ClearContext Corporate Blog

Our next major release, ClearContext v5, will be about making the email management features our users have come to depend faster, more automated, and more intuitive.  We've made many incremental improvements to ClearContext for Outlook over the past year, as well as some major additions like our statistics and effectiveness components.  But we've also been working hard on the next major version of ClearContext for Outlook, and we're excited to share our plans with you. 

Our development efforts are concentrated on four areas:

• Infrastructure & Performance
• Message Filing & Organization
• Project Management & Dashboards
• Statistics & Effectiveness Measurement

Please note that we are still early in the release cycle, so a number of these details are likely to change.  We're very interested in hearing feedback about which features are most critical for you.

Infrastructure & Performance

We’ve re-architected the ClearContext infrastructure to be more flexible with lower overhead.  This will provide a number of key benefits including:

• Improved performance
• Compatibility with more mail configurations
• Support for the upcoming Outlook 2010 release

Message Filing & Organization

Inbox management is a critical part of everyone’s day.  ClearContext v5 will make filing and organization smarter and more automated.  Key improvements include:

• Smarter topic assignment and filing
• Flexible topic management
• Simplified message prioritization
• Additional automated message filing

Project Management & Dashboards

ClearContext v5 project management functionality will include a much stronger focus on tasks and actions, and make project dashboards much more flexible:

• Improved summary information on projects and actions
• Flexible project creation and organization
• Integration of additional information
• Additional task management and prioritization
• Project archiving and reporting
• Improved search and filtering

Statistics & Effectiveness Measurement

Our initial release of statistics and effectiveness measurement focuses very heavily on email – volumes, response times, and performance.  We’re continuing to gather feedback on the data you find most useful in understanding your email activity, as well as continuing to refine the ways we measure your email management effectiveness.  If you haven’t already, please visit ClearContext Online and let us know what you would like to see there.

In addition to email, ClearContext v5 will expand elements of the statistics and effectiveness modules into areas such as tasks, appointments, and project-focused measurement.

Next steps and beta

In order to deploy these features and enhancements as quickly as possible, we are organizing the v5 release into several stages. The initial ClearContext 5.0 release will focus on the infrastructure and filing/organization features. Additional 5.x releases will focus on the project management and statistics areas.

We haven’t finalized release dates and beta schedule yet.  Stay tuned to the blog for more details.  If you’re interested in being on the beta list, please send an email to beta at clearcontext dot com.  Thanks for your interest!

It's been a long wait, but the Office team is finally giving the public a preview of Outlook 2010, slated for release in the first half of next year.  Check out the end of this post to read more about Outlook 2010.

But why wait for 2010 when ClearContext Personal and Pro have Outlook 2003 and 2007 users covered already?  Here’s a breakdown of some of the new Outlook 2010 features and their ClearContext counterparts.

Ignore Thread \ Unsubscribe

Outlook 2010’s new Ignore Thread feature moves all messages in the current conversation to the Deleted Items folder.  Future messages are also automatically removed from the Inbox.  ClearContext’s Unsubscribe performs the same function, plus lets you review the messages later or resubscribe to a conversation.

Conversation View \ MessageContext

The new default view for Outlook 2010 is a conversation view that groups all related messages together in the Inbox.  ClearContext provides a similar threaded conversation view for the Inbox.  More importantly, the MessageContext window displays the entire conversation for each open message.  In Pro, it also shows any tasks or appointments generated during the course of the current conversation.

Quick Steps

Quick Steps in Outlook 2010 are a way to set up macros for commonly used multi-step functions.  ClearContext filing features provide many common functions without the need to create any macros — including single click filing (message or thread),  automatic message filing when replying (or creating tasks and appointments), and automatic filing based on email history.

Product Roadmap

It's nice to see productivity features like these making their way into Outlook – but at ClearContext we're already working on the next generation of more intuitive, powerful and automated productivity features for email.  Tomorrow we’ll post our full product roadmap, highlighting our continued mission to help email overloaded individuals more effectively prioritize, organize and manage their email and projects within Outlook.

More Info on Outlook 2010

Here’s the official Outlook 2010 preview video:

Here’s Robert Scoble’s longer interview with Chris Bryant, Group Product Manager for the Office 2010 team.

As we prepare to celebrate the US Thanksgiving holiday, ClearContext would like to thank all of you for the support you have given us throughout the year.  For those of you taking some time off around the holiday, here are some tips for jumping back on top of your email when you return.

Deva had the opportunity to sit down with vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco and field some questions about our company and upcoming release:

For more detail, Organizing my messy inbox with ClearContext.

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!

