We noticed the harmon.ie announcement at BlackBerry Live 2013 for Office 365 and SharePoint coming to BB10, so we met up with the co-founder and CEO Yaacov Cohen to get a closer look. Harmon.ie sits on BES 10.1, allowing its users to access all sorts of day-to-day Office 365 information securely, as well as tapping into the SharePoint cloud collaboration service. Harmon.ie also supports Android and iOS, plus Balance for BlackBerry, so it's perfectly suited to the mixed BYOD environment. SharePoint documents can be opened directly in the built-in Docs to Go suite, while search, contacts, and calendar are due for the next update.
The nice thing about harmon.ie is that though this is geared primarily as an enterprise product, they have a fully functioning free sample app available in BlackBerry World right now, so BES admins can figure out if this is right for them without having to make any initial investments. Once they're ready to go, harmon.ie costs $4 per user per month.
The most compelling part of my talk with Yaacov was when he said their aim was to make it so folks weren't just "bringing their device to work, they're bringing their devices for work." There are certainly some tasks in which a smartphone can replace a laptop in a pinch, but I would be hesitant to rely on one as much as I would on a laptop for some tasks, especially document editing.
Any of you guys currently using Office 365 or SharePoint at work? How badly are you hurting for a BlackBerry 10 client? For anyone interested, hit up harmon.ie for more details about their BES plans.
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