harmon.ie Helps the Canadian Dept. of Agriculture Reap Benefits from SharePoint

Press release

harmon.ie Helps the Canadian Dept. of Agriculture Reap Benefits from SharePoint

The responsibility of feeding the people of Canada rests squarely on the shoulders of the Canadian Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food (AAFC). Their partnership with harmon.ie helped AAFC achieve their business objectives; namely, coordinating policy and collaborating internally, with local, provincial, and federal agencies, as well as with partners.

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Tel Aviv, Israel

28 October 2020

Canadian Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) today demonstrated how harmon.ie makes it easy for knowledge workers to use SharePoint and fulfill the corporate mandate for managing its millions of email records, while driving Microsoft SharePoint adoption.

"We know that governmental departments have the difficult task of serving the people," says Yaacov Cohen, harmon.ie founder and CEO, "and we are grateful for the opportunity to help them fulfill this important job. Classifying content is a crucial phase of fulfilling government objectives; namely, coordinating policy and collaborating internally, with other agencies and partners, and harmon.ie is the key to a simple classification process that all workers can follow."

SharePoint is Great, But….

In the past, AAFC used an OpenText document system. A number of years ago, the decision was made to move to SharePoint on-premises. The move to SharePoint was promising, but AAFC still faced a few challenges.

  • Document versioning chaos – too many versions of documents floating around created confusion about what was the latest/authoritative document.
  • Saving emails to SharePoint – there was no easy way to upload important emails to SharePoint. Since many emails are really business documents that need to be retained, this was a big problem.
  • Limited email inbox storage – with only several gigabytes of email storage, workers had to find a centralized location outside of Outlook to store important emails.
  • Accurately tagging content in SharePoint – workers were often not compliant with tagging documents in SharePoint metadata because it was seen as unnecessary overhead.
  • Bulk uploading of content to SharePoint – with many documents to upload, the overhead of tagging each document one by one was unacceptable to the worker community.

harmon.ie to the Rescue

AAFC selected harmon.ie to simplify employees’ interaction with SharePoint.

harmon.ie solves AAFC’s SharePoint challenges by making it easy for knowledge workers to use SharePoint. Workers simply drag and drop emails and documents to a SharePoint sidebar in their Outlook window, and they are prompted for required metadata. Important emails are stored in a centralized location and tagged so they are available to colleagues. There is always one version of the latest document, and mailboxes are not overflowing.

The results were spectacular. “We ran a pilot and it was very well received. And then more and more people wanted to get licenses and we just decided to buy harmon.ie for everyone,” says Mario Gaulin, Director of Enterprise Information Solutions at AAFC.

Today, harmon.ie is used extensively by a diverse group of AAFC employees across many departments, to capture and classify documents and emails from Outlook and from Windows Explorer into SharePoint. Links are now routinely sent instead of attachments.

By making it easy to accurately classify content, harmon.ie helps fulfill AAFC’s business objectives; namely, coordinating policy and collaborating internally, with local, provincial, and federal agencies, as well as with partners.

Gaulin sums up AAFC’s harmon.ie experience:

“People are not going to change. If you want them to use SharePoint, you have to make it easy for them to capture, classify, and find emails and documents. harmon.ie is the key.”

Future plans

AAFC is rolling out harmon.ie to its entire user community as it migrates to Microsoft 365. This move will further external collaboration with constituents in the Canadian ecosystem. AAFC is particularly keen to explore the ability to auto-tag content using the newly-announced SharePoint Syntex. harmon.ie will be there every step of the way to help AAFC complete its critical mission.

Read the complete AAFC case study.

About AAFC

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is the department of the Government of Canada responsible for policies governing the production, processing, and marketing of all farm, food, and agri-based products. The department works closely with provincial and territorial governments in the development and delivery of policies and programs. The department is also responsible for ensuring collaboration with its portfolio partners which are also involved in regulating and supporting Canadian agriculture.

About harmon.ie

harmon.ie makes it easy for knowledge workers to capture and classify emails and documents to SharePoint and Teams directly from Outlook, the place they already spend their work time. As such, it is easy to discover and share important content when needed, right from the email client.

By making it easy to do the right thing, harmon.ie increases SharePoint adoption, workplace productivity, as well as information governance and compliance. That is why thousands of enterprise customers count on harmon.ie's SharePoint and Microsoft 365-based user experience products for email and records management, collaboration, knowledge retention, and SharePoint adoption.

harmon.ie has won numerous Microsoft Best App awards and is a long time Microsoft Partner.

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Media Contact:
Maya Bickson
harmon.ie Marketing Manager
Maya@harmon.ie

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