41% of US Employees use “Rogue IT”
For an IT Manager or Company CIO, this number is more than disturbing. It’s downright scary. The rapid growth of mobile technology and cloud computing means that more and more people are bringing their own technology and accounts to the office and using them to do company business, simply because it is convenient to do so. While some businesses encourage the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture, others, such as government and major corporations, would rather you leave your device at the door, than risk important data being left in a less than secure environment.
Problem is, there are some very significant advantages to using the mobile and cloud based technologies that are out there and many software vendors are leaning in the direction of the access anywhere world. Microsoft, for example, offers Office 365 which encourages the use of mobile computing and cloud based access. So what is an IT Manager to do.
The answer: Bring Harmon.ie to your infrastructure.
It’s About Collaboration
Now, I will admit that I am not a big Microsoft fan. I spent the better part of a decade in the clutches of Windows World, before heading back to the Apple orchard. So, for me to say that I was impressed with the latest offering from Harmon.ie is really saying something.
Being the Social Media guy that I am, the first thing that caught my eye about Harmon.ie was their planned integration of Yammer to their mobile app. With Enterprise Social Networks starting to take off, allowing Social Media like interaction without the fear of a billion other people potentially overhearing your conversations, I was curious to see it at work. As I started through the demonstration of the product, lead by Harmon.ie VP of Development, David Levenda (@dlavenda), I was immediately struck by the incredible collaboration features the app had to offer. Near seamless integration with MS Office 365 and Sharepoint meant that any member of a team could access, edit, save and share, no matter where they were, on either a mobile device or desktop. I watched as real-time sharing was happening between their office in the US and the office in Israel, where the demo was being done. While a typical collaborative desktop is very busy, this mobile interface was clean and intuitive.
No More Dropbox
I know a lot of IT Managers and CIO’s, and they all have horror stories about how employees take sensitive work home by attaching it to an email or uploading it to a personal cloud account. Harmon.ie actually takes away that requirement by creating a secure connection to a company Sharepoint server and allowing the native based app that a document was created in to do the editing. If you have ever tried to edit a custom formatted document with a third-party app, you know how much this will make a difference. As the documents never actually leave the security of the internal network, there is an instantly reduced concern over where the document has been. Even more important, everyone is working off the same document, meaning that there is no document duplication confusion. Watching documents being shared via internally managed email, messaging and Social Networking, over both desktop and mobile devices, was impressive. While this type of collaborative sharing isn’t new, seeing it done so smoothly was a real pleasure.
Safe and Secure
As with anything that deals with corporate or proprietary data, security can be a real issue. This brings us back to the whole “BYOD” world of personal tablets and smartphones being used to do office work. With Enterprise level deployment capability and device management, IT Managers now have better access to who is using what in the network and to lock out access should a device get lost or stolen. Again, because nothing is stored locally on the device, there is no concern of access to information that is not for prying eyes.
Up to this point, Harmon.ie 4.0 has been available on the Desktop, iOS and Blackberry only. Today, however, the company officially releases its Android version for download, thus opening up the doors to an even larger market for their product. The product demo that I received, last month, was actually on the Android version of the app. Even as a die-hard iOS guy, the new Android app was just as impressive as everything else I had been shown.
All in all, Harmon.ie is easily one of the best multi-platform collaboration apps that I have seen on the market today and well worth any IT Manager’s time to explore.
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