ClearContext Corporate Blog

Wow.  I intended to put up highlights of the new release yesterday, but the response to v4 announcement has been amazing and has kept us all incredibly busy (in a good way).  A hearty thanks for the support!

For the v4 release we really focused on points of pain our customers have talked to us about in our forums and via support requests.  Here’s an overview of the key new features in v4:

IMS Dashboard

Accessed from the Dashboard button on the toolbar, this tool allows you to view Messages, Tasks & Appointments, filtered by Topic and Category.

When unfiltered, the messages window shows flagged messages only.  Apply a Topic filter to show Inbox and Filed messages with assigned Topics.

Alerts

Create an unread message or contact alert trigger by clicking the Alerts button on the toolbar.  If a message that meets the criteria set in your Alert trigger remains unread for the time you specify, IMS will pop-up a window letting you know that there is a message in your Inbox that needs attention.  A few notes:

• You can set Alerts by contact or message thread
• You manage/view your Alert triggers from the Alert management window, accessed via the ClearContext menu.

Toolbar Simplification

Probably the first thing you will notice in the new release is that the toolbar has been simplified.  Add/Remove buttons and change their position via ClearContext > Options > Preferences > Toolbar. 

Do Not Disturb

Access this feature from the ClearContext menu to turn off message notifications and work without interruption.

Topic Query on Save

Much like the Topic query on send function for composed messages available in v3, IMS will query for Topic assignment when a task or appointment is saved.

Mark as Read When Filing

IMS now marks all messages as read when filing using one of the filing buttons.  This behavior can be turned of via ClearContext > Options > Preferences > Misc.

Go to Topic

Accessed from the Topic Selector, Go To Topic opens the Topic folder that you select.

Custom Forms Support

IMS can be configured to use custom forms from the Task and Schedule buttons.  This allows the product to be used in conjunction with third party add-ins like Taskline.  Enter the custom form class in ClearContext > Options > Preferences > Tasks/Appts.  FYI – To use Taskline, enter IPM.Task.Taskline in the Task custom form field.

Thanks to the beta community who helped us test the new
features!

We’ve got a lot more to talk about in conjunction with this release.
In particular I want to share our near term product plan and talk at length
about the Information
Management System Daily Workflow.  So watch the weblog over the coming
weeks for some really exciting stuff.

We are pleased to announce the release of IMS v4.  The press release is posted here.  We’ve got a lot more to say about the release a little later.  In the meantime, peruse our newly re-designed website, download and install IMS v4, and let us know what you think.

I just came across this great article on Jugglezine filled with interesting email overload facts:

"In 2006, the average corporate e-mail user received 126 e-mail messages
per day, a 55 percent increase since 2003, according to a survey
by The Radicati Group, Inc., a technology market research firm in Palo
Alto, California. "If users spend an average of one minute to read and
respond to each message, this flood of e-mail traffic will consume more
than a quarter of the typical eight-hour workday–with no guarantee
that users actually read the messages that are most important," the
report said. "Additionally, if e-mail traffic continues to increase at
this rate, the average corporate e-mail user will spend 41 percent of
the workday managing e-mail messages in 2009."

The article also has a wealth of tips for "seizing control of email."  Check it out.

We’re heads down on the new release here, but I wanted to take a quick moment to point you to some of the interesting articles I’ve come across the last few days:

WSJ: Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?
“Email providers are trying to steal some of social networking’s thunder as fast-growing services like Facebook Inc. begin to encroach on their turf.”  (Deva’s got some comments on this one).

Alternate Layers: Workplace Attention Economy
“Email Free Friday is a downright silly idea, but is a sign that there is a greater disease.” (It looks like Thomas has the same opinion as me regarding Free Email Day).

