A collaborative project management system is provided to create a project workspace linking together various work-product items including e-mails, documents and tasks based on the identification and association of related information contained in such items. A new project workspace may contain groups of documents, correspondence such as emails, instant message and web chatting, tasks, and other data types linked together by common content topics. The system may initiate a new project workspace based on information contained in an initial correspondence, such as an email conversation, by identifying items that are related to the email conversation such as tasks or documents that a user creates or shares subsequent to receipt of an email or message, and automatically inferring an association based on their contents.