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.