Tracking Business Processes using MS Office

Israeli-based ActionBase have released an interesting application that provides Security Officers with “wave” collaborative software that addresses corporate governance, audit trails security. What interesting from a Microsoft Office perspective is that all of this can be done from within Microsoft Outlook and other Office applications.

Tracking Business Process from within MS Office

How does it work?

ActionBase converts regular e-mail into business-class e-mail, whereby all content is located under a one-line item in your inbox.

This means that all process stakeholders and participants in a discussion thread share the same content, can ask questions, respond and comment or add files instead of scattering feedback across different e-mail messages in the traditional paradigm.

It incorporates all actions that were initiated subsequently by any user involved in the process.

The ability to have drill-down capabilities from inside Microsoft Office applications allows process stakeholders to view the big picture — without compromising collaborative functionality.

Key features

1. Hierarchy model for business processes
2. Ensures process-related discussions remain associated with their original context, reducing e-mail overload.
3. Simplifies process-related search and follow-up by providing process visibility, i.e. related attachments and history, audit trails and change history.
4. Reporting mechanism provide real-time process information.

The company has also expanded ActionDoc (its action-driven Word documents) functionality to turn plain Word documents to executable working documents with a real-time graphical status view over the whole process.