Just a quick reminder – we’re giving free licenses away to anyone who posts a review of ClearContext in a public forum. For full detail see our previous post, Who Wants a Free ClearContext Inbox Manager License?
*** The free license program has been discontinued. This blog post remains up for reference only
This Fortune article has a great interview with Bill Gates and new Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie on how they see email tools evolving. It’s not hard to guess why we find Ray Ozzie’s comment so intriguing:
"Funneling messages in chronological order into
an in-box is not necessarily the best model for dealing with different
projects, different teams, different issues, while other unrelated
things get intermixed with those. You have no sense of the priorities."
You’re preaching to the choir here, Ray. Read the rest of the article for Bill’s explanation on how he manages his email account. Good stuff.
We’ve been getting increasingly excited about our future for ClearContext Inbox Manager. We posted earlier some of the ideas that we’ve been working on and, based largely on user feedback, we have updated plans for our next major release (v2.0) and beyond. As we have said before, we want to keep our product plans closely aligned with user needs, so we are posting them here for your review and feedback to ensure that we build the best product possible.
We’ve broken this information into a few sections – v2.0, Incremental Features, Future Functionality, & Additional Products:
ClearContext v2.0
The next major release of ClearContext will transform the application from an inbox manager to a fully featured email productivity tool. The major new functionality in this release will accommodate many user requests, including some key features that we believe will further our goal of becoming the silver bullet of Outlook productivity and management.
New Functionality – Email Workflow Processing
Convert to task – create task items from email messages
Convert to a calendar entry
Defer or “Snooze” a message – messages moved out of inbox for specified period
Unified view of related items (email thread, tasks, calendar entries)
Response Management – auto-notification based on reply statusUser Interface/Usability
New View – “Received By” with color-coding and threading
Installed Views – additional downloadable views packaged with installation
AutoAssign functionality integrated with Outlook Rules
Import/Export of ClearContext SettingsPerformance Enhancements/Bug Fixes
Prioritization Optimization
Domain Resolution for Exchange Users
Advanced error handling
Topic DDLB UI Enhancement
Incremental Features
These are additional features under development that we plan to release soon after version 2.0 goes out the door.
Multiple machine support – “Master/Slave” mode
ClearContext functionality in other folders
Topic/Priority sharing in groups
Advanced AutoAssign Rule Management UI
Advanced Reply Management
– Change in priority after reply
– Thread expiration / “unsubscribe” on reply
Topic DDLB Enhancements – Better UI for management of large folder hierarchies
Future Features
These are mainly large new areas of functionality that we will be tackling in future major releases of the software and primarily focus on increased automation of message processing. We have not definitively prioritized these features and encourage discussion/feedback on which of these areas you feel are most important to address.
IMAP Support
Message Content Analysis for Message Function
– AutoAssign Topic, Priority
– Suggest What to Do With Message (Convert to Contact, Create Task)
– Adaptive Learning / A.I.
Automated Attachment Processing (documents, photos, etc.)
Additional Products
These are a few more product ideas we have in our longer-term plans. This list has not changed since our last update. Which of these we focus on will be largely based on user demand.
Corporate/ Exchange Server Integration – Port core Inbox Manager functionality (prioritization, scoring, topics, etc.) to Exchange Server for application on both individual email accounts and on emails/threads across the organization.
Mobile Extension – Port core Inbox Manager functionality to mobile devices to allow functionality such as downloading of only high-priority messages.
Vertical Customization – Job-specific customizations for fields such as Sales, Financial Services, Project Management, etc.
Again, user feedback can and does help us refine our product plans, so if you think we should re-align our priorities, we absolutely want to hear it. You can post feedback here on the weblog or in our forums, or send us a note at support ( at ) clearcontext. com. We will update the plan and provide more concrete timeframes as we integrate your feedback and continue product development.
News.com published an article today previewing upcoming features in the next release of Lotus Notes; code-named "Hannover:"
For example, Hannover will be designed to let people organize and
manage their information based on a specific project or topic across various Notes tools .
Using a demonstration version of the software, Loria showed that if a
person were to click on an e-mail related to a specific issue, he or
she could quickly access all of the correspondence that might have been
received about the topic from others, regardless of the manner in which
those messages were sent. Data could also be organized to reflect
communications with a particular person, or group of people, using the
software.
Good news, Outlook users – ClearContext already allows you to organize and store your received and sent email messages by Topic. And, as our users know, these topics can be associated with communications with an individual or group of people. We are currently working on our next major release which will extend this concept to task and calendar items and give you a view of related objects. We’ll post a Product Plan with more detail shortly.
