Mainsoft Corporation, a leading provider of cross-platform
interoperability software, today announced Harmony – free software for
Microsoft Outlook that provides full-featured access to Google
Docs documents or Microsoft SharePoint document libraries from
within e-mail. Based on the premise that it should be easier for people
to work together on documents, Harmony brings some of the best
collaboration and document-sharing tools into Outlook, where users spend
a large part of their workday.
Currently, most Outlook users store documents on their local hard
drives and share them as e-mail attachments, resulting in wasted time
trying to find the latest version of a document and merging feedback
from various people. The new Harmony sidebar enables people to share a
single, centralized copy of the document, eliminating the many
intermediary steps associated with sending e-mail attachments back and
forth.
The Future of Email
Despite the growth in new communication tools, e-mail remains the
number one business communication channel. According to Andrew McAffee,
author of the book, Enterprise 2.0, people spend an estimated
26 hours per week on average using enterprise email.
Matt Cain, research vice president and Gartner’s lead e-mail analyst,
states, "We believe the ultimate role of the e-mail client is to
aggregate communication and collaboration streams from many modalities
into one common interface. In this way, the e-mail client becomes the
communication and collaboration master console — a universal queue, so
to speak."
"Adapting e-mail to the new world of collaboration technologies is
something being addressed across the industry, with both Google and
Microsoft transforming their own e-mail client experiences," said Yaacov
Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft. "Harmony offers a cross-vendor, cross-platform
approach, which delivers an integrated user experience across Microsoft
Outlook and Google Docs, and makes document sharing a lot more
accessible to end users. "
"Our users spend a large part of their workday in e-mail, and the
time it takes to save each attachment to the desktop as an intermediary
step to moving it to SharePoint, discourages people from using team
sites and document links," remarked Michael Bucciero, business solutions
manager for Louis Dreyfus Commodities North America. "People waste time
digging through their e-mail to find the latest version of a shared
document and merging comments from various users. Mainsoft software
eliminates these problems by making document sharing convenient, fast,
and easy from within email."
