Orchestra CM offers a server for managing conversations within the enterprise and beyond its borders. They treat the conversation from a human perspective, not a technological tool perspective. The key idea is to place a server in the background that captures conversation fragments, rather than forcing people to change the way they communicate on the front-end.

By using the conversation as the fundamental organizing principle, you immediately see the context of everything that has come before. When a user creates an email message, in addition to To: and Cc:, they flag the message with a project, a folder, and a language (if required) for filing the message. These are drop down lists, based on what’s been created before. Some users can type a new project name or folder name, and it can be opened to all, or the permissions to this can be restricted to certain individuals or groups. This means that you are minimizing behavior change … which is good for adoption. It’s only the first person that has to set these properties, because all of the responses automagically go into that project and folder. Today, you can have only one project or folder per message … but in the future it would be possible to file things into multiple places.

Responses and replies to the individual message via email are threaded automatically in the Orchestra CM server. Conversations can be reviewed via the Orchestra CM browser interface, and there is an Outlook add-in that communicates with the Orchestra CM to pull the project/folder list, and also to show the project/folder structure within the traditional Outlook folder hierarchy.

Today the system integrates with email … but if conversations are being handled in blogs, wikis or discussion forums, then it is possible that Orchestra CM could integrate with them. As an example (in theory), when someone creates a blog post, they could flag the blog post as being related to an Orchestra CM project/folder … so that it would get captured by Orchestra CM, as well as any replies and comments. Same for a wiki page. Just to be clear, this capability is not yet built, but Vic and the team at Orchestra CM is looking for blogging partners and other types of vendors that support enterprise communication to dream about the possibilities.

For more information, visit www.orchestracm.com