I read an interesting post by Howard Greenstein on “Google Wave’s Massive Potential for Business Users“. First off, I’m glad to see more and more people agreeing with the assesment that Google Wave is going to have a broad impact on business. Second, I thought I could use his taxonomies to show how ActionBase + SharePoint compares to Google Wave. His assessment of Google Wave’s benefit for business is based on it as a tool for facilitating project oriented communcations. We haven’t stressed that aspect of ActionBase lately, but that is one of the key usage paradigms in ActionBase. Many of our customers use Word (or an ActionMail QuickMeeting), and ActionMail to do complex project management. 

Howard uses Daniel Levi’s Group Dynamics for Teams to classify different types of project oriented group communication:

It is clear that ActionBase provides lots of benefits for the “Different Place” column allowing people to continue with their email paradigm but with an layer of management and control that didn’t exist before. What may surprise people is that we are also quite heavily used for Same Time, Same Place communication- leveraging Word as a way to capture meeting minutes and resulting required actions. In Office and Sharepoint 2010 MS will also provide the infrastructure for collaborative documents creating, which will make our tool even more powerful.Our integration with SharePoint also enables us to also provide complete support for the ”Same Time, Different Place” paradigm.

So if you use MS technology (Outlook, Office and Sharpoint) rather than Google (Wave and Docs), ActionBase+Sharepoint cansimply  give you the same functionality in your environment.