Mobile Office 365 adoption is up by 6 percent, from 18 percent to 24 percent, among harmon.ie Mobile users, according to a new report from the mobile collaboration software company.
The report was based on usage and activity analysis across 1,500 business users from 800 companies in more than 75 countries using harmon.ie Mobile. The company’s software works to combine Microsoft document sharing and social applications on a single screen on iOS, Android and BlackBerry 10 platforms.
As businesses migrate to the mobile cloud, seamless document collaboration, such as allowing employees to access and collaborate on documents offline and online across Microsoft tools, is the top business activity on mobile devices, the report found.
At 81 percent, the most popular activity conducted by business users on mobile devices was online and offline document access.
“Mobile employees have been limited to email and calendar for the past decade,” Yaacov Cohen, CEO of harmon.ie, told eWEEK. “The survey shows that with the recent technology progress, employees can now collaborate on documents from their mobile devices. Employees can review contracts, budgets or presentations on the go, which boosts productivity.”
Seven percent of survey respondents add SharePoint sites and 4 percent favorite documents for offline access. Three percent of users conduct document searches, the survey found. “Document collaboration is the natural next step for mobile productivity. Documents remain in the enterprise memory as they capture most of the enterprise knowledge,” Cohen said. “Enterprises are looking to increase the return on the investment made during the past 10 years in ECM, knowledge management and record management by extending these systems to mobile devices.”
Less than two percent of the sample worker pool participated in Yammer discussions, viewed activity streams or looked up a colleague’s SharePoint profile.
Comparing the number of Yammer discussion contributions to opened documents, business users opened documents 68 times more often than they participated in Yammer discussions.
The survey also found the most popular days of the week for opening SharePoint or Office 365 documents are Monday and Tuesday.
Based on analysis of documents opened, Apple’s iOS platform is more popular by a factor of at least 10 over Google Android.
Cohen noted iOS is perceived as more secure than Android, which is more open but as such more vulnerable.
The most used mobile device for document access is the iPad, followed by Apple’s iPhone, then by Android phones. The most popular device manufacturers are Apple, followed by Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony and Motorola.