All of us at ClearContext are really excited to announce the start of the beta program for ClearContext Personal.  This free Outlook add-in helps people organize their email and make their inbox (and email experience) just plain better.  At ClearContext, we have years of experience solving information overload challenges for email power users who deal with incredible amounts of email while managing multiple concurrent projects within Outlook.  In talking to lots of individuals and companies about those problems, we’ve found that it’s not just those users that are overwhelmed with email; it seems like just about all business email users are frustrated with email and feel stressed trying to keep up with it.  With ClearContext Personal, we expand the reach of our solutions to all Outlook email users who want a better answer to dealing with email overload.  Here’s a demo:

Our goal with ClearContext Personal is to identify the most common problems with email faced by users of all types and provide solutions that work without requiring any effort or behavior change on their part.  We want to help people figure out which email they need to deal with, put it in context with the information related to it so they have what they need to take action, and then automatically file it in the right place so all related information is neatly organized for them.  And all those huge reply-to-all threads, automated notification emails, and other unimportant messages clogging the inbox?  Yeah, put that to the side so they don’t keep getting interrupted.  Doesn’t that sound better already?

I’ve written a lot about how email needs to improve.  With this release of ClearContext Personal we’re taking some big steps towards addressing some of the key challenges I’ve discussed involving volume and context.  And that’s just the start.  TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm have already written about this launch – we really appreciate the great coverage from those writers and are really excited that improving email has become one of the hottest topics of discussion and innovation lately.   

We’re all pretty tired around here and we still have a few finishing touches to put on some of the new web pages, so for now I’ll send you over to check out the ClearContext Personal product pages.  Later today or tomorrow I’ll make a post that goes into more detail about the functionality of this release, what to expect in upcoming releases (including ClearContext Professional – a free upgrade for registered IMS v4 customers that incorporates all the new features in ClearContext Personal), and all sorts of other  information about this launch.

I’ll end this post with a big THANK YOU to everyone who helped make this launch possible – everyone at ClearContext, the journalists/bloggers, and all of our incredible users who have given us such great feedback and assistance in developing a product we are sure you’ll love. 

Randall Stross looks to Thomas Edison and H.L. Mencken for analog answers to managing electronic mail in today’s New York Times piece Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami.  In particular, journalist Mencken responded to every piece of mail he received, but didn’t let it overwhelm him:

"YET at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent as to interrupt his work."

This is almost exactly what we advise in our IMS Daily Workflow.  Set aside times to process your email and focus on your work the rest of the day.

There’s also brief mention of technological solutions to the problem; including ClearContext.

US News and World Report published a (timely) article on productivity for entrepreneurs.  Productivity: How to Do More in Less Time by Elaine Appleton Grant talks about several tools that “solopreneurs” use to stay productive and efficient:

“Already, savvy entrepreneurs are dramatically improving their productivity and boosting their sales. But as these small companies grow, so do their workloads. Rather than add employees and overhead, many employ virtual assistants to do the mundane tasks they simply don’t have the time to do.”

Thanks to customer Denise Reynolds who put in a plug for ClearContext!

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 delete my entire inbox. But even so, I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Plus another 721 in my Facebook inbox. and about thirty skype message windows open with unanswered messages. It goes without saying, of course, that my cell phone voicemail box is also full (I like the fact that new messages can’t be left there, so I have little incentive to clear it out).

How do I deal with email now? I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with. Or descriptive subject lines that help me understand that I should allot a minute or more of my life to opening it and reading it."

To which our CEO Deva responds Hi Techcrunch, I can solve your email problems:

"’I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages.’ – NO, NO, NO!  Nobody with any volume can do that and stay on top of email.  By analyzing your email history and all sorts of contextual clues about incoming email, this is something that can be done automatically
– and we do.

Jeremiah Owyang rants in Email Consumes Us:

"Ironically, most of my social media peers and I still use email as one of the main ways to communicate back and forth to each other But even more, there are more inboxes to check, twitter, facebook, linkedin, I’m getting business messages from these tools and I’m sure you are too."

Deva’s response:

"As I’ve been writing about for a while, the very nature of email itself is changing.  Two major things have changed about email in the past few years.  The volume (duh, more!) and the nature (it’s no longer just individual messages, it’s projects and tasks and collaboration).

Yet email clients are still fundamentally designed to process messages one by one and treat them as independent units of data.  That approach just doesn’t scale and doesn’t reflect the type of connected and context-rich information contained within email."

If this sort of thing interests you, I encourage you to read the posts in full, including the 100’s of comments on the TechCrunch post.  Commenter’s advice to Arrington falls into three broad areas: get an email processing methodology, use technology for better filtering and management, or hire an assistant (if you don’t have the luxury, see my previous two links).

I’m pleased to see a problem that we have been addressing for years get some attention.  As Deva mentions in his posts above, our next release will get us even closer to our vision for email automation – prioritization of incoming email, categorization of information, aggregation of related information, and context-specific actions for different types of information.

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!