Liaise turns emails into action items

CEO Sidney Minassian on how Liaise organizes messages to manage tasks

I've seen a lot of project management tools for email. But not all are compelling enough to want to test out. Liaise is definitely worth a try. 

Liaise organizes message in your inbox so you can manage tasks more efficiently. For someone like me, managing interview schedules with one group, managing our Juice Pitcher event with another, and managing a host of other items can take hours just sifting through past emails.

But Liaise hopes to make handling those tasks easier by using some semantic technology to understand the content and context and organize the email across calendars, reports and to-do lists.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company launches Tuesday at Demo.

"What's the problem you are trying to solve," I asked Sidney Minassian, founder and CEO of Liaise, in this recent interview.

"The problem we identified was that effectively there are hundreds of action-items that are locked up in our communication systems - Emails, IM, text messages," he said. "And it's in these formats that people actually use to get their jobs done, not necessarily the collaboration or other project management tools."

For instance, in email, when the words "follow up," or "Please get this job done" appear, Liaise knows that the action item is that there is an outstanding issue that needs completion.

In the demo Sidney gives me, he is writing a response to an email he just received. The email says that Web site specs are late. Sidney writes in response, "I'm upset." The word "upset" triggers Liaise to identify the email as an "issue." After Sidney writes, "Make sure you get this to me ASAP," Liaise understands that the message is not only an issue, but it is an issue that needs to be handled immediately. Liaise will show a calendar in which you can clarify what you mean by ASAP - whether it's 30 minutes or one day.

It's a great tool, based on the demo. The only drawback with Liaise, however, is that it's only available for Microsoft plugins. A version for the Web will be available in the future, said Sidney. Additionally, the service will be sold for $4 to $9 per month, per person. 

Watch the interview for the demo, and also Sidney's plans to distribute this product. He also talks about the difference between Liaise and other project management tools currently in the market, like Xobni and ClearContext.