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/solutions/intelligent-sharepoint-email-management

Intelligent Email Management with SharePoint

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Over 1300 employees, 18000 volunteers, and more than a million members

By using harmon.ie for Outlook, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has improved the document management capabilities of SharePoint to maximize information management across the business.

 Workers at RSPB are witnessing how a streamlined approach to information management is taking them out of the confines of their email inboxes and making their day-to-day work easier.

“Using harmon.ie is helping us better manage our information, especially the really important stuff. The documents we need to keep, like our records and any corporate information, are easier to access and more secure.” 
Jenny Sinclair, Lead Information Manager, RSPB

About the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)

Since being founded in 1889, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has witnessed a growing threat to wildlife and aimed to combat that threat by growing themselves. Now the largest nature conservation charity in the United Kingdom, RSPB continually strives to improve work both internally and with external organizations to give nature the home it deserves. 

harmon.ie Helps RSPB Soar Above Information Management

harmon.ie unifies information management across BAUER Group's regional IT departments with advanced, automated metadata.

For BAUER Group, centralizing the IT infrastructure and information in dispersed locations was a key challenge that harmon.ie helped overcome. Through harmon.ie's technology, BAUER Group merged employee's Outlook inboxes, and the information within them, with SharePoint.

"For construction projects it's important to have all the information - which primarily resides in documents, contracts, and emails - stored in a central location. Because of this, harmon.ie is a business necessity for BAUER Group."
Michaela Meissner, ECM Consultant, BAUER Group

BAUER Group provides services, equipment, and products for construction and machinery manufacturing. The company is split into three segments.
 - Construction, which caries out foundational engineering projects independently with its own machinery.
 - Machinery, which supplies the construction equipment - a market leader in the development and manufacturing of specialist foundational engineering equipment.
 - Resources, which focuses on products and services around water treatment, biotechnology, environmental remediation, waste management, and desalination to support project execution.

BAUER Group Unifies Information Management with harmon.ie

UNISON goes mobile with harmon.ie to boost SharePoint adoption.

The mobile experience of using SharePoint with harmon.ie is incredibly popular with UNISON’s employees. When out of the office, they can now instantly access their files, update documents, and upload their changes back into SharePoint from their phones. harmon.ie has transformed SharePoint from a potentially valuable but unpopular IT asset to a hugely successful and vital tool for UNISON’s mobile workforce.

“Our users no longer avoid using SharePoint. Instead, they're now saying they love to use the platform, with the help of harmon.ie.” 
Laurence Arterton, Head of Client Support & ICT Services

UNISON is the UK’s largest trade union with a membership of 1.3 million workers. The organization’s membership is made up of workers in a wide range of sectors including local government, energy, health care, police, transport, and more. UNISON employs approximately 1300 staff located in 32 offices.

Guide to Intelligent Email Management in Professional Services

harmon.ie 7: Six New Features for Working Smarter

harmon.ie at SharePoint Conference North America 2019

Capture, Classify, and Find Emails and Documents

Intelligent Email Management with harmon.ie

Download our ebook ‘The Challenge of Email Management and What you Need to Solve it’ to learn the best practices that will help you implement your email management initiative successfully.

The Challenge of Email Management and What you Need to Solve It

Download our ebook, ‘Three Options for Solving the Email Management Problem’, to learn the pros and cons of the different approaches to email management.

Three Options for Solving the Email Management Problem

How SharePoint can be the Ideal Solution for Intelligent Email Management

Microsoft team speaks about harmon.ie to describe how we worked work together to present information to Office 365 users by topics, the way you think, using the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Data Connect.

Microsoft team speaks about harmon.ie to describe how we worked work together to present information to Office 365 users by topics

Microsoft team speaks about harmon.ie

What's the right email management solution for your organization?

Save Incoming emails and attachments to SharePoint    

Mind the Gap: A Better Way to Manage Emails in SharePoint

View and Edit Email & Document Properties (Metadata)

harmon.ie brings together the multinational’s global Legal Department through more efficient information management.

The Legal Department of the REHAU Group selected SharePoint and harmon.ie to optimize and streamline their internal process for storing and sharing case files, legal documents and other important data; allowing them to draw important information together from all points across locations, including Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook. 

