We’re pleased to announce the latest addition to the ClearContext
team. Our CTO’s second child, Samantha Jean Kang, was born on April
28th at 10:24 PM. Mom and baby are both healthy and doing well.
Congratulations Frank and Dana!
Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has posted an article on email management in MacWorld that could easily apply to Outlook users. His method, based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done Methodology, helps the user quickly evaluate email messages and convert them to action. He writes:
“Start by stripping your e-mail directory structure down to seven basic folders, each defined by the action that its messages require.”
ClearContext makes this easy to implement in Outlook and extends the concept with topic management and automated filing. Create a ClearContext Topic for each of the folders Merlin defines (Respond, Action, Hold, Waiting, and Archive). As you evaluate a new message, assign the appropriate topic, which will appear next to the message in the inbox. You could either leave the message in the inbox and easily scan all of your open items or make use of our filing buttons (File Message, File Thread, or File Topic) to automatically file the message into the associated ClearContext Topic Folder. As future messages in the email conversation arrive, ClearContext will automatically tag them with the associated topic, reducing the need to re-evaluate the appropriate action to take on the email. As an added bonus, if you’re using ClearContext color-coded views, we’ll prioritize your incoming messages so that you can evaluate your most important email from your most important senders first.
In the future, we will be implementing functionality that will allow the automatic creation of calendar and task items from email, taking this concept to the next level. See our product plan for more detail.
As we reach out to potential reviewers regarding ClearContext, we are often asked how Inbox Manager compares and contrasts with Nelson Email Organizer. This is understandable given that both are billed as email organization products for Microsoft Outlook users. In a nutshell, our add-in is different from NEO in three major areas:
Both ClearContext Inbox Manager and NEO have some overlapping functionality such as advanced display of email conversations, automated methods for assigning topics (or categories) to email messages, and filtering of email received from bulk senders.
This is first in what will be a series of posts on ClearContext competitors. If there are any users out there who have tried both products, we welcome your input on differences between the applications. Please contact us a info (at) clearcontext.com and/or post your comments here in our weblog.
William has posted a thoughtful review of ClearContext Inbox Manager; it appears that he uses our filing and archiving features the most.
He mentioned something that we hear occasionally – our prioritized views take some getting used to. Though ultimately he thinks that they are "a better way of dealing with your inbox," we want to point his readers to instructions for getting the most out of ClearContext views. If the out of the box views aren’t working for you, we’ve got several different views available for download on our website; including views that allow you to take advantage of the message management features that William discusses without the use of color coding or prioritization. Power users, of course, can use native Outlook functionality to modify and customize views.
On a side note, though William already owns a ClearContext license, his review is the perfect example of one that qualifies for our free license giveaway. Thanks, William!
ClearContext Inbox Manager is too well kept a secret and we want to recruit our users to help get the word out in a big way.
Along those lines, we are offering a free ClearContext Inbox Manager license to anyone who posts a review of the product in any public forum. Weblogs, websites, discussion forums, and newsletters are all game. We don’t care what the subject matter of the venue is (as long as it’s in good taste), the review doesn’t have to be a glowing recommendation, and we don’t expect a dissertation. Just post a few paragraphs that clearly show you have used the product – not just a regurgitation of our marketing materials or someone else’s review – send us the link, and we’ll send you a license.
This program is open indefinitely – we’ll announce it’s closure on our weblog. The only fine print – the license is contingent on our review of the post and we are the sole decision maker on whether the review qualifies for the program (given the guidelines above).
Thanks for your help in getting the word out and we look forward to distributing a lot of free licenses!
*** The free license program has been discontinued. This blog post remains up for reference only
Marc Orchant has posted a three pronged approach to tackling the inbox: processing techniques. software, and attitude adjustment. His advice is spot on. If you are overloaded with email, get yourself an email management strategy.
We have posted a five minute product demonstration that highlights many of the features that ClearContext provides. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Update: We’ve pared the demo down from eight minutes to five. Enjoy.
