Though it was only recently posted to their website, Five Card Studs came out a couple of months ago in San Francisco Magazine. Like CNET News.com’s High-stakes start-ups, it’s a short article on our somewhat unique funding source:
"There’s a connection between poker and start-ups," [ClearContext CEO Hazarika] says. "The scorecard is money."
I’ve said it before – any money that allows us to make the right decision for our users is smart money.
Michael Caton at eWeek has been using ClearContext for a couple of months and wrote a brief review:
"When I installed the software, it created prioritization rules by
looking at my e-mail history. Those rules generally did a good job of
moving messages, such as internal e-mail including attachments, to the
top of the queue."
I would like to address one point in the review. Michael mentions
that he saw some performance issues using Outlook over a VPN.
After speaking with him, it sounds like he’s accessing his Exchange
server in online mode while at home. Switching to cached exchange
mode in Outlook 2003 or offline in earlier versions of Outlook will
mitigate the problem.
By design, ClearContext ranks incoming messages on several characteristics including sender, message and thread priority, thread participation, and message directness. For a detailed description of each of these factors, see our user guide.
The weighting given to each of these characteristics can be tweaked via the ClearContext Options menu. See Tools > Options > ClearContext > Scoring Options for a screen with sliders that allow the adjustment of each factor’s weighting. The default settings represent our best guess at what makes an email important to you. However, we strongly encourage everyone to adjust the sliders on our scoring screen to get the most out of ClearContext prioritization.
For example, if you work in sales and receive a great deal of important email from new contacts who are not in your address book, you might want to adjust the Known Addresses weighting down and the Thread Participation weighting up to ensure that email conversations started by you and/or that you have participated in receive a higher score (and therefore higher prominence in your inbox).
There’s a review of ClearContext in the current issue of The Office
Letter (permanent review link here), calling Inbox Manager a "rules engine on steroids" and giving a
practical demonstration of the AutoAssign feature. We are pleased
to hear that the program works as expected.
Two items we’d like to note from the review:
BTW – The Office Letter is a great place to find ways to increase your
office productivity. If you haven’t subscribed to their
newsletter, I recommend you do so. In addition to a review of our product and OnlyMyEmail, this week’s issue includes:
In addition, Premium Issue subscribers learn how to move multiple items in Word using a little-known (and poorly documented) feature. Check it out.
I was going to write something about the Forbes article that concluded email was dying due to teen’s preference for IM (The Beginning of the End of Email), but Jason Clarke said it just about perfectly – teens prefer IM because they don’t have a need for a less immediate medium like email. Just wait until they get into the business world. Read Email Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.
Slipstick publishes an informative, biweekly newsletter devoted to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Issues called the Exchange Messaging Outlook. This newsletter is always a good read – to subscribe, sign up here.
The latest issue has an article on the perils of using your Deleted Items folder for filing important messages:
"I understand why they do it – they want to keep the Inbox clean and hitting the DEL key is quick and easy, but I’m amazed at the number of people who use this for message management and see nothing wrong with it. They get upset with me when I tell them it’s a really bad idea to store messages in the Deleted folder and many continue doing it even after losing all of their important messages."
As mentioned in the article, there are better, more secure ways to file your email, including automated solutions from ClearContext. We allow you to assign topics to email threads and provide filing buttons for one touch archiving of messages, email conversations, and/or entire categories of email. This is almost as convenient as the delete key, much less likely that you will lose your important email, and makes it a lot easier to find archived email when you need it.
Ina Fried wrote an interesting article on CNET News.com regarding the problems with information distraction from technology such as email, instant messaging, PDA’s, etc.. This quote from Dan Russell, a senior manager at IBM research, made me chuckle:
After concluding three years ago that he was becoming a slave to
e-mail, Russell decided to put his foot down. These days, he takes his
time replying to messages. All his responses say at the bottom: "Join
the slow email movement! Read your mail just twice each day. Recapture
your life’s time and relearn to dream."
I agree with Russell, don’t become a slave to email (or any other technology for that matter) and by all means set aside time during the day for email rather than constantly checking it. That said, while well thought out replies are the hallmark of a good email manager, I also think that deliberately waiting to reply to email is a mistake. Yes, research has shown that by waiting to respond to messages you condition the sender to not expect you to be at their beck and call; but there is a significant amount of time wasted re-reading messages that sit in your mailbox awaiting disposition. Once you’ve given your attention to a message, go ahead and do something with it (reply, file, create an appointment or task). If you want to delay the reply, change the sent message options to set delivery for a later time.
The article gives a survey on page 2 that tests whether you are too distracted by information and also lists some stop gap measures to help mitigate the distracting impact of technology. If overwhelmed, the tips are good for regaining some sanity, but the reality is that this flood of data and the technology that delivers it are necessary components of today’s information society. As we noted in a previous post, studies have shown that devices such as Blackberries can have a positive impact on our ability to complete our jobs. A good strategy for integrating information into your workday and exploiting it’s usefulness is required to be an effective worker. If you feel the need to unplug as the article suggests, I recommend you take some time before you plug back in to think through how to manage the data in your life more efficiently.
[Thanks to Super Web Tech weblog for the pointer to this article.]
There are three items that I like to highlight for people who have recently installed ClearContext. These are things that might not be obvious at first pass over the application, but really open up Inbox Manager’s functionality:
The message here is that, while the out of the box experience may be exactly what you’re looking for, ClearContext provides a wealth of ways to customize and tweak the user experience to make sure that you get the most out of Outlook. If you have a unique way of conifguring and using the application and/or there are additional features you would like to see, please do not hesitate to drop us a line.
Check out my article on good inbox management techniques published in the August Issue of Outlook Power Magazine. In a nutshell, I prescribe a six point process for getting more productivity out of email:
The bottom line here is best summed up by one of our 2005 Email Usage Survey respondents:
"The fact is that email is the conduit for virtually all business work product in the 21st century. Learning to manage it appropriately becomes everyone’s personal responsibility."
For the full text of the article, including an explanation of each point, see Don’t Become a Slave to Email. For additional tips and techniques on email related issues, see our previously posted top five lists (downloadable pdf versions of these tips are located on our additional information page):
Top Five Ways to Manage the Inbox Effectively
Top Five Ways to Reduce Email Traffic
Top Five Ways to Improve Email Etiquette
Top Five Email Policy Considerations
The ClearContext message toolbar (Open, New & Reply) is disabled if using Microsoft Word as an email editor – the default editor for Outlook XP and 2003. To make use of this ClearContext functionality, select Tools > Options > Mail Format and uncheck the "Use Microsoft Word…" option.
This will open up several additional Inbox Manager features, including the ability to assign both Topic and Priority in open messages, file message functionality, and access to the sender’s contact record for easy manual priority assignment. In addition, the presence of the toolbar allows the assignment of topics to new messages, greatly enhancing the usefulness of ClearContext’s Sent Message filing feature.
For more detail on getting the most out of ClearContext, see our User Guide.