digitally, ensuring maximum accessibility and security? Which files are at the end of their lifecycle, and should be deleted to minimize data storage and document chaos?

A government agency in Israel was dealing with this exact issue. Ultimately, they decided to leverage harmon.ie to provide the solution. But the story began even before.

Been there, done that

The government agency operated a SharePoint-based system, which connected with their ERP and CRM applications. A SharePoint-Outlook integration was clearly the way to go. This would enable employees to share links rather than bulky attachments, and SharePoint’s user access control would support permissions-based access, so link sharing would meet the strict security guidelines.

The agency’s IT team had attempted to manage the problem in house, developing their own Outlook plugin for archiving emails to SharePoint. After a while, despite investing much time and resources, it became clear that this solution was not robust enough to meet growing demands.

Hello harmon.ie

The decision to partner with harmon.ie was based on careful evaluation of several third-party solutions. But in the end, a pilot run made the choice abundantly clear: harmon.ie’s integration with SharePoint and Outlook provided a 300% increase in functionality compared to the internal plugin.

Implementation was a collaborative effort, with the agency customizing harmon.ie to meet their unique requirements, from branding to user configurations. Staff received training on best practices for document management, ensuring a smooth transition to the new system.

User first, always

Part of the challenge of IM is user adoption: how to ‘retrain’ employees to file and share documents in a more effective and efficient way. With harmon.ie, the agency employees can file emails and documents to SharePoint directly from Outlook, where they spend most of their time. The harmon.ie solution fits intuitively with their work style, making adoption much easier and quicker.

In addition, harmon.ie’s setup capabilities means that the agency could pre-establish configurations for each user, so that individual setup was not required.

These are just two examples of the ways that harmon.ie streamlined for the user, not just the organization’s needs.

Complex dilemma, smooth solution

Following the harmon.ie implementation, the government agency hasn’t looked back. A difficult problem was solved with harmon.ie, a commercially available, customizable third-party solution that met its promises:

• Far fewer documents stored in email inboxes, far more storage space
• Creation of duplicate files is kept to a minimum, reducing document chaos
• Employees manage documents directly within Outlook, so they don’t need to drastically alter their work habits
• Employees have embraced the user-friendly platform, actively participating in effective IM

Bottom line: with harmon.ie, this large government agency was able to boost efficiency of IM, and solve the “retention or disposition” dilemma, while saving on budget, resources and manpower.

Dive into more details about how harmon.ie was tweaked to fit with the government agency’s needs, and how it continues to evolve with the IM demands of the organization. Read the full case study here.

If your organization is struggling with IM challenges like those faced by the Israeli government agency, it may be time to consider a solution like harmon.ie. Download a free trial today, or look at other government case studies.