It was just a short year ago that I really started to look for Outlook plugins that might make email management a little easier. Within the last few weeks I have found three. I didn’t dig into the history of each one of them enough to know how long they had been around but I’m guessing that the availability of Office 2007 has something to do with it.
Below I am going to give my opinion of one plugin, ClearContext. The next two will be covered in separate posts.
The first plugin I tried is ClearContext
From my experience, the idea behind ClearContext is to organize your email into categories or stages. In doing so the messages can be automatically filed away, deferred, delegated or turned into a task or calendar entry. Once an email has been categorized a dashboard view is available which allows a look at all messages, tasks or calendar entries for the project.
ClearContext does a lot of things right. The options available to you from when composing or reading a message are many, and are truly valuable. These include things like creating a task from the message or showing a related view which opens a window showing all messages within the category of the message you are viewing.
Unfortunately there are a few shortcomings that ultimately led me to uninstall ClearContext in search of an alternative. The first of these was that I could only place a message in a single category or stage. Ideally a message should be able to live in multiple categories without creating multiple copies of the message. The next issue was with the dashboard. While this idea is great, the execution is lacking. The dashboard is simply not as well organized or as functional as it needs to be. The last issue was how the messages auto categorize. If I categorize a message with a subject of “Sales Reports” to the “2007 4th QTR” category each message received with the same subject is also placed in that category. There are many instances when this simply won’t apply and will have to be worked around by resending the message to myself with an updated subject. This equals more work and defeats the purpose.
If these few shortcoming can be resolved (and they have certainly been mentioned by others in the ClearContext forums) this will be a very strong plugin.
Chuck,
Thanks for the writeup. The three items you mention happen to be key areas we’ve been working on making enhancements to the existing functionality.
The dashboard functionality is relatively basic by design. We wanted to address the core request by many of our users to provide a consolidated view of related information across the various silos in Outlook – messages, appointments, tasks, etc. Since that release, we’ve gotten tons of great feedback about the different ways people want to use the dashboard and we’re working on lots of improvements to make it as broadly useful as possible.
We’re investigating a few different options for more flexible categorization of messages. Potential options include types of tagging capabilities and more flexible usage of the native Outlook category functionality. A big part of our work here is to make sure that whatever we do maintains a simple and efficient user interface to maintain high productivity as well as on the technical side maintaining very high performance.
Finally, on the threading and auto-categorization, we’re looking into additional ways to link message threads together that will allow for more automated handling of scenarios such as multiple threads being linked together and single threads forking into different topics. Again, keeping a simple and highly efficient process flow and maintaining high performance are key considerations in what we do here.
We’ll be releasing information about our upcoming betas in the next few weeks. Stay tuned, I think you’ll find the new developments very interesting!
Deva – Thanks for commenting! This is great information. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on ClearContext and look forward to trying the next release.
[...] for Microsoft Outlook - Taglocity 14 01 2008 I mentioned previously that a big drawback to the Outlook plugin ClearContext, for me, was the inability to place a [...]
chuck, thanks! i was looking up clearcontext and I found your blog. Do you have any opinions on Outlook Track-It? I just downloaded this, and it’s been amazing so far. My favorite feature is the e-mail followup reminder (reminds you the user, and others to follow up).