Harmon.ie Brings Social Collaboration To Outlook With New Version

Israeli enterprise software company Harmon.ie has released a new version of its email plugin that adds social and collaborative features to Outlook, Google Docs and Lotus Notes. Harmon.ie for SharePoint 3.0 allows users to collaborate with colleagues and external contacts on Outlook without leaving the email interface.

Within Outlook, business users can share documents and track document updates; post and check colleagues’ real-time status; initiate phone/chat/video/email communications; and more.

Through a new people view open in a sidebar pane within Outlook, users will see an activity stream providing both document and people status updates from their network, and they can open documents that are posted without leaving the email interface.

Harmonie will also suggest colleagues to you and recommend additional connections based on their contact history including email, chat, and document co-editing. And you can call, chat and initiate a videoconference within the activity stream.

Currently Harmon.ie for SharePoint has attracted 400,000 paid users. Harmonie also offers a free plug-in that bring Google Docs documents and Microsoft SharePoint document libraries directly to Microsoft Outlook. And Harmon.ie generates around $4 million in revenue per year (not including the plug-ins). Mainsoft (which was rebranded as Harmon.ie) originally did raise funding, but the harmon.ie restart has been self-sufficient based on sales of the legacy Mainsoft products.