Conversations as the bridge between your product and your users

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Orchestra CM is a “Conversation Management Server”, doing for electronic conversations what document management servers do for documents. By making each email part of a conversation and associating conversations with the workflows and business processes that your product supports, Orchestra transforms unstructured email chatter into structured objects, organized onto web pages and filed into folders that are controlled, managed and accessible within your product.

To understand how a conversation management server can make your product better, let’s return to your user, the one who wants to discuss something related to what your product does. Whether you like it or not, he or she would typically turn to email to capture and manage that discussion, attaching your product’s outputs and reports to an email and circulating it to others for comment. Now consider what users can do with Orchestra CM. Instead of exiting your product and engaging via email, he/she can click on a button within your product, compose a new email, and send it out directly. Your product manages how and where that conversation gets filed, who receives it and who can see it depending on the business rules that your customer defines and controls. People respond as they normally would in email, but everyone’s replies are organized and managed within your product, and each email contains links back to all the relevant supporting benefits that your product provides.

Now it’s actually easier to connect with others via email from inside your product. Managers simply select a report, click on a button and compose the message. As others reply back, everything threads onto a single page, making the entire conversation easier for the manager to track than would be the case had he sent it from his own email. And because that conversation now resides on a centrally managed web page rather than scattered across multiple email inboxes, the entire discussion can also appear within almost any electronic document or application, including from within the report that is under discussion. You want your users to discuss Section 2? Ask them to click on a link in Section 2 and add their comments directly to the ongoing discussion. Other team members see all comments from all sources in their inbox via email, and can choose to respond via email, via the report or via your product.

In the end, all options point to the same page and that page is managed by your product. The conversation acts as the highest common denominator, creating a bridge between email where your users spend much of their time, and your product where you would like them to work. Users can continue working in email and their input still gets captured, but whenever the user is ready, he/she can cross the bridge by clicking in any email to gain access to the tools that support the conversations. By introducing users to your product via the email discussions that are already second-nature to them, users understand how your product enhances the work habits that they already employ.