I was amazed how Colayer had a virtual reception. Colayer is developing a collaboration product which work a bit like Google Wave for realtime collaboration. Colayers products adds more context to the conversation like if it is a question you are asking. When the conversation has more meta data, it is possible to make better selection of data.

By using a virtual reception it is possible to contact a person in Colayer with out knowing their address.  I thought that it could also be possible to use a Wave robot to front your organization. It could be to find the relevant persons to get in contact with.

I implement a demo on how it could be possible to use a Wave robot for this. The result is published in this video.x

The demo show how some simple character based search is working to identify which results to show. When the user types something, which should like an employee or group name the robot returns the list of possible employees/groups. The user can then select which user to connect to. The robot connects the user to that employee by adding him to the Wave. After connecting the user to the selected employee the robot goes to standby.

There is a lot of possible improvements. The application should be more clear on when it can add any users. I have implemented the Soundex Java library for string comparison, but are not clear on who to implement it best and what the thresholds should be.

Also it would make a lot of sense to connect the data to the companies directory or Google Apps hosted application. If the user has Wave for his domain this would make a lot of sense, since they must have all the informations hire. It is fairly easy to extract data from the company directory and use this data together with the robot and redirect the user to the correct account. To have the full use it is required that you are using the same usernames on both wave and email.

Speaking of Wave for your domain, can you also create robots on your domain. So you have welcome@masteringwave.com or something similar as the robot you are connecting to.

Do you think this would be a solution, with some development could it be implemented in your organization? Why would it make sense for you to have such a solution?

Related posts:

1. New SAP ES Demo: Creating Service Requests Some weeks ago I made a demo of how SAP...
2. Using Groups in Google Wave Using wave in an organization can be a little challenging,...
3. Designing Wave applications with Balsamiq I have been working on creating some new robots or...
4. Simple Form Gadget Creating my first form gadget, I call it “form gadget”...
5. Workflow applications in Google Wave One interesting aspect of Google Wave is the way that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.