If you spend most of your day inside Microsoft Outlook and also use Google Docs for storing documents and other files online, here’s a free Outlook plug-in that will let you manage your Google Docs account right from your favorite email client.

The plug-in, called Harmony for Google Docs, adds a sidebar to your Outlook so you can access your online documents from virtually any Outlook screen.

When you send an email message that contains attachments, Harmony will ask if you want to upload the attachments to Google Docs and instead send links of the uploaded files to the recipient.

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Upload & Download Google Documents using Outlook

There’s more. You can drag-n-drop files from the desktop into Outlook sidebar and they’ll immediately get uploaded to your Google Docs account. If you are reading an email inside Outlook, you can drag the file attachments from that email into the sidebar and they’ll be uploaded as well.

Alternatively, if you want to download one or more Google Documents from the cloud to your local computer, just drag the files from the Outlook sidebar to your desktop. It can’t get easier than this.

Related story: Edit Google Docs in Microsoft Office

Harmony will add a Google Docs search function to your Outlook so you easily can find documents that are already in your Google Account and attach them directly to your email messages. Harmony can find documents based on the title or it can even for text inside the documents.

Double-click any document name in the sidebar and you’ll be able to edit it right inside Outlook – when you are done, the changes are saved online.

Harmony currently supports Outlook 2007 though they plan to add support for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2010 as well.

Go to mainsoft.com to download Harmony for Google Docs for free. Do check the homepage video to understand how the plug-in can be a great time-saver for employees who have to work on Office documents collaboratively.