The Legal Department has branches in multiple countries. Before harmon.ie, this meant multiple file storage systems in several locations. By using harmon.ie within their SharePoint and Office environment, the REHAU Group brought previously disparate information together into one place.

“We saw that a harmon.ie and SharePoint solution covers 95% or almost 100% of our needs… it’s much more cost efficient than a specialized third-party solution.”
Christian Steier, Legal Digital Officer, REHAU Group 

The REHAU Group is a leading systems and service provider for polymer-based solutions for use in construction, automotive and industry. The Legal Department is responsible for the corporate legal matters of the entire worldwide REHAU Group, which accounts for about 20,000 employees.

The volume of information that must be successfully dealt with by the Legal Department is large and vital to business functionality across the company. So, the right solution was critical not only to the Legal Department but for company-wide success. 

Rehau-Case-Study-final.pdf

The Legal Department of the Rehau Group selected SharePoint and harmon.ie to optimize and streamline their internal process for managing and storing information.

Rehau Group optimized the way they store informaiton with harmon.ie

Bringing critical information together with harmon.ie

Find Emails and Documents Using Filter by Tags

Information_Governance_with_SharePoint_2018_f3.pdf

Improve Information Governance in SharePoint

Managing_Cases_with_SharePoint_2018_f.pdf

State_&_Local_Government_2018_f3.pdf

File_Share_Migration_to_SharePoint_2018_f2.pdf

harmon.ie helps construction giant to integrate SharePoint and Outlook and create better processes

Kier Group plc used harmon.ie to improve user experience of collaborating and managing information in Office 365. Kier migrated from several legacy systems, which meant a change in process and culture was needed when it came to storing and sharing information.

harmon.ie helped Kier Group enable seamless integration with SharePoint, Outlook, and Office 365. This transformed their complex information management process from many systems into a single, streamlined and secure platform.

“harmon.ie has significantly boosted our teams’ adoption of SharePoint, which has improved how we share project information which is so vital in an industry like construction”
Shipra Sharma, Business Analyst, Kier Group

Kier Customer Testimonial: harmon.ie Enables Deep Work with Office 365

Kier Group plc renews the places where we work, live, and play. They operate across a range of sectors including defence, education, housing, industrials, power, transport, and utilities. A sector leader in the health and education markets, with key capabilities in civil engineering and design and build from small works to major projects. Constantly juggling these multiple projects, Kier Group are always on the lookout for ways to improve how they work.

Kier embraced SharePoint – a single, evolving, and scalable platform. But get the most out of it, they added harmon.ie, who helped bring SharePoint and Outlook together for the construction company. This has simplified how Kier employees can store, organize, and manage the vital information for their many projects.

Kier-Case-Study-2018.pdf

In this case study, we introduce how Kier Group plc used harmon.ie to improve user experience of collaborating and managing information in Office 365.

Kier Group plc: A foundation for success, the case study

A foundation for success at Kier Group plc

Collaborate on Emails and Documents in Real-Time

Share Emails and Documents with Other Users

Send SharePoint Links Instead of Email Attachments

Testimonials: Customers talk about harmon.ie

Learn how you can turn SharePoint into the central repository for documents and emails.

Managing_emails_on_sharepoint_2018_f2.pdf

Read this ebook, Moving to a New File Share Experience, and learn how to save your business time, effort, and money during your file migration.

Klotz GmbH is a German-based organization that develops and builds specialized machinery and technical software for measurement, testing and automation equipment.

Klotz’ machinery is used worldwide throughout the automotive industry.

Project-collaboration in business requires efficient processes to meet challenging deadlines and ensure accuracy when sharing fluid information. With the right tools, an organization hopes not only to remain organized, but to gain a competitive advantage.

“There is a significant difference between a process that takes three seconds to archive a project document and a process that takes 30 seconds for the same task,” suggests Jürgen Kaiser, Project Manager at Klotz.

Needing to utilize a common platform for document management and collaboration, Klotz decided to deploy Microsoft SharePoint. Their objective was simple and explicitly fixed: all documents were to be handled in digital form. Paper-based documents like purchase records were to be digitized as early in the process as possible.

In the modern business world, emails are a vital and indispensable element in collaborative projects. In many cases, for every document of record, you may have many accompanying emails of record. Are these email records not documents in and of themselves? Should they not be treated and archived as such?

