Clarizen awarded patent for its email-based workflow system
There are a number of companies offering enterprise collaboration products, but Clarizen is among the first to be awarded a patent for its technology.
The patent relates to the company's InterAct email engine which lets users trigger specific project-related actions like approval processes, generating reports, creating new projects and other workflows through their email.
"This patent is an important technical milestone for Clarizen, one that has been in the making for several years," says Avinoam Nowogrodski, founder and CEO of Clarizen. "It underscores the significant investment we have made in continuous innovation to stay one step ahead of customer and market needs. The value the technology delivers is a strategic win for Clarizen's customers, and we look forward to sharing more patented innovations with them in the future".
Clarizen InterAct allows users to use their email as a routing system so they can generate an unlimited number of email addresses and associated actions, business and routing rules. Emails can be sent via Clarizen requesting an updated report and receive an automated reply with the report attached.
Issues can also be submitted to InterAct via email or a form, prompting the issue to be automatically added to the appropriate project with a notification sent to the project manager.
"Email is still by far the most used collaboration tool, but email was not really built to support collaboration (many-to-many). What Clarizen has done with this patent is part of a trend we are seeing where team members are moving from email to more context-based in-app communications," says David Coleman, senior research analyst at Gigaom Research and managing director of Collaborative Strategies, Inc.
You can find more information about InterAct on the Clarizen website.
Photo Credit: Arcady/Shutterstock