Harmony is a content management system that uses MongoDB for data storage. It allows for flexible, custom data structures through embedded documents and inheritance. Content like pages, blog posts, images and files are all stored in MongoDB collections, allowing for simple querying. Activity streams provide quick access to user and item activity information by embedding full objects rather than just references. The talk emphasized taking advantage of MongoDB's flexibility through techniques like dynamic keys, embedding, and storing binary data to simplify relationships and queries.