Collaborative work platform Podio, the Danish Yammer and Basecamp competitor that was acquired by Citrix earlier this year, launched two new features today that are meant to help businesses and small teams cut down on internal emails. Starting today, you will be able to connect all of your Podio workspaces with unique email addresses. This, the company says, allows you to get “those important emails out of your inbox” to share them with the right people in your organization and attach them to the right projects and tasks while also allowing you to keep track of a given conversation in one place. According to Podio, this new email tool isn’t so much about “killing email” as about “building the right bridges between your inbox and your collaborative work platform.”
As a Podio spokesperson told me earlier this week, “this feature is designed to offer another easy way to get content into Podio, recognizing that most people still receive a lot of important emails that need to be connected to special projects, shared and discussed with teams in an open collaborative setting, or linked to ongoing tasks or meetings.”
In addition, Podio also launched @mentions for workspaces today. This feature, which is also meant to cut down on internal emails, allows you to quickly notify everybody in a given workspace (your marketing or developer team, for example) instead of having to copy everybody on an email.
The idea behind Podio is to bring together all of your workflows and the people you work with in one place. Because Podio allows you to quickly build specialized apps for your needs with just a few clicks, it’s definitely one of the more flexible collaborative work platforms on the market today. As quite a few of these workflows are organized around files, Podio supports virtually all of the major cloud storage services. The service also offers mobile apps for iPhone and Android.
Today’s expanded email integration combines Podio’s apps and workspaces by allowing you to set rules for how incoming email should be interpreted. An email to your CRM app and workspace, for example, could use the subject to identify the name of a potential customer and the body could be an email address and/or phone number
The company counts numerous large enterprises among its customers, including Alcatel-Lucent and BMW, but it is also positioning itself as a solution for small businesses and startups. Indeed, the company is now specifically reaching out to startups to introduce its product to them. During Vancouver’s GROWtalks event last week, for example, the company offered all attending startups free access to its premium version for a year.
Podio is free for teams with up to 5 members and after that, you have to pay $8 per month per employee.