In-row Buttons in Tabular Views

Suppose you have a table of action items and you would like to be able to send a note to people assigned to various action items.  At present you would click on the row, the form would open, and you will have added a button to the form which sends an e-mail.  A better experience would be to allow users to embed a button as a column equivalent in a table so they do not need to open the form in order to send the e-mail. Support for multiple buttons per row would be ideal, a possible use case being button 1 sends a message to the task owner, and button 2 sends a message to the task owner's boss.