Trampoline Systems watches the flow and exchange of documents in a company network, giving it the ability to spot key influencers and to bring into view the documents accessed and an individual's network of contacts.

The primary value is to staff who need to find sources of expertise or particular kinds of information very quickly, or simply to keep tabs on their own recent activities and connections. Having said that, it is also of value to companies who are looking to reduce their dependence on some people and bring others more into the fold.

Many companies feel more comfortable with this kind of system behind the firewall, so it is available as an appliance as well as a hosted service. Customers so far include the UK Foreign Office, Grant Thornton and Channel 4 Television. Yesterday, it announced a substantial pilot programme inside the Raytheon Company, a US defence and aerospace business. The aim is to improve the sales process through finding and exploiting existing relationships and sources of expertise.

Last year, it chose to illustrate its system using 200,000 of Enron's internal emails from 1999-2002 which had been released by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The default in any company is to capture all emails, but the user can elect to exempt private messages. The system recognises existing permission levels.

Connections can be mapped around any individual and both their contacts and their communication  themes can be navigated through tag clouds as well. Emails are listed according to their relevance and each can be viewed in its own window.

Here's a (slightly reduced in size) map of some of the connections centred around one person:

The width of the connecting lines reveals the traffic flow between individuals. You can double click any person's name to bring them to the centre and show their own connections. The related document list and tag clouds appear in the same browser window, providing instant access to all that is important.