As the primary step for document retrieval, it’s essential that document archival processes are simple and, if possible, automated. It doesn’t make sense to trade off the time it takes for an employee to retrieve a document with the time it takes for them to properly archive it.

Having already deployed SharePoint, Klotz still needed a way for their users to access project emails via classifications such as “to,” “from,” and “subject,” in addition to the contextual aspects of the documents. The challenge that Klotz faced stemmed from their understanding that document management software is only as good as its ability to produce information on-demand.

While looking to enrich their existing SharePoint investment, Klotz took note of several third-party software solutions. After evaluating numerous options, they chose harmon.ie because of several differentiators. Some of harmon.ie’s key benefits to Klotz have included:

Fast, efficient navigation in the SharePoint web and folder hierarchy

Consistent and self-explanatory user interface

Search function to retrieve SharePoint document libraries and folders

harmon.ie’s simple, intuitive solution has enabled Klotz employees to get the most out of more than just their SharePoint, but also out of their email and file documentation. Klotz needed to find that connector to bridge the gap between Outlook and SharePoint, and harmon.ie presented them with the automated content synchronization and collaboration means for achieving that.

The ability to synchronize email steadily and regularly, rather than intermittently, has allowed Klotz to work directly from SharePoint without any single- or multi-user confusion – or additional user support efforts. harmon.ie has also improved Klotz’ email management through increased visibility and smooth functionality.

harmon.ie has helped Klotz employees to be able to retrieve SharePoint information more quickly, easily, and efficiently than ever before. They even found the Outlook integration to be simple and easy to follow.

harmon.ie’s metadata tagging and email sorting has greatly improved Klotz’ record keeping and data cataloging. “Klotz employees have even commented on how remarkably well harmon.ie has been able to derive metadata classifications from long email threads,” says Jürgen Kaiser. For Klotz employees to improve their collaboration and increase their production, they were happy to welcome an automated solution that wouldn’t bog them down with complicated steps for manipulating their document workflow.

“Using harmon.ie, we were able to achieve our project objectives with respect to document management in SharePoint,” reported Jürgen Kaiser.

Having already invested in SharePoint, the organization was able to strengthen this solution and enhance their workflow. Thanks to harmon.ie, a number of key areas – from synchronization to documentation to retrieval – have been vastly improved in an intuitive, user-friendly manner.

When the two governing bodies within Waterford, Ireland, were merged as the result of the 2014 Local Government Reform Act, the newly united Waterford City and County Council faced a daunting task: how to combine operations that served nearly 114,000 people and merge a huge trove of records in a very short time, all while staying in compliance with Ireland's strict record-keeping laws.

The oversight of this task fell to one person who knew that the best bet was to find an intuitive, software-based solution, that would let Council employees handle the tasks within the systems they already used, while also archiving the full spectrum of record types – from documents, to audio files, to emails – in a way that both kept them available, and kept the Council in compliance with the law.

Waterford City and County Council, Ireland: A harmon.ie Success Story

The City Council and County Council in Waterford were the last local government authorities to be merged under the Local Government Reform Act which meant they had the shortest amount of time to transition into a single entity with unified records that were easily accessible. Complying with record-keeping laws, of course, was not negotiable, and some of the documents dated back a century or more.

"We're heavily regulated. You may have to keep a document 30 or 40 years if it's a planning file and potentially hundreds of years, if it's property management," Rachel Neylin, Online Manager for Waterford City and County Council. “We have to have these file indexes in place, so people have to be trained on them."

There also was another crucial issue to contend with. "Unless the solution addressed how workers use email," said Neylin, "it wasn't going to work at all and you might as well not even bother. So many people work through email and they use it in a colloquial fashion, so they don't tend to attach the same importance to an email," she said. “They don't realize it is actually a record and can be produced in court if required."

The Waterford City and County Council had much to accomplish and not much time to do it – nor many people to oversee the process. "Originally they were going to have five people working on this project," said Neylin, "but that project group hasn’t materialized."

