There's a lot more to email management than SNARF

Microsoft Research today released a new utility called SNARF that "filters and sorts e-mail based on the type of message and the user’s history with an e-mail correspondent." It's interesting and good to see Microsoft acknowledging the significance of some of the problems we've been tackling at ClearContext for the past couple of years, but there's a lot more to solving these problems than prioritization and triage. 

In March 2004 we described a number of email-related problems and discussed our approach to solving them in our white paper, Designing a More Effective Inbox. In that paper we describe the design philosophy behind the patent-pending contact analysis and email prioritization algorithms at the core of the ClearContext Inbox Manager product we released last year.  A key consideration in our design was to seamlessly integrate this functionality into the existing Outlook Inbox that people use every day, We chose not to add more overhead to their busy worklife by creating a second interface for them to use (as products like the SNARF utility or NEO require).

Based on our survey of high-volume business email users, we found that email prioritization and triage was definitely an important factor in effectively dealing with email, as described by a number of our users, including Omar Shahine.  That was just one of three key areas where our users wanted help with email, though.

The second area we received the most feedback about had to do with filing and organization of email.  ClearContext Inbox Manager allows topics to be assigned to email conversations, automatically organizing related emails in easy to manage topic folders as described in William Bartholomew's review.

The third key area has to do with action items and workflow generated from email.  Email is no longer just about information.  The tasks, appointments, and other action items that make up an individual's workday are largely driven from email. Our focus in our 2.0 release has been on extending ClearContext functionality beyond just the Inbox and emails to integrate across and link all of these items.  We describe a number of the features in our product plan. 

We have recently started beta-testing ClearContext v2.0 with a small group of users.  We will very shortly be announcing an openly available beta 2.  In advance of that, we'd like to give you a sneak-peek our ClearContext 2.0 product line (that will be officially announced in more detail upon GA release).

ClearContext Inbox Manager Personal Edition 2.0 - this free product will be focused on inbox prioritization and color-coding functionality

ClearContext Inbox Manager 2.0 - this upgrade to our existing product will expand functionality beyond the inbox and add a number of brand new features, such as unified views of all Outlook items related to the same topic/project

ClearContext Professional Information Management System 2.0 - this product goes beyond email management to add email-driven task assignment, scheduling, deferral, delegation, follow-up management, and other workflow functionality

As a special bonus for our existing 1.0 users, all registered users who participate in a follow-up survey to our email usage survey will be given a free upgrade to our IMS 2.0 product.

It's good to see a lot of awareness and momentum building around something we're very passionate about here, making email a better and more efficient tool for communication and workflow.  We're excited about our upcoming releases and look forward to hearing your feedback as more of you try out our new products in the coming weeks.

Comments

[Michael]

Will vs 2 be a free upgrade if I purchase today or should I wait? I hate paying twice for software!

[Brad Meador]

Michael -

Thanks for your interest!

Those who purchase the v1 software prior to the v2 release will have the opportubity to upgrade to v2 for free by filling out a short survey.

[Heather Adams]

This Blog is really helpful to me. Its a learning experience. Hope everyone feels the same.

Heather Adams
http://www.Emailmanagementsite.com