As we’ve posted about before, it seems like everyone has problems keeping up with their email. Robert Scoble is the latest blogger to write about this – and it’s not the first time he’s mentioned his issues with email overload:
"Trying to (and failing) catch up on email."
"I’ve got about 1,100 emails waiting."
"Yeah, I’m overloaded on email."
We know many of you share the frustration with email. We’ve written about the importance of an email management strategy, which is clearly the right long term solution. But how do you get started?
Let ClearContext perform triage on your inbox so that you can get it under control.
Ed Bott did it:
"…yesterday, my inbox was overflowing with 4500 messages. Today, it contains 29 messages…"
Omar Shahine did it:
You can do it.
From our January post Holiday Email Avalanche, here are the three most popular ClearContext features people take advantage of to rapidly clear out a backlog of messages:
Try us out.
We had a post in our forum a few weeks ago questioning the value that ClearContext provides over built in Outlook features. On the surface, this is perfectly understandable. After all, Outlook provides the ability to prioritize and color code the inbox, a method for the categorization of messages, and a very robust rules engine for identifying and processing messages. That said, ClearContext’s value is in the way we simultaneously enhance these native Outlook features and simplify the setup process to make revolutionary changes in the efficiency of the Outlook interface.
Complex Prioritization
Through the creation of rules, Outlook can provide simple categorization and prioritization of email by a single message characteristic (i.e. sender, directness of email, etc.). ClearContext enhances this capability by analyzing each incoming message on several weighted characteristics (including sender, message priority, directness of the address, and whether or not the user is participating in the message conversation) to create a composite score for the message and order and color code appropriately. This is automatically setup on installation of ClearContext and weighting of each factor can be easily adjusted, giving the user a far more complex prioritization system that is much easier to implement and maintain. For more detail on the patent pending ClearContext prioritization process, see ClearContext Design: Message Prioritization.
Threads, Not Messages
One very important distinction – everything ClearContext does applies to message threads (or “conversations”), not individual messages. On the surface, our topic assignment behaves a lot like category assignment in Microsoft Outlook. However, when a ClearContext topic is assigned to a message, all current and future email messages in that thread are assigned that topic. This saves the user the time and effort of assigning a category to every message that is received. Additionally, topics are automatically assigned to sent mail associated within a conversation and, optionally, sent mail is automatically moved from the Outlook Sent Mail folder to the appropriate ClearContext Topic folder.
ClearContext AutoAssign vs. Outlook Rules
As the post cited at the beginning of the article mentions, ClearContext AutoAssign appears to duplicate some of Outlook Rules’ features. We believe that the Outlook Rules engine is a very robust and useful tool and our intent in developing AutoAssign was not to replicate all of its functionality. Rather, it was to support ClearContext specific features such as topic and priority assignment, and provide a simpler and easier to use interface for the most common rules scenarios. Ed Bott highlighted this in his review of our product:
"I had done some of this stuff with Outlook message rules, but the ClearContext Auto-Assign rules are much easier to create. Likewise, it’s possible to file messages into Outlook folders, but this add-in makes it much easier."
We have plans to provide integration for ClearContext functionality within the native Outlook rules interface in the near future. We believe this will provide the best of both worlds – our AutoAssign interface for ease of use, and access to the Outlook rules engine for creating more complicated rules that take advantage of ClearContext features.
What Else?
Those are the main points we’d like to make, but to highlight a few other enhancements ClearContext makes to Outlook:
1. ClearContext default views group prioritized messages by conversation. Outlook can show a prioritized view. Outlook can display a Group By Conversation view. Outlook can’t display a Prioritized, Group By Conversation view.
2. Once a topic has been assigned, ClearContext provides File Message, File Thread, and File Topic functionality for quick manual filing of Inbox messages into the associated topic folder. Outlook requires the user to take several steps to file a message into the appropriate folder and, outside of Group By views, does not provide an easy way to file all messages in a thread or category.