Having used SharePoint in the past, Neylin felt it was a good fit for what needed to be done. SharePoint 2007 was already in limited use by the finance, sport, corporate, and management departments for document management. But SharePoint’s limited exposure was not the biggest problem: SharePoint 2007 was widely disdained by employees. Even among those who had been trained on it, many had been swayed by rumors it was difficult to work with and were hesitant to learn how to use it properly.

The existing bias meant a widespread cultural change was needed before there could be broad adoption. "Workers' perception of SharePoint was one thing to try and counter," Neylin said. "It also wasn't viewed very positively because it was seen as being part of the merger. Because we have people working out of multiple, maybe three or four locations in day, any potential solution needed to work from every location."

The Solution and the harmon.ie Experience

Rachel needed something that would help employees embrace all of SharePoint's features and Google led her to harmon.ie. She downloaded the free version first and tried it out with several employees, some of whom had used SharePoint before and others who had not – the latter being the "hard nuts to crack." She knew if they could be won over, they would become "flag bearers" for harmon.ie and create that cultural change necessary to get SharePoint adopted by workers.

How did the trial go? Very well: the Waterford City and County Council decided to hire two trainers and now has 250 people using harmon.ie and the more current SharePoint 2013.

"harmon.ie was the key in getting the whole SharePoint option moving forward," said Neylin.

Having the SharePoint team calendar and harmon.ie operating from the same pane in Outlook also helped because workers then associated them with each other. That, in turn, developed a positive vibe among users that replaced the previous distrust of SharePoint. Along with sharing documents, workers also shared their experiences, asking each other what they thought and replying, "Oh, it was great," said Neylin.

Using harmon.ie to facilitate SharePoint adoption has helped the Council tackle the mass of documents it and its independent predecessors accumulated under Irish regulations. The trove included PDFs, PowerPoints, GPS and GIS files, audio clips, spreadsheets, images and text documents, as well as emails that are increasingly associated with every project. This also addressed the Council’s need to comply with stringent regulations for document retention.

"It’s absolutely key that we have a proper file index, that we have proper retention periods, and that people understand that anything that comes through email can be regarded as a record, so they have to be careful of what they say, what they do, and how they save it," Neylin said. "If we didn't have harmon.ie, we wouldn't be able to do it all."

Local authorities, like the one in Waterford, assume many roles in their communities. In that way, they are a lot like a collection of businesses with different products and services. Neylin felt SharePoint, on its own, was aimed more at handling the documents of a single company, but harmon.ie provided the kind of support the Council needed to show its employees all of SharePoint's abilities and how they could be used across all departments, keeping the necessary documents immediately within reach whenever needed.

The Waterford City and County Council continue to train employees in harmon.ie and SharePoint, with a goal of increasing adoption to approximately 450 users. harmon.ie has been absolutely key in getting the SharePoint solution underway for the Council’s records management needs. "harmon.ie is just really, really good. Very practical, very user-friendly and intuitive," said Neylin.

Powered by harmon.ie, the Council is on the verge of completing the once monumental task of moving records archived under the old internet domains of its predecessors, into SharePoint. Once accomplished, the old domains can finally be shut down – a symbolic closing of the books on its transformation into a single governing body.

"If we didn’t have harmon.ie, we wouldn’t be able to do it at all," Neylin said. "Loads of things now are being done through harmon.ie."

Waterford City and County Council Case Study

Network Communications Manufacturer eradicates old habits and enables not only easy compliance, but seamless, cross-organizational collaboration.

One of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, this company is a market-leading manufacturer of network equipment provides end-to-end network integration and management solutions.

This is the story of a global technology leader and its Chief Legal Counsel as the business champion of a best-in-class, corporate-wide knowledge management, retention and compliance program – with the legal group leading the charge and subsequently bringing in IT, sales and other departments on board. The company’s pragmatic approach to flexing technology to the needs of the business is a success story of how today’s leaders can apply lessons learned from the SharePoint trenches to empower cross-organizational technology adoption, use and compliance, in order to achieve business goals.

The company was facing a challenge familiar to many enterprise organizations: the need to capture and store emails, documents, and attachments in an organized manner, so they could be found later on. Its employees had come up with their own solution-of-least-resistance: storing emails in Outlook, and storing documents on shared drives, in hundreds of different folders. This led to “folder creep” and unchecked duplication as more and more folders were created across multiple departments. Adding to the folder creep, documents were could not being cataloged and were often duplicated by saving multiple copies on the shared drives and by distributing copies via email attachments. Due to this document proliferation, the latest version could not be located when needed, to say nothing about the vast wasted storage space of duplicated document copies.

