I had a great chat with Jerome Colombe of Alcatel-Lucent earlier this month at the IntraTeam 2012 conference about how his colleagues transition email threads to their community platform.

It happens on an ad-hoc basis now. Collaboration adherents and community facilitators (or just enlightened employees) at Alcatel-Lucent will tell email correspondents to "move" certain conversations to a community space that offers threaded discussions. Or just they just start a new thread themselves. It's a manual process, but when it happens, it seems to work well.

This approach makes all sorts of sense. Moving email to collaboration spaces can:

• Reduce email volume (hooray!) -- maybe not number of messages, but volume of body content to parse
• Make information more searchable and open
• Make conversations more understandable, especially for someone jumping in the middle

Like some other tech firms, Alcatel-Lucent is comparatively sophisticated in this regard. They have a mature implementation and Colombe and his colleagues have worked hard to educate and support their peers.

So what could work for the rest of us?

Here's what I'd like to see collaboration vendors implement: integration at the mail server level that automatically inserts a link to your community platform in certain internal email messages, according to filters you set. That way employees would be encouraged to migrate conversations to your community spaces -- and more importantly, have a really simple means to do so. Ideally the system would already pre-populate the first forum post with the original email subject and content.

For example, you could set rules to insert the move-to-community link into the top of a message body when someone:

• Replies-all to a message
• Receives any message sent to multiple recipients
• Receives any message at all from a colleague

To be sure, I'm leaving out some important technical details. You'd need some signalling downstream to email recipients who didn't know the conversation had moved. And the integration could get tricky -- though not impossible, especially if you just target Exchange for starters.

To my knowledge, none of the social and collaboration tools we evaluate can do this natively today. That's a pity. But perhaps we could all start asking...