ClearContext Corporate Blog

I am very pleased to announce that we have officially released ClearContext v2!  I will write a longer post on v2 a little later, but wanted to share the press release below…

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ClearContext
Information Management System Pro and free Inbox Manager Personal
Edition help Microsoft Outlook users efficiently cope with increasing
volumes of email by utilizing automated email prioritization,
organization, and email-driven workflow capabilities.

San Francisco, CA – March 22, 2006 —
ClearContext Corporation today announced the release of ClearContext
Information Management System Pro (IMS Pro), a Microsoft Outlook add-in
to help individuals efficiently manage email, tasks, and appointments
in a fully integrated fashion, and ClearContext Inbox Manager Personal
Edition, a free product to automatically prioritize and organize email.
Both products utilize patent-pending email and contact prioritization
algorithms to highlight a user’s most important email and provide
features to quickly organize and file related emails by project.

IMS
Pro includes additional functionality to create, process, and organize
not only emails, but also tasks and appointments. “As business users
face ever increasing email volumes, taking quick, effective action on
messages becomes vital,” said ClearContext CEO Deva Hazarika.
“ClearContext IMS Pro allows users to instantly identify critical email
and with a single click create action items linked to that email –
transforming Outlook into a powerful information management system.”

In
addition to instantly converting emails into tasks and appointments,
IMS Pro also allows users to delegate email to others or defer emails
so they disappear from the inbox and reappear at a later date. “Defer
is like a snooze button for email,” said Brad Meador, ClearContext’s VP
of Operations. “The combination of these features and automated email
prioritization allows busy users to very quickly perform ‘email triage’
on their inbox.” Outgoing message features include the ability to
generate reminders if a response is not received within a certain
timeframe and automatic filing of sent messages into project folders.

To
help users manage their action items, two powerful new dashboard views
have been integrated into Outlook. ActionView provides users with a
consolidated view of all pending action items (tasks, appointments,
deferred messages, and flagged messages) filtered by project, enabling
individuals to more efficiently manage and organize their workday.
RelatedView displays all related emails, tasks and appointments along
with a history of all activity within the email conversation, allowing
users to at a glance see when emails were sent or received and view all
action items generated from these messages.

ClearContext
Inbox Manager Personal Edition is available completely free of charge.
ClearContext Information Management System Pro is priced at $69.95 per
single-user license with a 30-day free trial available. Both products
can be downloaded at www.clearcontext.com.

I started to write Shawn Morrissey a note about this, then thought it’d be more fun to share.   Shawn writes:

"I found that, given the right seat on an airplane so I actually have
room to open a laptop, I can get lots and lots of work done.  I don’t
know why it took so long to break through the “duh” factor, and I
finally started doing the same thing when I’m on terra firma.  I’ve
started setting aside 90 minutes or so every day, and set Outlook into
Offline mode.  Then I can do tearing through my inbox without
distraction."

Once, for a big project, I traveled back and forth from San Francisco to NYC almost every weekend for about two years.  I flew so much that United sent me a gift.  "We see that your travels often take you to New York, so we thought you might like a New Yorker desk diary."  That’s when you know you’re on the road way too much.

The point is, I’ve never been more productive then when I was on that plane.  My team HATED when I flew, because after I landed I always connected up and sent off 50+ emails that had been written while in the air.  It was my time to catch up on all of the unanswered email of the week, take a project status check, and get my my team’s ducks in a row for the following week.

I think Shawn’s on to something.  If you need to focus on your Inbox for a while, take Outlook offline and pretend you’re flying.  If only I could figure out how to get a complimentary drink and bag of peanuts, too…

Before you read the article below, answer this question:

What word is related to the following other three? Cookies, sixteen, heart.

The answer is in the text and I unfortunately read it before I thought about the question.  Is it patently obvious or not?

Fortune Magazine’s Anne Fisher asks the question – if Archimedes were taking a quick shower instead of a bath, would he have formulated his displacement principle?  The gist of the article is that it takes blocks of time to come up with the really smart, creative ideas and our interrupt driven, multi-tasking work environment is making this increasingly difficult.  Here’s a quote:

"What scientists have only recently begun to realize is that people may do their best thinking when they are not concentrating on work at all. If you’ve ever had a great idea pop into your head while you were washing your car, walking your dog, or even napping, you already know what a team of Dutch psychologists revealed last month in the journal Science: The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all."

Now, as I read it, this is what David Allen has been trying to tell us all along – get your daily tasks under control so you don’t have to think about them to free your mind to be more creative.  This is certainly true for me – I do my best thinking on my walk to work when and my creative pursuits always benefit from downtime.

Jason Clarke has some great comments on why effective email management is essential to success in business and life.  I can’t say it better, so go read it now.