The first-level solution was to implement SharePoint, which allowed employees to store documents centrally and easily. However, this was not entirely successful in curbing the folder and document creep and did not address the need for proper indexing, storing and retrieval of files and emails. Employees found it hard to actually use SharePoint; in particular assigning metadata was too complicated.

The web systems administrator and SharePoint administrator, summed up the persisting issues: “When I looked at other team sites, I noticed that people seemed to see SharePoint as another file folder. Employees would create a new folder, and then a new one, and then a new one, essentially replicating shared drives now in SharePoint.”

Users, it turned out, were treating SharePoint like they had their personal Outlook clients and were still not applying the pertinent metadata to each file. This practice actually increased the problems it sought to solve, especially when employees shared documents as most continued to share as attachments in emails, exacerbating the version control

challenges. It was clear the company needed a better, easy-to-use and scalable way to ensure employees would not only adopt SharePoint and apply the proper metadata to documents, but also change the way they handled email attachments –from appending files to using SharePoint links.

The company’s Vice President and Chief Legal Counsel knew that unless his team helped solved the business need – make document sharing and storing seamless for employees, and solve for it easily and quickly – the company would not be able to meet the stringent regulatory and legal requirements expected.

The company had strict policies already in place to ensure compliance and audit standards were maintained, with SharePoint at the center of their knowledge and document management infrastructure.

“We’ve recently rolled out a retention policy that stipulates emails aren’t documents of record unless they’re stored in SharePoint,” explained the Chief Legal Counsel. “Emails in Exchange cannot be assumed records. If an email contains something important, you need to get it out of the inbox and put it in SharePoint.”

The company had run up against the Last Mile dilemma: employees could import attachments from emails in Outlook and stored on Exchange servers to SharePoint, but not the emails themselves. The company needed a solution that would allow the emails to be stored like documents, and one that would make it easy for employees to add the metadata needed for classification and retrieval of all SharePoint files.

Such a solution also had to accommodate the need for various departments within the company to access the same document from multiple SharePoint sites. Because attachments moved into SharePoint were stripped from their associated emails, it was possible that relevant information might be missing when the document was called up. What the company needed was a fail-safe way to get the knowledge management and compliance job done, every time.

The company found its “Last Mile” solution with harmon.ie and its seamless ability to add emails and documents to their proper destination in SharePoint, including the automatic indexing and classification of such documents.

“This is great,” said the SharePoint administrator upon an initial demonstration of harmon.ie. “I can just drag an email. It saves as a message, the attachment’s on it. Works perfectly.”

With the implementation of harmon.ie, the company was able to eradicate old habits and simultaneously enable not only easy compliance, but seamless, cross-organizational collaboration. Since harmon.ie’s email-based sidebar is incorporated directly into

Outlook, users no longer have to tediously switch between windows to move documents and emails into SharePoint as it is all done automatically.

Even more importantly, harmon.ie’s automatic prompting for required metadata ensures all departments needing to feed into the compliance trail are doing so, without expending special effort, while making all documents and emails stored in SharePoint easily searchable. In fact, the “one window, no pain” functionality of harmon.ie has increased adoption of SharePoint significantly across the organization – starting with the legal department, and making its way into IT, sales and other departments.

And although employees still use hundreds of individual sites across the system, they are always accessing a single version of truth for each document, with its associated metadata for proper indexing and classification. No longer do a dozen different versions of a crucial document exist, raising the question of which to use; nor are important details missing because they were not saved into the correct version. Now, when users drag files into specific folders through the help the harmon.ie sidebar, they get immediately prompted for the specific metadata required. Only after they enter that metadata, are users allowed to store the document. And when a document needs to be emailed, harmon.ie prompts users to send a SharePoint attachment link rather than a traditional attachment, letting everyone see the same and latest version.

All of this is a boon to the Legal Department, since emails are now easily storable within SharePoint which helps ensure compliance with information governance and regulatory standards as well as the company’s own policy that emails are only considered records once in SharePoint.

