ClearContext Personal Beta Launch Update

First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who has downloaded or signed up for the ClearContext Personal beta. The level of interest has been incredible. We’re working hard so we can send invites to everyone still on the waiting list as soon as possible.

One thing we didn’t really expect was how quickly so many people would download, install, and send us feedback about their experience with ClearContext Personal. Based on that, we’re changing our plans a little bit. The initial plan had been to roll out the first wave of invites to a group of Outlook 2007 users, follow that with a quick round of bug fixes, and roll out to a larger group of Outlook 2007 users plus Outlook 2003 users. We’ve received a lot of enhancement requests and feature suggestions (many of which were already on our plans for the next beta) from our beta testers in a few key areas that we agree will make the product both easier to use and more valuable to our users. So we’ve decided to extend development a few weeks and roll a number of these changes into the product. People currently on the waitlist will have to wait a little longer than initially planned, but the beta you’ll get will be a much improved version of the product. Again, thanks a ton to everyone who has provided us with all this great feedback. Here are a few key areas we’re working on:

• Guided Setup – walk-through during setup with more details on contact prioritization and options for color-coded inbox views
• Filing – make one-click filing capability even smarter and more automatic, so keeping email organized will be even easier
• Contacts and Attachments – additional actions on contacts and attachments, and make it easier to work with groups of related items
• Message Prioritization – make it easier for people to customize how important messages from different contacts are to them
• Notification Managers – simplify the installation process for notification managers

We really appreciate all the feedback we’ve received so far and are excited about these improvements that will make the product even easier to use and give users a much better email experience from the first moment they install the product. Please keep signing up for the beta and stay tuned to the blog for more updates. Thanks!