We had the opportunity to meet with Buzz Bruggeman a couple of weeks ago. Among the pieces of sage advice that he gave, one stuck out. He stressed how important it is to take "smart money" when building a startup. One thing we didn’t get to discuss with him was our particular approach to fundraising.
It’s no secret that ClearContext is a young company and we’re working hard to turn into a profitable organization. What has been something of a secret, until this CNET News.com article, is our unique method of bootstrapping. Online poker winnings might not be the easiest way to fund operations, but the money comes with no strings attached and affords us the opportunity to make decisions that are good for the product and our customers.
Smart money!
Read High-stakes start-ups for more information.
Forbes magazine posted another analysis of the AOL Email Usage Survey with some additional data from a Cisco study. The conclusion:
"Give an executive a laptop computer he can use
at home, and you’ll probably get an extra hour of work out of him at
the tail end of the day. Give him a BlackBerry, and he can arrive at
the office caught up on e-mail and ready to attack real work earlier in
the day. Streamlined communications usually lead to faster decisions,
which can result in a more nimble, responsive and competitive company."
Bert has posted a list of things you should do in email if you really want to alienate people. My favorite is the fourth one down:
"CC everyone you can imagine, especially their superior
– This is especially good when your recipient has slipped up and made a
mistake. If the mistake is small, do this before you have all the
information so it looks a lot bigger than it really is. This is also
effective when dealing with confidential or sensitive information."
Carbon copy bloat is the #2 contributor to email overload, right behind spam. Take Bert’s tips to heart the next time you start to send an email.
We want to take this opportunity to give our readers some early information about the new product development we have underway. Before we put our thoughts down into a more concrete update to our
product plan, we wanted to share with you what
we’re building. Take this as your opportunity to assess our plans, make features suggestions, and help us set priorities before we lock down the design of our upcoming releases.
Here are a number of the major new features we’re working on that will be in the next product releases, roughly in priority order:
Workflow Enhancements – We’re really excited to start incorporating workflow functionality into the product and believe it will take email productivity to the next level. This includes features to convert mail messages to tasks and calendar items, as well as the ability to "snooze" a message for later review.
Advanced Views – We are going to implement additional views in this next release of the product. In particular, we plan to add many of the views available for download on our website as well as a new view that will allow users to sort email by received date, but preserve thread grouping within the inbox. The view buttons will change on our toolbar and the setup wizard will walk the user through a selection process to identify the best view for his/her needs.
Multiple Machine Support – Earlier we referred to this as "Master/ Slave Mode;" essentially it’s a facility to ensure message integrity for users who access the same Exchange mail account from multiple machines.
Functionality in Other Folders – We are researching ways to provide some subset of current ClearContext functionality in folders outside the inbox.
Topic and Priority Sharing for Groups – This feature really launches the product into the groupware realm, allowing users to share their priority and/or topic assignments with each other.
In addition to the above, we have many other smaller enhancements planned based on user requests, including integration of priority and topic setting functionality into Outlook rules, optimization of performance in some of our analysis processes, import/ export of ClearContext user settings, etc..
All of these features won’t make into into our next release. We are looking to you to help us determine those features that are of most value to our users. Feel free to comment in this post or send feedback directly to support ( at ) clearcontext.com. Thanks in advance for your help – we will be posting the updated product plan in the coming weeks.
CNET News.com has posted an article on an AOL Email Usage Survey. Addicted to e-mail? You’re not alone makes some interesting observations (which weren’t far off from what we found earlier in the year):
"For 41 percent [of respondents], morning coffee can wait, but not e-mail; accessing e-mail is the first thing they do in the morning."
The study also found that people are almost as protective of their email addresses as they are of their mobile phone numbers. That’s surprising.
On setup, ClearContext analyzes your email history to extract contacts that aren’t in your address book and rank all of your contacts by email volume. (For more detail on our patent pending prioritization process, see ClearContext Design: Contact Analysis and Maintenance).
Email usage patterns change over time, which should, in turn, change the importance of individual contacts. We recommend, after extended use of the product (say, every six months), that you re-run contact analysis to refresh your contact’s rankings. Contact records will retain any priorities you have set manually, but new rankings
will be assigned based on the latest email history to all other contact
records. The contact analysis process can be re-run at any time via Tools > Options > ClearContext > Analyze Contacts.
For more information on leveraging ClearContext to manage your most important contacts, see our User Guide.