“Every library that we’ll use is accessible to me in harmon.ie,” said the Chief Counsel. “Even for departments that haven’t done custom content types at that level, we still keep their sites on harmon.ie because it’s a fast and effortless interface.”

Since the implementation of harmon.ie, its proven ability to reduce digital sprawl and improve metadata usage has made it the killer app for the company. It has made compliance with the company’s email retention policy simple and employees have embraced its ease of use through the Outlook pane. Though the project was born from business needs within the Legal Department, harmon.ie’s features are now being embraced across the organization – making the right thing to do, the easy thing to do for thousands of employees.

Next time, when you hear innovation, collaboration and compliance can’t live under the same roof, consider this company’s experience. Consider how they took the lessons learned from making SharePoint the company collaboration and compliance hub without the expected sacrifice for those who use the system daily. Add to that the increased adoption of SharePoint and you will turn those skeptics into evangelists.

Network Communications Manufacturer Case Study

Learn more about harmon.ie 10 - SharePoint and Office 365 the way you think!  Organize emails and documents by topic, from Outlook. 

The Global Fund, an international partnership organization connecting governments, NGOs and civic communities through funding and investment to eradicate HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis was struggling with the way they processed and managed documents. These problems were largely a result of poor infrastructure within the countries where these diseases are most prevalent, along with the difficulties of managing the overall projects and meeting strict governance and compliance requirements of different governments and NGOs in each destination.

In early 2016, The Global Fund had migrated from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365/SharePoint Online, yet continued to struggle with these same problems.

The goals prior to the migration included:

The reality just months later was disappointing:

--Moving to the cloud did not fix the problem of user-adoption

The Global Fund now uses harmon.ie to make the processing of funding applications a smooth experience for everyone. Internally, the shift from exchanging documents via email to using SharePoint to its full collaboration potential, has brought a clarity  and ease to the process and user-adoption has increased massively. This, in turn, has helped revolutionize the way people actually work at the organization and ultimately helps ensure that the organization gets finance to the people who need it most.

The Global Fund is a Geneva-based partnership organization whose mission is to eradicate HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Originally founded in 2002 as part of the World Health Organization, the fund partners with government, private sector, NGOs and any group of people that have been affected by, or are working to combat, these preventable diseases.

The Global Fund works as a financing institution that raises and invests approximately $4 billion a year to support worldwide programs which are run locally by in-country experts within the communities most in need. The Global Fund strives to assist these local communities to find the most effective method to use their funding; ways that will make the biggest impact on people’s lives and general health.  

The grant-requesting process: an administrative challenge

The Global Fund employs around 1,000 people who use SharePoint as part of their funding request and approval process. When benefactors ask for support, The Global Fund requests a considerable amount of documentation relating to the project’s intended goals and motivations, to ensure their donors’ money is used judiciously.

Employees therefore spend much of their time assessing applications for funding, and with each request comes a multitude of documents. What’s more, assessments continue throughout the application period, all the way to the actual distribution of funds, and as the project itself is implemented. Employees must assess the performance of the programs that the money is supporting in addition to the overall impact of the operation in a community, on a case by case basis, so that they can ensure the funds are well spent.

For a single grant, The Global Fund typically produces several hundred documents. Over their worldwide portfolio, this adds up—at present there are over 1.4 million documents in The Global Fund’s SharePoint environment.

Another big challenge The Global Fund faces is that many benefactor countries suffer from poor internet connectivity, and so web-based systems for fund-applications have proven problematic. Therefore, email is still the primary method of receiving requests and providing information.

Finally, since The Global Fund works in close collaboration with numerous national governments and local NGOs, they must be able to comply with a range of strict governance and compliance regulations around the world.

At the beginning of 2016, The Global Fund migrated from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365/SharePoint Online. It was hoped that the move would increase user adoption of SharePoint among other productivity-related issues. Unfortunately, the move to the cloud did not fix the problem of user-adoption—SharePoint, in both its online and on-premises forms, was not any easier to use, hence documents were still being passed around the organization as email attachments, with important information ending up locked away within individuals’ inboxes, or left to another team member to file the document in SharePoint.

The result was multiple copies of a document without one version of the truth, which led to poor governance, a lack of compliance, and a broader impact to the business. Projects were not being managed according to the organization’s standards, and this had an effect on The Global Fund being able to meet its goals.

