ClearContext Corporate Blog

A quick note for all Win7 upgraders – ClearContext v4.6.6 is fully tested and compatible with Windows 7.  Enjoy!

Per this post, we would love your feedback:

Thanks!  Please take our conversation priority poll if you haven’t already.

Per this post, we would love your feedback:

Thanks!  Also see our views poll here.

We’re making ClearContext simpler, faster and smarter.  Last week we discussed v5 single-click filing.  This week we’re writing about message prioritization.

Email prioritization has been a core feature of ClearContext.  For v5, we are reworking message prioritization to make it easier to understand with less setup and processing overhead.  Our goal is simple – automatically separate the wheat from the chaff for busy email users.  From our perspective, the “wheat” in your Inbox consists of the following:

• Messages from people you know
• Conversations you have participated in
• Email related to your active projects

In v5, we will analyze incoming messages and automatically apply a color-coded categories to the following types of messages:

• from people in your address book
• from Important “VIP” contacts, automatically identified during setup or designated by you
• in threads you’re active in

This represents a fairly significant change from previous releases:

• Color-coded categories are being used in place of our current custom views.  This will take better advantage of Outlook’s category coloring and minimize current infrastructure costs when scoring messages.
• Contact priority will be simplified to one setting – either the contact is designated as a VIP or not.
• We will no longer provide views that order messages by priority and/or thread – use Outlook’s native views for this functionality.
• The Topic name, when there is one, will appear in the category field, but will not be written to a special Topic field.  This will minimize instances of message conflicts.

The bottom line:

v4 Inbox	v5 Inbox

We want to hear from you

As before, we have some questions:

UPDATE: we can only use one poll per post.  Please take our conversation priority and customized views polls.

We welcome any additional feedback you have on these changes.  Subscribe to this blog for future updates regarding ClearContext v5.

All v4 purchases made after August 1, 2009 and all ClearContext Connect subscribers will receive a complimentary upgrade to v5.  If you haven’t already signed up for the v5 beta, send an email to beta at clearcontext dot com.  The beta schedule isn’t finalized yet, but we will let you know when a download is available.

Did you know August 12th is Information Overload Awareness Day?  Our friends at Basex are putting on a web event focusing on ways to decrease the impact of  Information Overload. 
I'll be speaking on a Visionary Vendor Panel representing ClearContext along with speakers from Microsoft, Xerox, Xobni, and Nordic River. 

Thanks to Basex and conference sponsors, we're able to provide you with a free pass ($50 value) to attend the event!   Please come as our guest on August 12 - use the code "DevaGuest" for your guest ticket.  The web event begins at 8am PST and the Visionary Vendor Panel is at 11:15am PST.  You can see the full agenda here.

The keynote
presentation will feature Nathan Zeldes, Intel's former Information Overload
czar, speaking about his work at Intel and will coincide with the release of
the forthcoming  Basex report, Intel's War Against Information Overload.
 All attendees will receive a complimentary executive summary of this
report.

Additional speakers include:

• Noted authors Maggie Jackson
  (“Distracted”) and Mike Song (“The Hamster Revolution”)
• Edward Stern, Occupational
  Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Dept. of Labor
• Mark Hurst, Creative Good
  and author of "Bit Literacy"
• John Hagel, co-chairman, the
  Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation
• Seth Earley, CEO, Earley
  & Associates
• Anne-Katrin Neyer, School of
  Business and Economics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Peter Marksteiner, Colonel, Air
  Force
• Paul Silverman, Integra
• Christina Randle, The Effective
  Edge
• Jonathan Spira, chief analyst
  at Basex

Over 500 people are
expected to attend worldwide.  I hope you're able to join us.  Click here to register now – and use the code
"DevaGuest" for free admission!

Our Features and Support forums are unavailable while we perform maintenance over the weekend.  Full functionality will be restored by Monday morning Pacific Standard Time.  In the meantime, contact support at clearcontext dot com with questions.

A quick administrative note… 

With the release of v4 and the IMS Daily Workflow, I have made a concerted effort to tag posts by category.  To support that, this week we added a tag cloud to the weblog.  Use the cloud to drill down on product announcements, process oriented posts, individual steps in the IMS process, etc..

Our friend Robert Scoble weighs in on the future of email in the BusinessWeek Debate Room on a piece titled Email Faces Deletion; his premise being that “e-mail isn’t a good way to share knowledge.”  ClearContext CEO Deva Hazarika has posted his rebuttal of Robert’s points on his newly revitalized blog, Email Dashboard.  Check it out.

“Free email day” makes me sad.  

The WSJ posts about companies who designate “Free Email Days” for their organization – entire days where employees are forbidden from using email to get their work done:

“While the bans typically allow emailing clients and customers or responding to urgent matters, the normal flow of routine internal email is halted. Violators are hit with token fines, or just called out by the boss.

The limits aim to encourage more face-to-face and phone contact with customers and co-workers, raise productivity or just give employees a reprieve from the ever-rising email tide.”

If you’re a reader of this blog then you likely already understand the issues that too much email presents.  From a USA Today article on the same subject, Fridays go from casual to e-mail-free:

“E-mail overload is caused by the sheer volume of messages zipping around the globe. Each day, about 39.7 billion person-to-person e-mails, 17.1 billion automated alerts, and 40.5 billion pieces of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) are sent worldwide, researcher IDC says. White-collar workers often receive 140 messages a day, executive coach Marsha Egan says.”

But honestly, free email day sounds a bit like the ostrich putting his head in the sand.  It’s like admitting that bad email management is sapping your employee’s productivity, but rather than addressing the issue you’re OK with them being completely unproductive 4 days out of the week.  Hey, at least your organization gets some work done on Fridays!

I have said it time and again, if you aren’t efficiently managing your email, you aren’t being fair to your customers, your co-workers, or yourself.  These companies need to be putting their efforts into giving their employees the tools they need to effectively manage the flow of information.  And I’m not ranting because I want everyone to buy site licenses to our product (but you should!); teach your employees how to identify what’s important in email, how to efficiently manage those messages and how to succeed at their jobs rather than putting arbitrary restraints on their workflow because they can’t focus on the task at hand.  The result will be happier co-workers, satisfied customers and a more productive, creative work environment.

And I won’t be sad anymore.

We’re getting close to final release of the next version of IMS Pro.  Those of you who have previously contacted us about the beta program will be hearing from us soon.  We’re keeping details on new functionality under wraps for now, but there’s a lot of exciting new stuff in this release.  We’re expanding our current group of beta testers, so if you’re interested in participating in our private beta (participants must agree to keep information about the release confidential until launch) to get an early preview of all of the new functionality, please send an email to beta@clearcontext.com and we will get back to you with more information.  Thanks for your assistance – we’re really excited to show you what’s coming and hear your feedback!