Taming the Email Beast

Taglocity wins a Pick20 Web 2.0 Award from KPMG and Backbone Magazine

David Towert — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:56:00 GMT

Taglocity was ranked #18 on the Pick20 Web 2.0 list by KPMG and Backbone Magazine. The PICK20 Web 2.0 Award recognizes Canadian companies that are driving innovation and changing the way we use the Internet.

We've been working on ways to unlock knowledge from inboxes and mitigate the effects of email overload with web technologies for over two years now so it's great to have that acknowledged!

The judges explain their selection of Taglocity as follows:

By working to manage the flood of e-mail, Taglocity "targets a real problem using innovative solutions," Geist said. According to Napier, "a solution like Taglocity, that combines both e-mail management with collaboration and knowledge-sharing tools like micro-messaging, enables knowledge workers to capture, organize and share information from within Outlook without having to jump to or learn a different platform or application." O'Connor Clarke concurred. "Taglocity addresses the problem right inside the knowledge worker's main desktop environment: Outlook. It requires only small changes to existing behaviour to show immediate productivity benefits. Excellent stuff."

Our New Conversation Reader

David Towert — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:32:00 GMT

We've been heads-down in development working on Taglocity version 3 since late last year. After two beta updates, we're seeing a very positive response from our beta community (thanks for that!). One of the areas we've improved the most is the Conversation Reader. Recently we got a question from a new user asking about the strategy behind it. I thought it would be good to share the answer with everyone. Here goes:

The overall purpose of the conversation reader is to present a unified view of all messages belonging to a conversation or email thread. As you know, conversations can get quite messy with different people contributing to the topic at different times which means the latest email doesn't always contain all of the content. For example if two people reply to a message roughly at the same time, or pick an ‘earlier' message in a thread to reply to, then no single message will contain all the content in it.

What is nice about the Taglocity Conversation Reader is that it will find all messages of a conversation and present a preview of them in chronological order which allows you to scan who said what when. It will also fully render the current message and any of the preview messages you click on. This allows you to quickly jump around the different messages of a conversation to quickly locate what you're looking for, and therefore be better informed. If you click on the fully rendered message in the Conversation Reader, it will open Outlook's version of it for deleting, replying, forwarding, etc.

What makes the Taglocity Conversation Reader even more powerful is that it gathers all messages in a conversation from any folder, including your own replies from the Sent Items folder. The built-in Outlook conversation view, or conversation grouping, does a nice job of organizing messages by conversation, but it only shows the messages in the current folder. Naturally this would not include your replies and any messages that have been moved to different folders. People who rely on this feature may be missing important information leading to less than optimum decision making. Or they waste time, completely unnecessarily, trying to find related messages in other folders.

Another great benefit of the Taglocity Conversation Reader is that no matter where you stumble upon a message, whether it be in some obscure folder or deep in search results, then with one click you can automatically see the latest message in the conversation with the most up-to-date information about a topic.

But that's not all! You can tag all messages in a conversation in the Taglocity Conversation Reader; either append tags to each message, or replace all the different tags on the messages with new ones. In addition, with one click of a checkbox, you can tell Taglocity to assign a set of tags to all future messages in the conversation.

New features in the latest beta release includes the ability to embed the reader into a region in Outlook to suit your layout preferences. This builds the conversation view for any message you click on in Outlook. If you have a second monitor, you can set the Conversation Reader to 'float' mode which puts it a new window that you can position anywhere.

If you don't have a lot of space, you can keep the conversation view in condensed mode which works well in narrow or short spaces because only the preview bubbles are shown without the fully rendered view of the current message. Clicking on a bubble opens the message in an Outlook window for you to see more.

Hope you enjoy this awesome feature....I can't live without it now! I even use it place of the Outlook Reading Pane now.

A Streamlined Email Process with Taglocity

David Towert — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:42:00 GMT

I love it when our customers share their Taglocity experiences with us. Mic Cullen, a sports journalist, recently wrote to us and kindly gave his permission to publish it. Thanks Mic!

Hopefully this will give others some good ideas on how to become more productive with email using Taglocity....

Taglocity makes my job a whole lot easier. Sounds like a big statement, but to give an example of how much I need it, I hung off buying a MacbookPro until I was sure that Taglocity would run with Outlook on it (under VMWare Fusion, if anyone cares).

I am a sports journalist (among other things), and email is my lifeblood. I use it from 5am to 11pm.

