I had an interesting call with Lynda Ting from Microsoft last week about connectivity between email and SharePoint. After our call Lynda blogged that “ActionBase adds (to Sharepoint) the ability to have follow–up, tracking and process management associated with email.” This is a unique and important value proposition for customers. We enable them to take email correspondence and make it traceable. We consolidate discussions or conversations and their related actions. We also have the ability to add micro- messaging (like IM message), keeping all of these collaboration channels in context.

The context of a discussion is in many cases more important than any of its atomic elements. When you trace a discussion’s back and forth messages and see the documents related to it as well as all subsequent process activities, you create a view of one big web of social activity that encompasses the whole flow of the conversation, its context and all participants. It allows you to really trace where things are and who is doing what. By collating the whole process thread (like in IM  or Google Wave) we simplify collaboration and the way people share and view the same information in same context and the same discussion history.

Funny how all things get connected. I met  a very large Fortune 100 company last week. They work intensively in Office and SharePoint. We discussed our ability  to connect the dots between emails, and sites within SharePoint, to enable follow through on activities from within Word and Excel sheets. One of the folks there said to me that they have been searching for a long time for something that can be “the glue between email and other office tools”, collaborative applications and  workspaces.

He was referring to activities and conversations that start in email. Then you decide to create a Sharepoint site to link those discussions with their related documentation and have the team site to track the  follow up. ActionBase’s capability to provide one view of the flow that connects all those elements together within one context or process was a key feature for them. Most importantly the ability for everyone to be synced without duplicating items, and providing a single version of the truth was very appealing.