Topika: Integrating collaborative sharing with email

Abstract

New enterprise tools (wikis, team spaces, social tags) offer potential benefits for enterprise collaboration, providing shared resources to organize work. However, a vast amount of collaboration still takes place by email. But email is problematic for collaboration because information may be distributed across multiple messages in an overloaded inbox. Email also increases workload as each individual has to manage their own versions of collaborative materials. We present a novel system, Topika that integrates email with collaboration tools. It allows users to continue to use email while also enjoying the benefits of these dedicated tools. When a user composes an email Topika analyzes the message and suggests relevant shared spaces (e.g., wiki pages) within the user's collaboration tools. This allows her to post the email to those spaces. An evaluation of Topika's suggestion algorithm shows that it performs well at accurately suggesting shared spaces. Copyright 2011 ACM.