In the summer of 2015, The Global Fund began working with harmon.ie. By the end of that year, they completed an evaluation with a focus group of company employees who used harmon.ie in their Grant Management division. Within that division, feedback was fantastic.

As Phillip Worrell, The Global Fund’s ICT Engineer and Business Analyst points out:
“When the evaluation period ran out, we had employees saying, ‘Give me this product now.’ Because it was such a great product for them, and it made their lives there easier.”

Feedback from users was similarly positive. For some employees, using harmon.ie completely changed their experience at work by humanizing the use of SharePoint, making their entire internal process more intuitive.

“It will revolutionize the way that I work,” one focus group participant explained. “This makes things so easy,” summarized another: “we all love it.”

Employees also found they could now work collaboratively with their colleagues, in a way they had never been able to before. A member of The Global Fund management division who has gone through all the iterations of SharePoint and other systems, said it was the most valuable tool they had ever used.

At harmon.ie, our vision is to make the user experience central to all our solutions. This is what we mean when we talk about putting people at the heart of technology. Humanizing IT means making technology integrate as seamlessly as possible into our natural way of thinking and working.

For document management, this means making the process of doing the ‘right’ thing, the easy and most natural thing. Instead of sending documents back and forth via email attachments or uploading them manually to SharePoint as an afterthought, harmon.ie users can simply drag and drop documents from their email client into their SharePoint and it updates automatically. Again, by using harmon.ie, The Global Fund could replace document attachments with links to the file in SharePoint. This eliminated document chaos and ensured everyone was on the same page with grant documents.

Moving forward, The Global Fund is looking to roll out harmon.ie’s mobile application. Employees travel frequently and they often must work on documents on the move. Using mobile apps, they can edit and review documents and send them back to SharePoint no matter where they are in the world. This is the next step for the Global Fund in supporting their employees to work on documents and grant funding applications wherever they are, in a way that is most natural to them.

We’re excited about helping Global Fund keep on improving their critical business processes, improve the funding application process, most importantly, keep providing the tools that lets the user work in a way that is most natural to them.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), an agency of the European Union, is the centerpiece of the European Union's strategy for aviation safety. Its mission is to promote the highest common standards of safety and environmental protection in civil aviation. The agency develops common safety and environmental rules at the European level. It monitors the implementation of standards through inspections in the member states and provides the necessary technical expertise, training and research. The agency works hand in hand with the national authorities, which continue to carry out many operational tasks, such as certification of individual aircraft, or licensing of pilots.

EASA uses a host of financial documents, technical documents, and planning documents that need to be shared with colleagues within the organization’s headquarters, and with satellite offices.

Originally storing documents on shared drives, EASA identified gaps in document management and retention requirements, and it sought a solution. “EASA decided to centralize knowledge, and move from network drive storage to central storage using SharePoint”, noted a section manager at EASA. “Now, for a lot of people here in the agency, moving to SharePoint, and especially leaving their network drive, and leaving their favorite tool, Outlook, was difficult.”

Once SharePoint was selected as the infrastructure for central storage, EASA started to look for a tool to link Outlook and SharePoint, to make it easier for people to actually start using SharePoint.

But EASA needed help for more than just making it easy to store new documents in SharePoint. “We also had to find a solution for the older documents, which we need to keep mostly for our liability,” observed the records manager. EASA sought a way to enable bulk uploads of existing documents, which would also help bootstrap the migration to SharePoint.

EASA learned about harmon.ie from other European agencies that were already using harmon.ie. It was simple. According to the section manager, “We tried it out. It worked, so we decided to buy it. Normally, we develop requirements, do a market study, and then select a solution. But with harmon.ie, it was just perfect.”

harmon.ie was selected to simplify the move from drive storage to central storage. The thought was to link SharePoint to Outlook, “which is the natural environment workers are used to working with.” harmon.ie displays the SharePoint structure inside Outlook. “That’s what gave us the entry point, and that’s what we have used to make the switch easier,” added the manager.

“I was the pilot person here,” said another manager. “We added some business people because they were using SharePoint a lot more… then we added people doing invoice tracking. We then added our secretary assistant; she was a bit reluctant in the beginning, but she’s using it very often now. She never goes to SharePoint directly anymore…. that was our test period.”