I have a pretty streamlined email process. I used to have a folder hierarchy for filing email in, but that gives issues, as you have to decide which folder an email belongs in, when it might need to be in several. Now, I have just three -folders - Inbox, @Holding, Archive.

However, I have any number of tags through Taglocity. As a result, I can tag one email with multiple tags - for example, the main organisation (AFL), team (Richmond or Western Bulldogs) and a tag like @Action. These can be automatically applied on arrival (ie AFL/Richmond) or manually, after arriving in the inbox (@Action). Tags can be set to perform actions as well as simple tagging, so my @Action tag not only applies the tag, but moves it to the @Holding folder.

As a result, the email is out of my Inbox, because I've looked at it and assigned a ‘next action' (if I can steal and slightly corrupt a GTD term), but it's available to me in my "@Action" search folder, as well as my "AFL", "AFL this week" and "Richmond" search folders.

My other primary tags are "@Visit/Read" and "@Waiting", which are for emails that have a site to visit or a document to read, or because I'm waiting on a response/arrival, respectively. (I'm also wanting to buy a house, so I also have more temporary categories such as "@Housing-new".)

However, Taglocity also does more than just passively tag and move emails, it can also do actions on them. For example, if I have an email that comes in that tells me about a media conference I need to go to, I simply click on the "Appointment" tag on the Taglocity toolbar, and it pops up an Outlook new appointment dialog, with the body of the email in the details section of the appointment, and the subject of the email in the subject of the appointment. Setup the time, and you're away, with all the relevant details there for checking from your calendar. I have it setup so that applying this tag also applies the "@Action" tag, which moves it to the "@Action" folder.

This keeps my Inbox empty once I've dealt with the email, either by responding or by assigning a tag, and allows me to see what I need to do immediately.

My other main tag is that of "Done" - once an item is dealt with, if I want to keep it (as I often do), I simply assign the "Done" tag. This strips off the "@Action", "@Waiting" or "@Visit/Read" tag, and moves the email out of the @holding or Inbox folders into the Archive folder. All the other tags are kept (ie "AFL/Richmond" or "Family/Simon") and so can be easily searched on under the various tags it still carries.

This is not all it does (Taglocity pane, conversation viewer) but that's how I use it.

Thanks for a great year!

David Towert — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:42:00 GMT

2008 turned out to be a fun year for us at Taglocity because we were fortunate enough to spend the whole year doing what we love: developing cool software solutions that we love to use ourselves.

At times it was challenging but we wouldn't have it any other way. I must admit, it really helps when you have a highly competent team with colleagues who respect one another's abilities and contributions. Having been in the software business since 1993, I know this is not always the case!

We are proud of the advances we've made in corporate communication systems to improve knowledge sharing and reduce email overload. The initial feedback we've received has been very positive so after two years in development, we look forward to an exciting new year as we enter the go-to-market phase of our young company's lifecycle.

I'd like to extend a heartfelt 'thank you' to our staff, our customers, our beta testers, our supporters, and to all the people who've taken the time to review our solutions.

On behalf of the Taglocity Team, we wish everyone a very happy new year and a most prosperous 2009!

Dave Towert | President & CEO

Email is alive and well in the C suite

David Towert — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:20:00 GMT

A recent survey revealed that CIOs still prefer email over other forms of electronic communication technologies. The survey was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.

Respondents were asked, "What is the preferred way for IT staff to communicate with each other in the office?" Their responses:

E-mail	43%
In-person conversations	36%
Phone	10%
Instant messaging	4%
Text messaging	2%
Don't know/no answer	5%

"E-mail is effective for quick exchanges and keeping written records of decisions," said Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology. "However, when conveying potentially sensitive information, nothing can replace the value of face-to-face communication."

What does this mean to us? Many people think the solution to solving email problems is to move away from email to other technologies, but we believe the answer is to extend email systems to provide the benefits of the new web-based communication technologies without requiring people to leave the 'comfort' of email.

For example, if a project decision made between a few people in an email thread is of interest to others, people naturally ‘push' it out via distribution lists, or manually pick recipients to CC. What typically happens then is that because distribution lists are dynamically updated, the message will undoubtedly reach and interrupt people who don't need it, and may not reach people who do need it but aren't on the DL, perhaps without the sender even realizing it.

And when people manually pick recipients to CC, they could easily omit people by mistake, especially when there are more than just a few people involved.

