Over the last year, much has been written about remote work, with the bulk of the discussion focusing on the need to bring people together in virtual meetings, using tools like Zoom and Teams.

But one aspects of remote work that has been largely overlooked, is the (new) challenge of managing content when workers are geographically dispersed. In a recent report, Gartner noted that “As organizations rapidly scale their remote work capabilities and deploy new technology, IT capacity is increasingly strained. … [they] are still struggling to successfully implement and enforce data governance frameworks. As they accumulate new types of data and rely on fragmented storage systems, they are more exposed to regulatory, ethical, and data security risks."

Fragmented storage systems could be as simple as saving email attachments and downloading files to a local hard drive. In fact, in a recent webinar, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), reported their employees were doing just that. When lockdown hit, IT at ESDC discovered email inboxes were ‘exploding’ as employees who were suddenly disconnected from shared drives, were stockpiling important documents in email and on their local drives, leading to endless document versions and… ‘information chaos.’

Like many organizations, ESDC quickly migrated to Microsoft 365, and that was wildly successful for meetings – with 30,000 employees moving to Teams in just 3 months. To address information chaos, the next step was getting documents in order using the Microsoft 365 tools already in place.

But getting document in order with Microsoft 365 is not straightforward because Microsoft 365 includes multiple apps with document repositories. Case in point; Microsoft 365 emails and documents may be stored in Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and even Teams. So, with many workers toiling away from home office ‘silos,’ where emails and documents actually end up is anyone’s guess. The question is, “How can you implement information governance with such a dispersed workforce?”

Information governance

Enforcing information governance is a problem, in part, because many emails are ‘documents of record’ that need to be retained for compliance or regulation requirements. And with Microsoft 365, finding important emails and documents across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook is a not easy … for remote workers, as well as for information and compliance managers.

So, while Microsoft 365 might be part of the problem, when used together with the new harmon.ie 365, it is also the core of the solution… Because harmon.ie 365 makes it easy to capture, classify, and then discover emails and documents across multiple Microsoft 365 apps; SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook.

Want to learn more? Watch our November 2021 webinar, entitled Conquering Information Chaos with Microsoft 365 and harmon.ie.