Prior to the COVID pandemic, ESDC used file shares and SharePoint 2010 for content storage. Use of SharePoint 2010 was voluntary. In addition, ESDC initiated a pilot of GCDocs, the Government of Canada's hosted, government-wide solution for archiving and records.

Then COVID hit, and mailboxes ‘exploded’ because people were sending attachments for work offline. ESDC needed a way to help its employees focus on work and collaborate effectively without making employees spend valuable time and effort on information management (IM). As a government agency, ESDC also had to meet the comprehensive WCAG2.1 / EN 301 549 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

To provide a rapid and comprehensive remote work solution for employees, ESDC adopted Microsoft 365 for online meetings and document storage; with a goal of migrating an astonishing 30,000 employees to Microsoft 365 in just 3 months!

To expedite Microsoft 365 adoption, ESDC needed a way to easily migrate content to Microsoft 365. Key requirements included the ability to capture, classify, and share important emails and document attachments with remote colleagues, eliminate ‘document chaos’ associated with sharing document attachments, and verify that people had access to a file before sharing it with them.

ESDC reached out to other Canadian agencies and these organizations recommended harmon.ie. harmon.ie is already in use in other Canadian government agencies and Crown corporations, including Library and Archives Canada, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC), Canada Post, Justice Canada, and many others.

Alexandre Singh, ESDC Executive Director Business Solutions and Information Management, explains why harmon.ie was selected: “We wanted to make sure people had a tool that could be used from Outlook. The mapping of metadata makes it a lot easier and more acceptable for people to start storing their emails in Microsoft 365. We also realized a bonus in that harmon.ie could help us migrate data from Outlook to SharePoint Online, and as a result, reduce mailbox size.”

Importantly, ESDC relied upon Orangutech, harmon.ie’s Canadian partner and a trusted partner of the Canadian government.

Singh explains the plans for harmon.ie at ESDC:

• Use harmon.ie to reduce mailbox size. “We plan to use harmon.ie to make it easy for people to take attachments out of Outlook and store them in the right spot… SharePoint.”
• Use harmon.ie to move workers from shared drives to Microsoft 365 for content storage. “We see harmon.ie as a lever to migrate our existing user base, who are doing IM on shared drives to move to SharePoint Online. With harmon.ie, workers are able to drag and drop attachments into SharePoint Online.”
• Use harmon.ie as an easy input for requirement metadata. “Metadata is what helps us with retention disposition. harmon.ie makes it easier for people to classify data correctly with pull-downs. When documents are classified correctly, it is easier to locate them later.”
• Use harmon.ie to improve business processes. “We're seeing that we can re-engineer some of our administrative business processes where people have spent time consolidating documents. Now that links will be sent instead of attachments, they don't need to worry about managing the latest version of key documents.”