With Taglocity, the message can be sent to those who absolutely must receive it, and then CC'd to a team or project group where others subscribe to content they're interested in, or can search for it later, all without leaving email. In other words, people ‘place' information (via email) at a fixed location in context, and others ‘pull' it on-demand.

An added benefit of this approach is that people joining teams later can be invited to specific groups where they get immediate access to important information that has been previously shared by their colleagues.

By leveraging Web 2.0 technologies like tagging, indexing, search, micro-blogging, groups, subscriptions/alerts, RSS, natural language processing, etc. all built around secure web-services, we believe Taglocity can help to shed the notoriety now associated with email. We want email to once again contribute to improved productivity instead of email overload and information silos.

Indeed, we want to make sure everyone prefers email, not just the CIOs. The last thing we need is even more fragmentation in our communication technologies - email is great because everyone has it and it is so easy. Let's fix (extend) email so it stays that way!

Dave

You Don't Have To Tag

david Ing — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:39:00 GMT

One question that comes up quite often when we describe Taglocity is the reaction of 'I don't want to have to tag things - sounds like more work'. We've thought about this a lot during the development of Taglocity and some of the concepts that aren't obvious is that we actually have quite a few ways in which you don't have to tag things yourself. Here's some ideas and guidelines:

- Taglocity has a great 'Auto Assign' feature, where you can right mouse-button click on an email in your inbox and just say 'Anything from this person, or about this subject, or about these things then please put these tags on automatically'. After a few Auto Assignments have been set up then you'll really find a lot of things happening automatically, i.e. no work.

- If you tag any new messages as you write them, or replies to existing threads, then you'll find a dramatic increase in your productivity. Taglocity has the concept where the tags (with your permission) can travel with the message - this means all your replies and long threads are tagged automatically for you. This also has a 'network effect' of helping others, especially where you choose 'group tags' that you all might share. The majority of email you get will probably be in a team of people, and here the 'traveling tags' can really save you and other people a lot time. You may just want to use the tags in your group of people you work with, and tags like projects, or clients or statuses can really help get across the 'context' of your message (and let the recipients automate their filing/handing too).

- We use the concept of Taglocity Groups as a place where you can send email to and then let the recipients decide how they want to see it - sort of a smart alternative to the dreaded Reply All or growing CC list. Some members of the group will want everything forwarded as you send it to the group, while others might be a happy with the Daily Digest summary or perhaps specific RSS feeds based on narrow queries. The main point here though is that others can choose their 'email flow' and for those emails that arrive they are already tagged.

- Finally, it's worth mentioning that not everything has to be tagged. The delete button is still sometimes the best way to go, and the usefulness of the tags should be considered with your chances of ever wanting to quickly find that information ever again.

We're also currently working on some new 'Tag Suggestion' technologies, so please do stay tuned for that or leave some ideas at http://feedback.taglocity.com.

I hope though that the above list helps get across the concept of that in a typical work day you'll find you have to tag a lot less than you think you will.

Taglocity 2.0 in the Press

david Ing — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:03:00 GMT

Here's a quick sample of some of the press for yesterday's launch, and thanks to all for the positive reviews and comments:

Taglocity Aims To Improve Microsoft Outlook By Making It More Like Gmail
TechCrunch
Hate that folder system? Taglocity 2.0 will turn messages, contacts, calendar entries, etc. into taggable items or virtual folders much like Gmail does with labels.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/13/taglocity-aims-to-improve-microsoft-outlook-by-making-it-more-like-gmail/

TechCrunch Japan
http://jp.techcrunch.com/archives/20081113taglocity-aims-to-improve-microsoft-outlook-by-making-it-more-like-gmail/

TechCrunch France
http://fr.techcrunch.com/2008/11/14/taglocity-tente-de-transformer-microsoft-outlook-en-gmail/

Taglocity bringing Gmail features to Outlook
CNET News - San Francisco,CA,USA
Taglocity, a company that aims to provide streamlined e-mail services to the enterprise, announced Thursday that the latest release of its add-in for ...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10096265-2.html

Taglocity Brings Gmail-like Tagging to Outlook
LifeHacker
Windows only: Microsoft Outlook plug-in Taglocity brings Gmail-style tagging to your Outlook email. Getting started with Taglocity takes a little figuring out, but once you understand what the app is capable of, it's got all kinds of ...
http://lifehacker.com/5086336/taglocity-brings-gmail+like-tagging-to-outlook

Lifehacker Australia
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2008/11/14/taglocity_brings_gmaillike_tagging_to_outlook.html

