Harmon.ie Brings SharePoint Collaboration To iPadHarmon.ie Brings SharePoint Collaboration To iPad

10 Gorgeous Apps For New iPad

Harmon.ie wants to turn Microsoft SharePoint into a collaboration tool you can hold in your hands.

Best known for its social collaboration SharePoint plugin for Outlook, which makes a feed of SharePoint updates available as a sidebar to email collaboration, Harmon.ie now wants to do something similar for the iPad.

"It's definitely the same concept, but adapted to the platform," said Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Harmon.ie.

Part of the idea behind embedding SharePoint collaboration in the email experience is to encourage users to share documents through SharePoint as an enterprise collaboration system rather than relying so heavily on emailing file attachments. On the iPad, Harmon.ie functions as a stand-alone app, providing access to a feed of updates from SharePoint, plus the ability to search for and retrieve documents.

[ Need professional collaboration on the go? See LinkedIn iPad App: Plenty To Like. ]

"You can open a document with an app like QuickOffice, update the document on SharePoint, and check it back into SharePoint without leaving the document in iOS," Cohen said.

The Harmon.ie app works with the documents on SharePoint, rather than downloading a copy to the local device, making it more secure for enterprise use, Cohen said. However, if you use an external editor, the Harmon.ie app doesn't necessarily control whether that app might leave data behind on the device, he said.

The Harmon.ie Lite: SharePoint Mobile Client is available in the Apple App Store as a free download. The $20 premium version is required for read-write access to SharePoint documents. The app actually works on both the iPad and the iPhone, although on the iPad it takes advantage of the larger screen for better usability.

Harmon.ie says its SharePoint app's advantages are two-fold: it makes the iPad more useful as a corporate device, and it makes SharePoint more useful by letting you take it with you. As part of the launch, Harmon.ie introduced a marketing campaign on the theme of "Don't SharePoint While Walking", jokingly illustrating the trouble you can get yourself in while collaborating on the go.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference brings together industry thought leaders to explore the latest innovations in enterprise social software, analytics, and big data tools and technologies. Learn how your business can harness these tools to improve internal business processes and create operational efficiencies. It happens in Boston, June 18-21. Register today!