Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest, an event led by the Emerging Business Team of Microsoft in Silicon Valley, will feature seven startups who are building social-oriented applications on Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.
In this article, I will cover Liaise.
Liaise promises to help us turn words into actions. Most of us manage projects in email. I certainly do. Grounded in this reality, Liaise works with Microsoft Outlook to annotate text in email messages with four parameters: issue or action, who is the issue or action assigned to, when is it due, and what is the level of urgency. It’s very simple. Imagine writing an email message. “Hello Gordan. Could you help fix the video issues on MicrosoftStartupZone.com? Could you do this ASAP? Thanks.”
Liaise’ NLP-based engine reads the sentences and annotates them by issue, person, due date & urgency. It keeps track of these action items, not just in out-going email but also in-coming email responses. When the issue or action is still incomplete, it generates easy to organize and easy to print reports of outstanding issues.
Liaise’ co-founder Sidney Minassian calls this “business interaction management.” It’s a great term because most corporate email messages are action-oriented interactions.
What is neat about Liaise is its viral nature. It doesn’t matter whether the email recipient is using Liaise or not. Responses to email messages sent via Liaise from any email platform such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail, or even from mobile email systems such as Blackberry and iPhone, are automatically tracked by Liaise. The person or people on the other end, will simply see the email message normally. However, once a person starts using it, it is extremely easy to get others to use it. And the more people that use it, the better the software becomes, as there is more linguistic information to help train Liaise’ patent-pending natural language processing engine called KeyPoint Intelligence™.
Liaise is available as a downloadable beta application. When launched, will be sold as a software-as-a-service on a per user/per month basis. Liaise won the prestigious People’s Choice for Best Enterprise Product at DEMOfall09 and was the winner of the collaboration category at the annual Emerging Technology Awards presented by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal in December 2009.