harmon.ie SmartAssistant release 8.1 is now available! And just in time too.

We know that many of you are working remotely at home during these difficult times. That means coordinating with colleagues and finding information is more challenging than when working in the office. And Microsoft Teams is proving to be an important tool to help remote workers. Official numbers show the number of daily active users of Teams has increased from 13M in July 2019 to 44M in March 2020. That is an unprecedented growth of over 300% in nine months. Even the normally conservative US Department of Defense has rolled out Teams temporarily to 4 million users for non-secure collaboration, including the addition of 250,000 accounts in a single day!

And as you become increasingly dependent on Teams, you need harmon.ie now more than ever. When working remotely, you don’t have local IT or help resources to reach out to when you get stuck. Since you are left to your own devices to get work done, using your Microsoft 365 productivity tools has to be as simple as possible.

This is precisely where harmon.ie shines. harmon.ie helps you bridge communications with the outside world using Outlook email, and internal collaboration with colleagues using Microsoft Teams conversations. With harmon.ie you can drag and drop emails and attachments from Outlook directly into a Teams channel and then seamlessly continue the conversation in Teams. The email and attachments are captured and classified using metadata so you can easily find information later. Captured emails are stored in the Teams channel Files location. The emails and documents remain connected and classified using uniform and coherent metadata so you will be able to see the big picture today… and later on, when you need the information to reply to clients or partners, for audits, or for information governance directives.

Release 8.1 renews the harmon.ie approach of making the work with Microsoft 365 easy for business workers, so they can focus on work rather than on figuring out how to use tools. harmon.ie SmartAssistant 8.1 offers the following new capabilities and enhancements.

Improved Outlook-Teams integration:

• With release 8.1, when you drag and drop emails and attachments from Outlook to a Teams channel, the emails and attachments are stored in the Teams channel Files location. harmon.ie maintains the link between the email and the attachments, while it preserves the SharePoint metadata for the email as well.
• It has never been easier to collaborate with colleagues by sharing an email (and attachments) in a Teams conversation. When you drag and drop an email (and attachments) to a Teams channel, you can add a personal message to accompany the email within the Teams conversation. Feel free to add @ mentions and locations to provide maximum context so that remote workers can immediately pick up where you left off.
• The onboarding process for Teams in harmon.ie has never been easier. Release 8.1 streamlines the Teams admin consent process, so you can get harmon.ie up and running quickly for all your workers.

Search

Working remotely introduces challenges for finding information fast, so harmon.ie continues to invest in enhancing its search capabilities. Today’s release adds a new search scope to help you search within a folder, in a document set, or within a Teams channel. Upcoming releases will continue to add advanced search capabilities.

Infrastructure Improvements

harmon.ie continues to invest in improving app performance. For example, an enhancement was added to address the “503 Server is busy” errors some European customers experienced due to stressed network resources brought on the increase in remote workers. You can read more about this enhancement here.

Get Started

A complete list of new features and bug fixes introduced in harmon.ie SmartAssistant release 8.1 can be found here.

If you are an existing harmon.ie customer, you can download the new 8.1 release here.