Bart from Lumo Research left a comment on my blog post re “email vs. collaboration tool” from earlier this week. I hadn’t heard of Lumo Research before, so headed over to their web site to take a look.

The firm offers a service called LumoFlow, which provides “social workspaces.” Key areas of capability are:
– Activity streams – for sharing updates and ideas quickly. Think “Twitter” for a nominated group of people.
– Discussion threads.
– Profiles about people, including expertise.
– A variety of tools so teams can work together, such as calendars, tasks, and project plans including the ability to estimate upcoming workflow.
– Document sharing.
– Access optimized for mobile devices with small screens.
– Per Bart’s comment on the blog post above, there must be some integration with email messages for notifying people of updates and new content, but as I didn’t sign up, I could not test that.

One large client is Royal DSM in the Netherlands. Hans from DSM said:

“LumoFlow is used on a weekly basis; mainly having discussions, making and/or editing documents and setting agendas. Most of us started quickly using the workspace as LumoFlow is pretty straightforward in its use.

We had the initial discussion why we don’t use the internal intranet tools, but then we realized that first of all those tools could really not live up the performance of LumoFlow and secondly the tools are scattered, so we should use different tools. The functionalities of LumoFlow enable us to work together most efficiently.“