Mainsoft Opens Door from Outlook to Google Docs.
by Bill Ives
According to Mainsoft, a provider of cross-platform interoperability software, currently 39% of business e-mail users use Microsoft Outlook but they have been unable to connect through Outlook to Google docs. I have recently been using Google Docs as we put together the Pistachio enterprise microsharing survey. It is very useful.
Mainsoft plans to attack this cross-platform need head-on. Through its free Harmony product it offers full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from Microsoft Outlook. They believe “e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly – so end users can be more productive – regardless of who is at war with whom.’ I would agree.
Harmony also offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. These are certainly productivity improvements for Outlook users. Currently, most Outlook users store documents on their local hard drives and share them as e-mail attachments. This is not limited to Outlook users but services like Google docs make collaboration much easier as I recently discovered.
According to Andy McAffee people spend an estimated 26 hours per week on average using enterprise email. Mainsoft quotes Matt Cain, research vice president and Gartner’s lead e-mail analyst, states, “we believe the ultimate role of the e-mail client is to aggregate communication and collaboration streams from many modalities into one common interface. In this way, the e-mail client becomes the communication and collaboration master console — a universal queue, so to speak.”
This will certainly be an improvement as email needs to adapt to the more collaborative world of enterprise 2.0
