Microsoft partners, harmon.ie and Gimmal have announced a strategic partnership to help business users with an easy way to capture, classify, store, find and retrieve important documents and emails in SharePoint, directly from Outlook.

The companies also released an industry report, “The One Email You Can’t Ignore: The Risks and Business Impact of Failing to Treat Emails as Records.” The report assesses the current state of managing email for information governance purposes, uncovers the obstacles and risks information governance professionals and their organizations face when it comes to maintaining and managing emails and documents as business records and includes previously untold accounts of the business and financial consequences associated with lost emails of record. 

Harmon.ie and Gimmal together promise the ability with Outlook on the desktop or using the Outlook OWA app on smartphones and tablets, to let users:

• Accurately classify documents and email messages by following simple prompts
• Easily maintain a complete version history of all important documents and emails
• Find and retrieve documents and emails for discovery, audit and compliance requirements
• Prevent data leakage by sharing secured links instead of attachments

By removing user adoption roadblocks and improving information governance, the joint solution aims to help enterprises reduce legal costs and risk, eliminate unnecessary storage and associated costs, make important documents easy to find and access, and, ultimately, strengthen their ability to prove recordkeeping compliance.

“harmon.ie makes RIM compliance through SharePoint simple. Its focus on the user experience and tight integration across all devices and platforms makes record-keeping and compliance initiatives more successful,” noted David Quackenbush, President and CEO at Gimmal.

“Overcoming the last mile of information governance, our joint solution gives enterprises an accurate, and easily accessible, digital paper trail.”

“Overlooking the role of business emails in information governance and compliance programs can be a costly mistake, and many enterprises are still struggling to get employees to embrace proper recordkeeping,” said Yaacov Cohen, CEO of harmon.ie.

“The key to avoiding document chaos and complying with increasingly strict governance directives is to make the right thing the easy thing to do. Our joint solution with Gimmal turns SharePoint and Office 365 into a complete enterprise content management system, resulting in robust recordkeeping for organizations of all sizes.”