Evaluating Harmon.ie For IBM Notes 9

I’ve spent the past two days evaluating the new Harmon.ie release of their software for IBM Notes 9 that connects to our SharePoint farm. I’m using a SharePoint 2007 farm currently but am looking forward to seeing the connection to 2013 as well. The results have been pleasantly surprising in adding additional functionality to Notes and SharePoint. One unexpected feature that has been really helpful is the people connection that pulls user information from within Notes. Current emails will automatically show the sender in the sidebar to provide more context the conversation.

The document browsing feature is also easy to use to browse the farm and instead of sending documents back and forth in Notes, you can simply drag the file and it will create a direct link to the SharePoint document. From within Notes you can view the author, version information and comments of a document. Another nice feature is being able to pull SharePoint calendars easily into Notes and overlay them; which was the original purpose at looking at the product.

The Harmon.ie add-on was easy to install with the only caveat being the installation of a mail template that was added by my Notes administrator due to permission settings for our environment. The template allows the functionality of dragging emails and email attachments directly into the Harmon.ie bar and drop these items directly into SharePoint. It even will prompt for appropriate metadata that may be required.

Overall I’ve been very pleased with the product and am looking forward to evaluating it for the next week and seeing how it changes my work processes. I may also take a look at their mobile solutions for accessing SharePoint.