Taglocity With New Innovation Edge, brings Gmail features to Outlook
Webtechpoint
Taglocity which provides streamlined e-mail services to the enterprise with its latest release of add-in for Outlook will bring functionality offered in Google's Gmail application to Microsoft's e-mail client. ...
http://www.webtechpoint.com/taglocity-with-new-innovation-edge-brings-gmail-features-to-outlook/

Get More Features in Outlook with Taglocity 2.0
Life Rocks 2.0
Taglocity 2.0 is a email management free add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 which helps you to manage your email better. This add-in is designed to reduce email overload for busy professionals. Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook puts the ...
http://www.nirmaltv.com/2008/11/14/get-more-features-in-outlook-with-taglocity-20/

Taglocity Brings Gmail-like Tagging to Outlook
Descontructing the Web
Microsoft Outlook plug-in Taglocity brings Gmail-style tagging to your Outlook email. Link: Taglocity Brings Gmail-like Tagging to Outlook.
http://blog.lroot.com/articles/taglocity-brings-gmail-like-tagging-to-outlook/

Plus many, many more - so thanks again everyone, and I'll add more links when the whirlwind settles down...

Taglocity in Action

david Ing — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:59:00 GMT

Yesterday was pretty exciting, with some great press and a huge number of new Taglocity users.

One thing I did want to point out is that we have some excellent screencast videos that help explain how to get the best out of Taglocity. They can be found here, so please do check them out:

http://www.taglocity.com/videos.html

If you want to offer feedback or a have a suggestion on how we could add or improve a feature then please do take a look here:

http://feedback.taglocity.com

Thanks again to all for making it a great launch day.

Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook Released!

david Ing — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:27:00 GMT

We've release Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook after a great beta period. You can download the latest official 2.0 release version from here:

http://www.Taglocity.com/Downloads

Thanks to all the beta users for their feedback - the suggestions and ideas have really helped us make Taglocity better and we do appreciate it.

What Next?

We're already planning version 2.1 and have a lot of things we want to add very soon. One of the biggest updates we plan to make will be on a new set of Taglocity for Groups features, which still stays in ‘beta' (and is free to use). Until we roll those new features out, we plan to use the following public site as a way to collect feature suggestions and ideas from everyone. Please take a look and vote or add a suggestion:

http://feedback.taglocity.com/

Please also continue to send bug/diagnostic reports to our support email address found here.

http://www.taglocity.com/support.html

The beta forum group will stay around for a while longer, but obviously as we are now out of beta we'll be putting out major announcements via this blog.

Thanks again for all the beta users help (over 3000!), and please stay tuned for the next update, plus our plans for some exciting new Taglocity for Groups features.

Regards,
David and all the Taglocity Team

David Ing
Terazen Technology Inc
Vancouver, BC

Taglocity on TechTalk WRLR 98.3FM

David Towert — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:58:00 GMT

I'm following the very interesting Obama/McCain contest on cable news TV and I sometimes find myself wondering what it's like to be interviewed on a talk show. Well, last weekend I got a notion of it and I have to admit, I found it quite enjoyable. I was interviewed by Michael Kastler, host of TechTalk on Chicago WRLR 98.3FM radio about Taglocity - the past, present and future.

I guess it helps a lot when the host is a big fan - Michael called Taglocity a cool product that he uses everyday. He also said he was a huge follower of David Allen's GTD methodology and that Taglocity "synchronizes into it so well".

Michael shared with the listeners how it allowed him to go from around 90 folders to 3 or 4 folders and said "I can't stress enough for me how much of a life change, a game changer for the way that I interface with email just to have what sounds like a relatively simple thing, this tagging ability but combining it with search and conversation follow, and bang, all of sudden you see your flow and the amount of time you spend dealing with email drop significantly."

Yesterday the podcast was posted online so you can listen to it here if you're interested (our interview starts about 28 minutes into the show if you want to jump to the Taglocity segment).

I owe Michael a big thanks for having me on his most enlightening tech show - thanks Michael!

Dave

Information, not Knowledge

David Towert — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:35:00 GMT

One interesting thing to come out of conversations with enterprise IT thought leaders at the Gartner Portals Collaboration and Content summit in LA last month was people are still wary of Knowledge Management solutions. My impression is that KM reached peak hype in the late 1990s and has since delivered mixed results. I've previously heard of KM deployments being referred to as ‘knowledge landfills' so I wasn't really surprised.

