Hate your inbox? Harmon.ie claims it can help.

The company is releasing a solution today that it claims can transform email to searchable documents that can be managed in SharePoint.

Breaking Silos

It's a simple solution, David Lavenda, product manager at Harmon.ie told CMSWire. Instead of separate repositories for email and document management – in this case Exchange and SharePoint — you turn email into documents and store them in SharePoint. That makes them easier to find and better for collaboration, he said.

“We've made it super easy to upload those Exchange email messages to SharePoint, automate the classification by taking the information in the headers and converting the messages into SharePoint columns,” he continued.

The single, central document repository makes it easier for organizations to manage both records and clients, as well as retaining critical knowledge.

It turns email into a more effective business tool, he said.

“Historically email was this almost real time communication tool that was different from documents. Over the years document creation applications and email applications have grown in parallel. Today it makes no sense to ask people who are already struggling across many different business initiatives to manage email as separate elements,” he said.

Where Microsoft Left Off

While Office 365 pulled together multiple Microsoft applications, including Exchange and SharePoint, it stopped short of connection the applications.

Office 365 offers a unified browser with tiles that allow you to switch between windows (like Exchange and SharePoint). But Lavenda contended, "At a very basic level you still have two user experiences. You have one product for email, you have one product for documents."

"There’s no way of searching, there’s no metadata and it doesn’t do anything to solve that problem of finding your information quickly.”

Harmon.ie's solution lets users drag and drop email from their Outlook window to a corporate SharePoint or Office 365 site, without exiting their email client.

How We Love to Hate Email

Despite what seems like nonstop complaints about email, it's use keeps growing, studies show.

"Email is certainly not going away in the Microsoft world. And IBM is talking about another generation of Verse and Google has its new Inbox,” Lavenda noted.

“The debate has changed. Now it is about whether email is the center of the universe with other things getting pulled in — which I think is the Microsoft, IBM and Google view of the world — or whether email is part of something larger. I think the latter is harder to do, but I think that’s the solution.”