E-mail gets context

Collaboration vendors ePeople and Kubi Software are attempting to transform e-mail communications into reusable and trackable corporate knowledge.

ePeople this week will introduce Teamwork 5.1, featuring native integration with Microsoft Outlook. The server-side version of Teamwork works with standard SMTP e-mail products, CRM systems, and IM.

Rather than forcing workers to collaborate within line-of-business applications or specified collaboration spaces, Teamwork 5.1 adds context and visibility where collaborative interactions are most common: in e-mail. Teamwork 5.1 helps workers find experts, locate business-critical messages, and capture knowledge for visibility and reuse, all without leaving Outlook.

"It is easy to share and collaborate over e-mail, but e-mail doesn't have context, tracking, or knowledge management capabilities," said Anthony Lye, president and CEO of ePeople. "Business intelligence and expertise are buried in e-mail. We want to extract knowledge and context [out of e-mail] but not create new apps or secondary processes."

Kubi Software, meanwhile, plans to release this quarter the beta version of its Kubi Connector for salesforce.com. The connector integrates the Kubi Client collaborative e-mail product with salesforce.com's hosted CRM applications to synchronize the content of email-based collaborations with customer information from salesforce.com.

"There is a lot of tacit knowledge and valuable discussions in e-mail. When e-mail is deleted, a lot of critical information and decisions get lost," said David Coleman, managing director at Collaborative Strategies, an industry analyst firm focusing on collaboration. "This is a way to start to keep the organizational knowledge without requiring people to change their behavior radically," he said.