harmon.ie helps Australian state government agency collaborate and manage records

The Australian state agency covers a broad range of responsibilities, and reports to four different ministers. This complexity compels the agency to be very accurate in their records management.

With a goal towards conservation, there is no paper-based correspondence at the agency – emails and electronic documents represent today’s correspondence and documentation. In this environment, many important emails are documents of record. This data needs to be recorded and maintained for an array of collaboration, governance, and compliance requirements. Owing to the nature of the topics under the purview of the agency, content must be quickly accessible for a wide variety of compliance and e-discovery reasons.

SharePoint was brought in several years ago to be the content management repository of record for the agency. Recognizing the challenges business users faced when capturing and classifying emails and documents using SharePoint ‘out of the box,’ the agency rolled out harmon.ie as part of the initial SharePoint implementation to 4000 of the agency’s employees.

The agency was introduced to harmon.ie by an outside contractor who sold them a complete document management package. The package included SharePoint, harmon.ie, and tools for government automation in one offering.

harmon.ie was purchased as the tool to drive SharePoint adoption and usage. By making ‘the right thing the easy thing,’ harmon.ie eliminates the complexity of capturing and classifying emails and documents, and makes it easy for workers to find content quickly, because the worker remains in Outlook, their ‘comfort zone.’

At the agency, harmon.ie helps workers manage records to meet compliance requirements. When workers upload emails and documents to SharePoint using harmon.ie and there are required properties in the SharePoint library, harmon.ie automatically opens a Property Editor, prompting users to fill in the required properties. By making it easy to accurately classify content, harmon.ie helps fulfill the agency's business objectives and comply with government regulations.

“Metadata is very important, particularly for the legal department. harmon.ie helps create order in the document chaos,” says the lead business consultant.

harmon.ie makes it very easy to upload documents and emails to SharePoint and collaborate on content by sharing links instead of copies of documents. This prevents version chaos while reducing already constrained Inbox volume.

harmon.ie users “like the familiarity of harmon.ie, because it looks like their directory tree, with the same icons and all the stuff they are accustomed to,” adds the business consultant.

harmon.ie was rolled in batches of 200 users as part of the SharePoint implementation initiative at the agency. Overall, the process took several months to complete. harmon.ie installation was very smooth.

The agency delivers SharePoint (and harmon.ie) training today over Microsoft Teams. Specifically, one-hour training sessions are provided on subjects ranging from introduction to SharePoint, to content management best practices, to how harmon.ie simplifies managing emails and documents using SharePoint as a shared content repository.

As part of the training and support program, the agency has generated dedicated materials and they make extensive use of harmon.ie ‘mini-videos’ that describe how to perform basic operations like capturing and classifying emails and documents on SharePoint, how to find content quickly using harmon.ie’s consolidated search capabilities across Microsoft 365 apps, and how to share document links instead of sending bulky and wasteful email attachments.

“harmon.ie feature videos are brilliant. They are very focused and answer just what you need to do”, says the business consultant.

harmon.ie has become a key part of the strategic IT infrastructure that helps the agency deliver on its mission. Some specific success milestones include the following:

• harmon.ie is extensively used at the agency to boost worker participation in the SharePoint-based collaboration initiative.
• harmon.ie is a key driver in the success of SharePoint as the agency’s repository of record for important emails and documents for governance and compliance.
• harmon.ie makes the population of metadata simple, so content can be found later.
• Sharing links instead of document attachments is heavily promoted as a ‘getting started’ feature because it reduces the size of email inboxes and ensures there is one copy of the truth.

To conclude, “harmon.ie enables people to get on with their business, and not have to deal with files or content management.”