E-mail is a fantastic tool for communicating with others, sending and receiving files (albeit with limitations) and managing personal tasks. E-mail is less useful for things like managing projects, particularly when multiple people are involved and responsibilities are shared among them. ActionBase has been designed to correct these limitations. The venture-funded developer of the same name is based in Israel.

ActionBase is focused on what the company calls Human Process Management – the management of various processes related to group decision-making, processes that require an audit trail of action items and their completion, negotiations with clients and prospects, and other group processes that require management of milestones. ActionBase is designed for use within Microsoft Office environments and uses primarily Outlook and Word for managing projects.

One of the key goals of ActionBase is to address the problem of e-mail overload. Using the ActionMail component of ActionBase, users can create a single e-mail that will then be used to manage subsequent actions under the same project. For example, if a manager creates a list of action items and assigns these items to various people in their department, a single ActionMail item will then be the focal point for managing updates to the project, completion of action items, an audit trail of actions taken on the project and all other information relevant to the project. 

The goal of ActionMail is to condense a large number of individual e-mails related to a project into a single, dynamic e-mail that is then used to manage that project moving forward.

Another key component is ActionDocs, which are basically Microsoft Word documents into which a project manager can define the process that needs to be completed, assign action items to various individuals and follow the progress of the tasks that have been assigned. ActionBase also provides detailed reporting capabilities using Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

ActionBase is an interesting product and one of a growing number of offerings designed to alleviate the burden of having to manage projects using nothing more than e-mail. This genre of products is designed, in part, to overcome the e-mail overload that plagues all of us, and to allow us to more efficiently process information and manage projects without having to learn new tools, new interfaces and the like.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.