What did surprise me is that our Taglocity Groups solution seemed to getting branded as a knowledge management solution. We initially positioned it, in part, as a knowledge sharing solution but no matter how much I explain that knowledge sharing is different to knowledge management, the connection persists. So we'll just change it from knowledge sharing to information sharing.

Many people use the words ‘knowledge' and ‘information' interchangeably anyway, and certainly the market hasn't helped to differentiate between the two. Internet research reveals all kinds of ways to describe the differences, but this article on Wikipedia touches on the pain Taglocity Groups solves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload. It states "Email remains a major source of information overload..."

This is applicable to us because Taglocity Groups provides a platform to minimize the disruptions and inbox clutter that non-actionable informational email creates. Instead, this type of email belongs in a group inbox for people to access when and how they need it.

So how does this sound for new positioning: Taglocity Groups is a non-disruptive email productivity and information sharing solution for agile enterprises to reduce email overload and transfer knowledge?

Hmmm, can't seem to get away from the K word. Let's try this then: Taglocity Groups is a private online service for groups of people to collaborate via email, share information, locate expertise, and reduce email overload. Yes, I think this will help keep Taglocity from getting lumped in with last century's cumbersome knowledge management solutions!

Opportunity or Threat?

David Towert — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:09:00 GMT

As the DOW gave up almost 7% in a single day today, I began wondering what the implications of a global financial melt-down would mean to small businesses like ours. We solve real email management problems for professionals and businesses, not consumers. Does that shield us from tightening purse strings or make things worse?

The optimist in me says that because we improve productivity at a very low cost, our products and services will be even more in demand than before. If the effects of the economic climate lead to higher unemployment and mass layoffs, I imagine those fighting to keep their jobs will want to stand out from others. One way to do that is to be more productive, make fewer mistakes, and produce higher quality work by leveraging other people's knowledge. Taglocity 2.0 is a tool that provides these benefits to individuals.

But this goes beyond individuals. Corporations will need to compete even more fiercely in the changing global landscape. We developed Taglocity Groups to improve overall corporate performance, not just by improving the productivity of one person and their inbox at a time, but by improving the productivity of entire teams and departments. Here is a rough idea of how it works: www.taglocity.com/discovermore.html

But the pessimist in me says go easy everybody, be conservative, and expect the worst because we're in uncharted territory. Who knows?

As for Taglocity, we're conservative by nature. Our business plan is not based on hype and getting millions of 'eyeballs' but rather on provding real solutions to real pain at a very reasonable cost. Fortunately we have 'staying power' and can afford to ride this out for a while.

In the meantime, let's all work hard together to get through these uncertain times as quickly as we can!

Dave Towert

Saving Email - A Brief History

David Towert — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:27:00 GMT

A few years ago, David Ing, our CTO and co-founder, came to the same conclusion as many others at the time: email, the killer productivity application of the 90s, was breaking down.

Or as he put it, "Email is basically broken. Or rather it is at the stage where its bad habits are institutionalized and accepted as the norm." He predicted that productivity gains would be eroded to the point where people would want to throw it out.

Sure enough, wikis, blogs, and other intranet solutions popped up in attempts to solve the burgeoning email overload problem. These solutions built on the premise that people use email for purposes it wasn't designed for, so why not offload the work onto other purposefully designed systems?

Well as it turns out, people love email too much, or it's simply too convenient and easy to use for collaboration and information sharing. So after witnessing mixed results, David came up with a brilliant idea: instead of making people leave email, rather extend it to support the way people like to work!

Why not extend it to easily allow people to place information in a fixed location in context? Why not let people browse and subscribe to this information? Why should email be a ‘push' only system? Why not extend it to support ‘pull' like wikis and blogs?

In other words, give people the benefits of wikis and blogs but do it with their email program of choice in a non-disruptive way. Give people less email to process but access to more information on-demand, on their terms.

And so Taglocity 2.0 was conceived! Now two very busy years later, Taglocity is nearing the end of a very successful six month beta program. And we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to all of our beta users for their encouragement and feedback over the last 6 months - thank you very much!

We are very excited about how David's vision has been realized in terms of the solution. Stay tuned for our official launch where we look forward to helping solve email overload and improve knowledge sharing for as many individuals and businesses as we possibly can.

We hope to use this new blog to start a useful dialog about saving email and getting people to love it all over again. Please let us know your thoughts!

David Towert
President & CEO