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SharePoint collaboration, connection

16 November 2010

Jacob Ukelson is chief technology officer of ActionBase

Jacob Ukelson, chief technology officer of ActionBase discusses how connecting e-mail into SharePoint can help organisations gain insight and reduce risk.

Organisations constantly find themselves under pressure to complete tasks and projects in order to meet deadlines. Despite the best of employee intentions, it is easy for mission-critical projects to get derailed for avoidable reasons related to process management.

Amidst the jungle of individual employee inboxes and disparate Word files and Excel spreadsheets, several problems are almost certain to arise. Management will find it nearly impossible to gain visibility into the complete scope of a task and the work of each of its stakeholders. Employees, unaware of who is doing what at any given time, duplicate efforts.

Those involved spend countless hours creating, digesting and responding to correspondence designed to avoid these problems, but that activity only generates additional stress and introduces further risk into the process. Businesses lose precious resources simply because they have not found a better way to track work.

Most companies are not in a position to waste this level of employee productivity and money, and they shouldn't have to do so.

An organisation can simplify collaboration and the way employees share and review the same information, in the same context and in the same discussion history

Jacob Ukelson, ActionBase Recently, organisations have recognised the need for a tool that can better track processes, including employee tasks, within the company. Businesses want a tool that can take e-mail and make it traceable throughout the entire organisation. It would be beneficial to have a solution that consolidates discussions or conversations and their related actions. This demand can now be answered for those organisations that use SharePoint. When these enterprises connect their e-mail applications with SharePoint, they gain greater visibility into the complete task and the workers involved in any given project.

Connecting e-mail with Microsoft SharePoint allows users to visualise the complete flow of conversation and context. This creates a web of social activity by tracing discussion messages back and forth to view related documents, as well as all subsequent process activities. This allows all members involved to view where documents are, where they are going and who is participating in each activity. To pull together the entire process thread, an organisation can simplify collaboration and the way employees share and review the same information, in the same context and in the same discussion history.

Among the many benefits of connecting e-mail to SharePoint are:

• Organisations and executives agree, it’s important to have software that allows them to connect the dots between e-mail and sites within SharePoint in order to cut down on time, effort and resources
• Linking these communication chains enables follow through on all company and employee activities within Word and Excel. If one stakeholder is unavailable, others can easily step in and determine the current status and other players involved in any given activity.
• Organisation executives gain the ability to manage, monitor and control the risks associated with daily processes managed via e-mail and spreadsheets, since they can now view the exact status of every task. The extra layer of management and control on top of familiar Excel spreadsheets and Outlook environments not only enables risk management, but also compliance and business efficiencies.

Connecting e-mail into Microsoft SharePoint provides a complete, end-to-end solution by which to process the real-world risk inherent in e-mail and spreadsheets. The most significant benefit organisations gain by connecting e-mail with Microsoft SharePoint is that it allows the entire organisation to be in sync without duplicating items or wasting valuable time determining which employee is responsible for each task. Now, instead of missing deadlines, organisations can deliver more productive results for every task. Connecting e-mail into Microsoft SharePoint leads to a more efficient work environment, saving time and money.

Jacob Ukelson is chief technology officer of ActionBase, a company that provides human process management and action tracking solutions that enable organisations to manage business-critical processes.

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