Mainsoft Corporation, a provider of cross-platform interoperability software, on Tuesday announced Harmony - free software for Microsoft Outlook that provides full-featured access to Google Docs documents or Microsoft SharePoint document libraries from within e-mail. Based on the premise that it should be easier for people to work together on documents, Harmony brings some of the best collaboration and document-sharing tools into Outlook, where users spend a large part of their workday.

Currently, most Outlook users store documents on their local hard drives and share them as e-mail attachments, resulting in wasted time trying to find the latest version of a document and merging feedback from various people. The new Harmony sidebar enables people to share a single, centralized copy of the document, eliminating the many intermediary steps associated with sending e-mail attachments back and forth.

Downloads for Harmony for Google Docs (BETA) and Harmony for SharePoint are available now at:

• http://harmony.mainsoft.com/content/downloads/harmony-for-google-docs
• http://harmony.mainsoft.com/content/downloads/harmony-for-sharepoint

The Future of Email

Despite the growth in new communication tools, e-mail remains the number one business communication channel. According to Andrew McAffee, author of the book, Enterprise 2.0, people spend an estimated 26 hours per week on average using enterprise email.

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."

"Adapting e-mail to the new world of collaboration technologies is something being addressed across the industry, with both Google and Microsoft transforming their own e-mail client experiences," said Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft. "Harmony offers a cross-vendor, cross-platform approach, which delivers an integrated user experience across Microsoft Outlook and Google Docs, and makes document sharing a lot more accessible to end users. "

"Our users spend a large part of their workday in e-mail, and the time it takes to save each attachment to the desktop as an intermediary step to moving it to SharePoint, discourages people from using team sites and document links," remarked Michael Bucciero, business solutions manager for Louis Dreyfus Commodities North America. "People waste time digging through their e-mail to find the latest version of a shared document and merging comments from various users. Mainsoft software eliminates these problems by making document sharing convenient, fast, and easy from within email."