‘Social Email’ Simplifies SharePoint Tasks, Removing Barriers to User Adoption

LONDON – November 14, 2011 – Social email software provider harmon.ie® today announced the latest results of its global SharePoint® User Challenge, designed to demonstrate how enterprises can accelerate Microsoft® SharePoint user adoption using harmon.ie’s social email. The challenge – taken by more than 500 SharePoint experts, power users, developers and business users in 10 industry conferences including the Gartner Portals Content and Collaboration Summit in London and this month’s European SharePoint Conference in Berlin – shows that users can complete key social and collaboration tasks four to six times faster by accessing SharePoint functionality from a harmon.ie window in their Microsoft Outlook® or IBM Lotus Notes® inbox.

Tasks that took 40 to 251 seconds using the native SharePoint interface required only 8 to 55 seconds in harmon.ie’s social email, according to a cumulative analysis of all 10 challenges. harmon.ie’s speed and ease of use – including reducing typical SharePoint tasks from nine steps to one by eliminating the need to toggle between applications – have increased usage of SharePoint from an average of 30 percent to as high as 80 percent in just a few months in enterprises worldwide.

Bringing SharePoint Functionality into Email

Forrester Research report across-the-board underutilization of collaboration and social tools, with 64% of surveyed businesses receiving few benefits, if any, from their investments.  According to their recently released “State of Workforce Technology Adoption” report, only 20% of business workers use team document sharing sites such as SharePoint daily. Similarly, a 2010 uSamp survey revealed that only one-third of end users in a SharePoint environment use it on a daily basis. These user adoption gaps stem largely from the multiple steps and window navigation involved in completing SharePoint tasks.

Enterprises that have adopted harmon.ie to make SharePoint functionality available from an email sidebar use have seen dramatic results. 

“The only real way to eliminate document chaos and get email correspondence into our document management system is to incorporate SharePoint into people’s preferred work environments, including Outlook and our insurance policy management CRM system,” said Darren Knowles, Group Data and Communications Manager for UK-based insurance and reinsurance broker RK Harrison Group, Ltd. “Using harmon.ie, people readily search, access and share email and documents on SharePoint without having to bail out of email or deal with distracting context switches.  It’s what SharePoint-email integration is supposed to be.” 

"harmon.ie provides an easy way to archive email records with complete metadata on SharePoint,” said Andreas Wilmsmeier, Managing Director for German IT consultancy coretelligence, which uses SharePoint for collaborating on client projects and business development.  ”We can use Outlook to provide the fastest, easiest way to search, access, and archive emails and documents from within the context of our daily work routine."

15,000 Hours Saved Per Year

In harmon.ie’s SharePoint User Challenge, users complete a SharePoint task of their choice from the SharePoint web interface and then from harmon.ie for SharePoint. The results show that participants spend 75% to 85% less time when using harmon.ie instead of the SharePoint interface to:

• Publish email messages on SharePoint (8 seconds versus 48)
• Save email attachments to SharePoint (8 seconds versus 48)
• Send links to SharePoint documents (8 seconds versus 40)
• Upload a local document to SharePoint and send a link (15 seconds versus 60)
• Find a colleague’s profile and status from email (9 seconds versus 36)
• Identify and contact a needed in-house resource (50 seconds versus 251)
• View version history and IM the last person who edited a document (55 seconds versus 223)

With these efficiencies, harmon.ie can save more than 15,000 hours per year for a 1,000-person organization with a SharePoint deployment, while also ensuring that the enterprise reap the full benefits of its SharePoint investment. 

More information about the harmon.ie SharePoint User Challenge can be found at WeAreAllOnTheSamePage.com. 

About harmon.ie 

harmon.ie (pronounced ‘harmony’) is a provider of social email software that brings document collaboration to every business user by transforming the email client into a collaboration and social workspace. Thousands of businesses already use harmon.ie social email to vastly increase user adoption of Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs™ for document sharing, collaboration, and social networking. Formerly known as Mainsoft, harmon.ie is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner building cross-platform enterprise software since 1993. For more information, visit http://harmon.ie.

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