We’re really excited about some of the new features we have coming soon to IMS. Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been working on, plus an opportunity to get an early look and start providing us feedback on the new stuff.
ClearContext IMS 4 Upgrade
Our next release will be a free upgrade for all licensed IMS 4 users. In our last product plan update we hinted at some prototype projects we’ve been working on. Based on initial feedback to those projects, we decided to roll a few of them into this near term release.
Contacts and Documents – The IMS Dashboard currently pulls together emails, tasks, and appointments related to a project. Now we’re adding documents to that list – helping you deal with all of the attachments that flow through email. We’ve also extended the product to not only let you manage the tasks and activities around a project, but also find and interact with all the contacts related to a specific project or subject. Stay tuned to the blog for more details about other cool stuff we’ll be doing around contacts and documents in Outlook.
New Dashboards – The current IMS Dashboard is focused on projects. But lots of emails that clog up your inbox are notifications of some sort that can be analyzed, processed, and organized for you automatically. We don’t think you should have to manually process all the social networking requests, log file reports, corporate announcements or various other types of status and notification emails that arrive every day. We’ve developed another type of dashboard to automatically manage this sort of processing.
Those and other new features are part of our plan to have IMS address the issues outlined in Deva’s Inbox Thesis blog post:
The volume of information that people (people in this context refers primarily to “information workers” but is rapidly growing to include just about everyone) receive via email is far more than they can process effectively using the sequential processing of individual messages for which most email clients are designed. At the same time, the information and the range of tasks/actions that flow through email are increasing in scope, importance, and variety. This necessitates new means of information processing consisting of the following elements: prioritization of incoming email, categorization of information, aggregation of related information, and context-specific actions for different types of information. This allows users to process information more effectively by taking advantage of the context of the information to provide a set of relevant actions to deal with information at a higher level than a single message basis.
Based on your feedback, we’re also making a number of improvements to the existing IMS 4 features. These include:
- Better data display and interactivity in the project dashboard
- Performance enhancements related to message scoring, threading, synchronization and startup
- Numerous other enhancements you have suggested to us on our forums (Thanks!)
So how do you get to see all this cool new stuff? We’ll be opening up the beta in stages. If you’re interested in getting a look at early, pre-release software, send an email to beta at clearcontext dot com. We’ll put you on the top of the advance preview list and notify you when a beta version of IMS is ready for download. Honestly, I can’t wait for you to get your hands on this stuff and let us know what you think about it!
Discussions on the Future of Email
There have been some really interesting discussions of late on the failures of current email systems. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch writes 2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur: “I routinely declare email bankruptcy and simply del…
Posted by ClearContext Corporate Weblog on March 27th, 2008.