Taming the Email Beast

Our New Conversation Reader

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.

Taglocity 2.0 in the Press

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

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.