The winner of DEMO’s enterprise category and people’s choice award, Liaise, is moving from private to open beta by launching their much anticipated mobile calendar integration and introducing their Team Services platform.
Liaise focuses on collaboration within email: it analyzes the content within your incoming and outgoing emails, captures the important information (Liaise dubs these KeyPoints) which needs to be acted upon, and sets up a management list based on this info.
To quote from our previous coverage of Liaise:
The product works quite intuitively. For instance, let’s imagine I am sending an email to a fellow writer: “Greg, make sure you interview the CEO of Liaise on Thursday.” The software will then recognize that my email is a call to action directed towards Greg and that it is due Thursday (these are the KeyPoints). The priority for this will be set at normal because it is due a few days from now. However, Liaise is a learning software; so it will change the way it works based off of the language I use and the edits to the suggestions which Liaise has made. For instance, lets say that I manually changed the priority of this issue to Very High. In the future, when I use the phrase “make sure,” in an email, Liaise will set the priority to high. If Liaise does not identify some parts of an email, there is an edit option to add your own action items.
Previously, Liaise only worked with desktop clients, but hoped to expand into the mobile market. Today, they have done just that. Now, utilizing Microsoft Outlook’s synchronization process, users are able to see their KeyPoints directly on their iPhone, BlackBerry, or with any other device that supports an Outlook-enabled calendar.
Liaise has also upgraded the interface of their application. When a team used Liaise to collaborate before, users would have to individually update their to-do list. With the addition of Team Services however, they no longer have to send new emails to each other to update the status of shared action items or issues. Instead, these updates are automatically synchronized when completed (or not) through each user’s calendar, simplifying the process.
The product now gives users the ability to hide KeyPoints from the individual they are emailing. This is beneficial because it allows Liaise users to check up on their subordinates without making it seem obtrusive. Thus, end users get the tasks assigned to them, and Liaise users are constantly appraised of their progress without seeming like they are micromanaging.
Liaise is sticking to their original price point and will be charging between $4.95-9.95 per user, per month when the beta is completed. Liaise is headquartered in Sunnyvale and has received an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Southern Cross Venture Partners.