Bex Huff: Email Free Fridays
I found Ben’s admittedly aggressive solution to email overload from the article above. His suggested automated response to email: “I’m currently swamped with projects X, Y, and Z at the moment. If I answer your email, one of them will suffer. Please let me know which one should suffer, let me inform the project manager that it will suffer because of you, and then I’ll be happy to answer your question.“

CNET: Gates has a long to-do list
“Others at the company say that Gates is particularly driven about the notion of how presence–the notion of a computer knowing whether someone is online or not–can be used by computers to help prioritize work.”  OK, so this is tangentially related to email, but I found the comments regarding presence and prioritization to be pretty interesting for reasons that I’m sure you can guess.

Enjoy.

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!

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame has written an interesting article titled “The Future of Ignoring Things” for Internet Evolution.  His basic premise – computers have done such a good job of helping us remember things that now we need to put them to work on helping us to ignore.  In particular, he talks about about implementing an email feature reminiscent of the Unsubscribe function in IMS Pro:

“Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference and founder of the startup AskSandy, once proposed an “ignore thread” feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week’s dinner plans become this week’s discussion of next year’s group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox — and a single click takes you back through all the messages you missed.

We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone between “delete on sight” and “show this to me right away.”

This type of strategy is necessary due to the huge volume and high cost of interruptions; well documented in Intel’s analysis of the impact of Informania.  At ClearContext we continue to focus our core products and energies on eliminating this issue and “showing people the right way.”

I have written about this before, but last week the Microsoft Outlook team blog posted, in great detail, one of my favorite Outlook 2007 features – collapsible folder list and To-Do bars…

As the problem of information overload continues to grow in the workplace, we’re seeing more entrants into this space with their own twist.  One example is Seriosity, a recent entrant with a novel concept for the enterprise.  They have created a system of email credits that people use to signify the importance of emails and compel recipients to pay attention.   Multi-player gaming for email!  Today we welcome another entrant to the space as the guys over at Xobni (a Y Combinator company) launched today at TechCrunch40.

Xobni is focused on contact-based organization, analytics and search within email.  They utilize a number of concepts similar to that in a product from Microsoft Research, SNARF, to rank the importance of contacts and provide analytics about your email traffic with each individual.  They also provide threaded views of email conversations, something we also do in both our Inbox views and RelatedView.  Another focus of their product is search, though with indexed search in Outlook 2007 as well as free desktop search tools we’re not sure how important that area is for further independent development.  Overall Xobni looks like an interesting product, sort of a slicker, updated version of Nelson Email Organizer integrated within Outlook to provide some interesting statistics about your email to help you be more efficient.

There are two main differences between our take on the solution to email overload and Xobni’s.  While we share their passion for analytics and organization, more of our focus with ClearContext IMS is on effective ways to process incoming email.  Secondly, their organization capabilities revolve around the contact.  While we do a lot of things based around the contact, a key area of focus for us is relating and viewing information on a complete project basis, encompassing multiple to-dos, appointments, and emails from various contacts.

We’ve also been quite busy with new developments ourselves.

Having worked with thousands of customers over the past few years to help them be more productive in email, we’ve developed our own unique perspective on the best solution for the space.  Like Xobni, our ClearContext IMS Pro product automatically identifies the highest priority contacts and your email relationship with then.  We use that to prioritize incoming email messages, then provide functionality to take action on these messages and keep all of the information organized.   While that is enough for many customers to love the product, we’ve also found that for many people the technology is just part of their whole solution.  Productivity methodology gurus like David Allen (GTD), Michael Linenberger (Total Workday Control), and many others provide a structure for working with email that for many people goes hand-in-hand with the technology to provide a complete solution.

Over the past year, we’ve been working with a number of customers to distill the most high-impact techniques for managing their workday into a streamlined system that can instantly help anyone be more productive and get more done.  We’re excited to show you how simple it can be to stay in control of email when, later in the year, we announce the next release of ClearContext IMS, a complete solution integrating best practices and software automation to help people be more productive and get more done with less stress.  We’re in the midst of beta testing right now and will be expanding the beta group soon, so let us know if you’re interested in an early preview.  It’s exciting to see more awareness building about the magnitude of the information overload in the enterprise, and we’re looking forward to seeing even more innovation in this space.

The ClearContext Team