There’s no rest for the weary: ClearContext v2.x Product Plan

Now that we have v2.0 out the door, it’s time for a product plan update.  We have some really exciting things planned for the product in the near future that we'd like to share with you.  I also want to talk a little bit about our Office 2007 efforts.  I’m going to break this into categories – v2.x, Incremental Features, and Office 2007 plans.

ClearContext v2.x
Much like our v1.1 release, our v2.x release will be 100% driven by customer requests.  We received a ton of great feedback during our beta period and will use v2.x as our opportunity to incorporate more of your suggestions into the product.  These include:

ActionView User Interface Enhancement
Topic DDLB Enhancements – Better UI for management of large folder hierarchies
Tighter Topic Integration in Tasks
Unsubscribe from a thread
Domain Resolution for Exchange Users
AutoAssign functionality integrated with Outlook Rules
Import/Export of ClearContext Settings (in the meantime, see here)
Advanced AutoAssign Rule Management UI
Integration with an exciting new email product (more on this in the near future!)

Incremental Features
These are among the additional feature/functionality improvements that we're considering for the product:

Advanced Contact Management Capabilities – including Smart Topic Assignment
Multiple machine support – “Master/Slave” mode
Topic/Priority sharing in groups
Custom Forms Support
Prioritization in Other Folders

Our future features and additional products list remains largely unchanged from our v2 product plan.

Made for Office 2007
We are extremely excited about the work we are doing with Outlook 2007, slated for retail release early next year.  Outlook 2007 will provide us the opportunity to more tightly integrate our features into Outlook, for a seamless IMS experience.  Though we can’t officially support Office 2007 until Microsoft releases it, each subsequent ClearContext release will be made with an eye towards 2007 support.  Planned “Made for Outlook 2007” features include:

Context Menu (Right Click) Integration
Enhanced Category and Flags Support
Integrated RelatedView Dialog
Ribbon UI Implementation
Optimized Performance
Additional Office 2007-specific functionality – we’re going to delve into more detail on this later

As always, your feedback can and does help us refine our product plans.  You can post feedback in our forums, on the weblog, or send us a note at info ( at ) clearcontext dot com. We will update the plan and provide more concrete timeframes as we integrate your feedback and continue product development.

Comments

[alpha]

Hi, Do you have any working demo for Outlook 2007. I am very interested in beta testing it. Thanks.

[Brad Meador]

We're not ready to start publicly testing our Outlook 2007 effort yet. I'm adding you to the O12 beta test list and will contact you when ready.

FYI, though we're not supporting it right now, there are several folks who are running the current code against O'07 with varying degrees of success. If you're feeling adventurous, give it a try. There have been no catastrophic problems reported to date. Let me know how it works out.