As I sit here, outside in my garden on an unseasonally cool May evening in England, the chiminea burning brightly and I’m checking the status of some documents in SharePoint on my mobile phone I find myself wondering about how amazing technology can sometimes be. The kids are playing in the garden, I’m (relatively) relaxed, and yet I am still “doing work”.

At 21apps we use Office 365 and SharePoint Online extensively, we don’t work in a traditional office environment and we are more than likely to be working in different counties or even countries!

You probably already know about the desktop email add-in harmon.ie and it’s benefits; I mentioned these briefly in the video I did for Harmon.ie recently entitled “SharePoint Social Software Bubbles”, well I’ve been lucky enough over the past couple of weeks to be able to beta test the latest edition to the Harmon.ie product family.

Harmon.ie Mobile

So this little beauty gives you the power of desktop Harmon.ie for SharePoint on your mobile device, in my case the iPhone. So this post is what I think, so far…

Set-up is pretty straightforward and then you’re in, you have full access to your SharePoint sites and sub-sites:

Harmon.ie browsing sites

You can tag (favourite) document libraries or at lower levels actual documents with one click and then get updates when they are changed.

Harmon.ie doc updates

At a document level you get the options you would expect and need if you’re away from your PC and doing work:

Harmon.ie Document Info

The ability to modify meta data (modifying Enterprise Keywords coming soon), open the document and check-out are really useful, but as you would expect the ease of sending a link to the document in SharePoint to a colleague nicely formatted and readable and exceptionally easily, is, for me the key part of Harmon.ie Mobile.

This came to the fore a couple of weeks ago when I travelled over to Atlanta for SHARE 2012, you may not know but for a UK traveller mobile data is stupidly expensive in the US, so the ability to quickly connect and send links to content in our SharePoint Online Intranet direct to my colleagues rather than using EXPENSIVE attachments, was a life saver being away for a week at an extremely busy conference!

I also found in my short experience with the product that integrated search was one of the most extremely useful features; getting asked for a document and being able to tap in a search and attach a link to an email and fire off in seconds is impressive.

There’s still some more functionality that I think is missing from the product (which I’m feeding back to the product team), but with the forthcoming ability to edit Enterprise Keywords on a document and fixes to some UI issues when working with long URLs in the iPhone all in the pipeline already, it won’t be log before Harmon.ie Mobile becomes a key mobile app for me and although some elements were a bit “twitchy” shall we say, it never crashed on me and I never felt like I wanted to delete the app from my already crowded iPhone!

I didn’t get a chance to really push the app to the limits (social and more complex operations)  and explore all it has to offer, mainly because during the beta test there wasn’t that much “document activity” going on (we are only a 2 person org) and I was “playing alone”…

Overall its a great addition to the desktop solution we already use extensively; it plays directly in the “getting the simple things done easier and more effectively” category of SharePoint mobile apps and for that I am grateful.

However you should head this warning:

Don’t SharePoint While Walking!

There’s some scary facts laid out at this website, so be warned, whilsts Harmon.ie Mobile will significantly increase productivity and effectiveness whilst out of the office, it’s can also be dangerously addictive having real-time document info at your finger-tips.

Go and download it today and be productive while you play!