On thing I’d like to add – there is a huge sense of satisfaction you get when you keep your email (and consequently, your life) organized.  This is one place where David Allen and his GTD disciples are dead right.  I start to feel a lot of anxiety when the messages pile up in my Inbox.  It’s a constant reminder that I’m not on the ball and I find myself wasting time, going back through my email to make sure I haven’t missed something.  It’s a relief when I can finally sit down and action all those emails.  Don’t underestimate just how much of a difference this can make in your life!

We made a few minor changes to the application.  Details and a download are here.

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to pull myself away from Release Candidate testing for a few hours and go to the TechCrunch Naked Conversations Book Launch party.  It was a much needed break, plus I got to meet a lot of innovative people and pick up a copy of Robert and Shel’s new book.  Thanks, Michael for throwing a great party!

Buzz was nice enough to introduce me to John Furrier, and we talked for a little bit about ClearContext.  Check out his podcast from the party.  I come on around minute 4:50.  After the pitch, John asks "So you’re simplifying people’s lives?"  Clearly John is a very perceptive individual!  Thanks, John!

In our v2 Release Candidate announcement, we posted plans for the v2 product line, including a description of the features in IMS Pro, our full-featured Information Management System, and Inbox Manager Personal Edition, our free email prioritization and inbox management solution.  For more detail, here’s a high level features comparison:

– This feature is limited for non-licensed customers.
* Features available to licensed Inbox Manager customers only

See our previous post for more detail on these two products and some screen prints.

I couldn’t let this pass without note.  Microsoft research is working on a foot pad interface to manage email.  Using a Dance Dance Revolution video game controller users can process their email – it’s touted as a healthy way to stay productive.  I’m not making this up – check out the video!

Yesterday we hit a major miletone in our development of ClearContext Information Management System v2 – we made our first Release Candidate available for download.  We have added several new features since the Beta 2 release, including WordMail support, enhanced setup and email tutorials, streamlined error reporting, Outlook 2000 and Windows 2000 support, and an enhanced ActionView UI.  Go to our beta page now, download the release, and let us know what you think!

There are a couple of known issues in RC1 (listed on RC1 release page), so we’ll have at least one more release candidate before our production release.  This release candidate is feature complete, so don’t expect any of the features that didn’t make it in already to make it into the 2.0 production release.  We did gather a lot of very valuable feedback during the beta period and will follow our 2.0 release with a 2.1 in the near future.  We hope to address many additional beta feature suggestions/improvements in that update.  Thanks again to everyone for the incredibly helpful feedback during our beta program.

We’ve also finalized the pricing and product segmentation for our 2.0 product line.  We’ve separated the product into two versions:

ClearContext IMS Professional

This product will be priced at $69.95 per single-user license.  ClearContext IMS Pro is our professional-grade, full-featured Outlook information management solution targeted at customers who use Outlook to manage their day.

• Address high value email first with automated prioritization

• Automate viewing, categorization, and filing of email threads via conversation management

• Quickly manage your tasks and schedule with automated workflow

ClearContext Inbox Manager

This product is free for personal use.  For $29.95, registered customers receive email support and additional functionality (RelatedView, AutoAssign, Sent Message Filing).  ClearContext Inbox Manager is our free email management solution targeted at email users who want to manage their Inbox more efficiently.

• Highlight important email via automated prioritization

• Easily link, categorize, & file email conversations

• View the entire email conversation at the click of a button (Registered Users Only)

Buy It Now!

For those of you who may have been waiting on 2.0 before purchasing, here’s a special offer that should help make up your mind.  People who purchase ClearContext Inbox Manager between now and our 2.0 production release will receive a free upgrade to the full ClearContext IMS Professional product.  This offer also applies to all 1.0 users who have been involved in the beta program.  We really appreciate everyone’s support and hope that you’re as excited about the upcoming ClearContext IMS release as we are.

Coming Soon…

In the coming weeks, we’ll finalize all of those things that go along with a new release – we’ve got an updated website coming, a new user guide, a new online demo and much more.  Watch this weblog for more information as we complete it.

Final Installment of Our IMS Pro Tips Series

Good conversation management is key to efficiently organizing and processing email.  As discussed previously, Topic Assignment and Filing is the first step in taking control of the Inbox.  Beyond that, the ClearContext RelatedView and AutoAssign features are excellent tools for keeping your Inbox organized and staying on top of email correspondence.

Want to get a global picture of all items in the current email conversation?  RelatedView shows all email in the message thread, along with tasks and appointments generated from that conversation.

Automatically categorize and prioritize email conversations.  AutoAssign allows you to create rules to designate a topic, message priority, and/or automatically file messages that meet specific criteria. This is helpful for proactively categorizing incoming email and automatically filing newsletters and other bulk email.