3. When setting up prioritization rules, the most important factor to many users is sender. ClearContext automatically ranks senders on setup via a patent pending algorithm that analyzes email history. To duplicate in Outlook rules, the user would need to manually create this information for each contact.
4. ClearContext allows the user to adjust the priority of email, which changes the placement of the entire email thread within the prioritized inbox. Native Outlook allows a priority change, but this doesn’t affect placement and it doesn’t apply to the entire message thread.
ClearContext not only provides functionality that can’t be duplicated in native Outlook, but our setup process, customized views, and toolbar buttons often makes it simpler to take advantage of these advanced features than the associated techniques in Outlook.
We’d welcome your feedback – if any of you Outlook Power Users out there feel that we have mis-stated Outlook’s capabilities, please send your feedback our way via comments on this site or direct email to info (at) clearcontext.com.
Why keep a corporate weblog? For us, it’s all about developing a relationship with our customers. We created the ClearContext Corporate Weblog to provide our users with detailed information about our product, share information with those customers in areas that we are passionate about, and make connections with potential customers. In the four months since we started the blog, we have seen a dramatic increase in customer interest and loyalty. As relative newcomers to the blogging community, we want to share our thoughts behind the decision to start a corporate blog, the way we use it to connect with customers, and our advice for starting one for your company.
In late 2004 we released the first production version of ClearContext Inbox Manager for Microsoft Outlook, an email prioritization add-in that automatically organizes the inbox and automates the message filing process. While developing the application, we quickly became regular readers of several weblogs, including Office Weblog, Office Zealot, Ed Bott, Omar Shahine – basically anybody who had something to say about Office productivity, email issues, or Outlook. It became very clear to us that the people who wrote and read these blogs were exactly the type of people that we wanted to give feedback on the product. So, on December 15th we put up the first entry in the ClearContext Corporate Weblog with our public purpose, “to share information about the company, our products, email productivity tips, and anything else that captures our attention, particularly if it’s related to email or productivity technology.”
Internally we hoped to do more than that. We hoped to develop a closer relationship with our customers by putting a face to the company. We hoped to build a customer base of like minded people. We hoped to develop our brand and spread the word on ClearContext Inbox Manager. We hoped to get our customers to participate in the direction of the product. We hoped to establish ourselves as knowledgeable in our field. In four months of blogging, we feel we have already made great progress towards these goals.
Here’s what we use the weblog for:
How’s it working? The corporate weblog has been an extremely good investment of our time and effort. In just four months of use, we feel that we have already seen some great results:
So are you thinking about starting a corporate weblog and wondering if it’s worth it? As far as we’re concerned the answer is clear – you can’t afford not to. The dollar cost to run the weblog is relatively low, so that is not an issue. As a resource constrained software startup, our hours are precious and the time required to post relevant, fresh material on the weblog is daunting, but it’s a small price to pay in exchange for a direct connection with many of our most knowledgeable (and demanding) customers. Are you worried that you might not be able to come up with content once you start a site? We had the same fear, but now have a backlog of posts we want to write. Are you passionate about your area of expertise and want to talk about it? Do you come across an article a few times a week that you find interesting? Are you constantly thinking of new ways to utilize your product or service? Those are the very things your customers will find interesting as well. Blog it.
For more detail on starting a corporate weblog, we suggest you look to the following resources:
Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto – a passionate list of 20 items to consider before starting a corporate weblog.
CorporateBlogging.info – the Business Blogging Basics section of this site is an excellent place to kickstart your thinking about a corporate blog.
The Red Couch – Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (with Marc Orchant
editing) are writing a book on Corporate Blogging and have posted
advance drafts of individual chapters. Definitely worth a read,
particularly their corporate blog tips.
How to Start a Blog – Michael Hyatt at Thomas Nelson Publishers has outlined basic steps for starting a blog. He has also posted a draft of his company’s corporate policy for bloggers.
Corporate Blogging – Richard Giles has posted a detailed examination of the advent of corporate blogs along with reasons to start a blog and tips on how to do it.