“We saw harmon.ie as quite a straight forward way to get the documents directly within SharePoint,” said the document and records manager.

Another document and records manager noted, “For certain functionality, such as uploading of multiple documents or other operations on multiple documents, we found the harmon.ie interface nicer than SharePoint’s, and more user friendly.” With this ability of harmon.ie, uploading all old documents was quick and simple.

People who were reluctant at first to move to SharePoint, found that with harmon.ie they rarely needed to go to SharePoint, performing all operations from their harmon.ie add-in inside Outlook.

EASA uses harmon.ie to store emails in SharePoint as well as documents. “We have a lot of audit trails and requirements, so we basically store everything. Now it’s easily and centrally stored, and accessible to other people in the SharePoint environment. We would have made that a requirement, but without harmon.ie, I’m pretty sure it would have cost people a lot more time to properly do this,” noted the section manager.

Training for harmon.ie is minimal – it can be completed in approximately half an hour as part of a two hour training for SharePoint.

The European Aviation Safety Agency is rolling out harmon.ie to the entire agency - more than 800 aviation experts and administrators.

European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) Case Study

Australia’s national research agency enables secure management of and collaboration across scientific projects with harmon.ie, which increases adoption of SharePoint and ensures emails, contracts, IP, and other data can be easily accessed.

For the past century, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has worked for the nation’s betterment. Founded as the Advisory Council of Science and Industry in 1916, the agency’s output has contributed to inventions and innovations that have driven a broad spectrum of economic, environmental and social impacts across Australia and the world.

Are you using Wi-Fi? Some of the key patents in that technology came out of CSIRO projects.

As with any research agency, CSIRO’s lifeblood is data. And with 5,000 employees nationwide, the amount of data flowing into and through the agency is staggering – and sometimes problematic. CSIRO employees must retain and collaborate on important IP, but remain in compliance with Australian law.

When you are a research agency, there never too much data. But data that is scattered, inaccessible, unable to be correlated or simply missing is not of particular use to researchers. It also raises red flags to those who deal with compliance, and hampers effective audits.

Because it is a public entity, CSIRO operates under the Science and Industry Research Act of 1949, which provides a defined structure it must adhere to; and under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act of 2013, which regulates public resource management. To that end, CSIRO’s legal department is the guardian of compliance and the agency’s most valuable asset – IP – and must ensure that: 1) data that is years or even decades old can easily be found and used for research or audit purposes, and 2) that current and future research projects succeed, which the department does by overseeing IP, signing off on contracts and ensuring that normal business operations run smoothly. 

When CSIRO realized it was facing an information logjam in the legal department, the agency recognized the solution had to manage data in a way that made collaboration and discovery easy, while simultaneously maintaining security and compliance.

The initial solution was to implement SharePoint, which brought much-needed document management and collaboration capabilities to the CSIRO team, easing visibility and searchability of information. However, while documents could be centralized in SharePoint, with no easy way to transfer email into the system, critical information remained relegated to the original inbox. As a department that is “very email oriented, and likely to capture important information and conversations through email” according to a service manager at CSIRO, this meant that data relevant to patents, contracts and other processes was scattered and sometimes accessible to only one person. 

“We’ve got a limit within our organization of what size our personnel inboxes can be,” said the service manager. “A lot of them were hitting up to 90,000 gigs rather than the 4,000 gigs that they’re allowed.”

The prevalence of siloed, chaotically-organized and opaque email inboxes caused major challenges with retaining the agency’s IP and continuing work when individuals left the organization.

“We periodically go through massive structural changes, and with those changes we have people leaving the organization with corporate knowledge that we can’t capture unless it’s in SharePoint,” continued the manager. “That’s what we were finding: people had information stored in their inboxes and other unknown locations, and it was just walking out the door with them.”

The solution for legal’s concerns was harmon.ie, which allowed users to transfer both emails and documents from Outlook to SharePoint in a “one window, no pain” operation, and ensured the information was stored in a way that addressed productivity, compliance and IP retention.

“Our personnel can literally just stay in their Outlook pane to transfer emails and documents to SharePoint, as well as access all information stored in their inbox or SharePoint,” said the service manager.