Productivity Features

Tagging is a highly efficient way to categorize and organize email containing information you may want to find later.

What is a tag? A tag is a relevant keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information, thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.

Benefits of tags

•	Outlook items can have multiple tags ( categories All Taglocity tags are mapped to Outlook categories, and saved on items as Outlook categories. You can even use the Outlook categories feature to assign and remove tags.), allowing for endless opportunities for categorizing and organizing

•	With Taglocity, tags are easy to assign, and can help have actions to automate common tasks

•	Tagged Outlook items are easily filtered and searched by Taglocity, making it so much easier to find things later

•	Tagging and then publishing email to TeamFeed is a nice way to share information and transfer knowledge that may otherwise be lost on individual computers

Tags in Outlook

All Taglocity tags are mapped to Outlook categories, and saved on items as categories. Taglocity exposes and enhances the full power of Outlook categories which is a typically under-used feature due to the klutzy interface. Both Windows Search and Outlook search index categories which means that even if you stop using Taglocity, you will still benefit from Taglocity tagging because tags always remain on your Outlook items as categories. And you can assign and remove them using Outlook's category interface at any time, including Outlook's Rules and Alerts feature, even while Taglocity is running.

Tagging Tips

One of the most powerful features of Taglocity are tags but this doesn't mean you should spend too much time tagging all your old email. One strategy to be productive is to only tag things that you would normally save in a specific folder, that you want to keep around for future reference (archiving) or follow-up action.

The purpose of tagging is to provide a better organization system for archiving, and then improving your odds of finding things later very quickly (via Tag Filter, Tag Search, and Windows Search too). You can ease into using tags and sooner or later you will begin to wonder how you ever got by without them.

Tip If you do want to quickly tag all your existing email, consider using the Bulk Tagging tool.

Tip Tags can be shared which helps to keep some consistency.

We recommend using tags in four ways

1.	for categorization instead of too many folders

2.	to describe things you want to keep (i.e. what is it? Contract, Receipt, Report, Reservation, etc.)

3.	for action (i.e. do you need to do something? To do, To read, To purchase, Urgent, etc.)

4.	to associate things (i.e. does it belong with a bunch of other things? Project X, Customer Y, Personal, etc.)

This way you can 'slice and dice' your email to see things in different perspectives such as Customer Y stuff across multiple projects or just for Project X.

Research shows that most folder based categorization systems fall apart...people have trouble remembering which folder to put things in, the act of moving things to folders is slow, and often an email belongs in more than one folder. These problems go away with tags because each item can have more multiple tags and applying tags can be automated to a large degree with Taglocity. And then tag actions like moving to a folder speeds up email processing.

Here is one suggested tactic for example: Instead of using lots of folders, try creating one for archiving things. Call it Archive if you like and then create a tag called Archive with a tag action to move items to the Archive folder. Then whenever you get an email that you want to keep for possible future reference, tag it with any descriptive tags you want such as 'Project X', 'Status', etc. and then assign the Archive tag which will move the email to the Archive folder. With Taglocity's auto-complete, the process of tagging is very efficient, much more so than manually moving items to specific folders.

Here is another useful example: If you get a lot of newsletters that aren't so important to respond to right away and just clutter your inbox, then create another folder called 'Newsletters'. Next create a tag called Newsletter with a move to action to move the item to the Newsletters folder. If you get a lot of this type of email from the same Sender or with the same Subject or containing the same unique string of keywords in the message body, then consider automating this with Auto Assigned Tags.

Generic keyword searches return very fast results but unfortunately also very huge result sets that you have to hunt around in. This is often sufficient when you have specific keywords and can remember who it was from or where you saved it, etc. But in other cases it becomes very time consuming to find things. With Taglocity Search, a tag cloud is presented with all of the tags found in the results so you can 'prune' (filter) the results to make the list more manageable.

With Taglocity Filter you can quickly filter the contents of any folder for a single or combination of tags, such as 'To do', 'Urgent', etc.

Tip Taglocity Search is useful for finding things that aren't tagged because it has tools not available in Outlook or desktop search tools such as a date range control, From and To and CC filters, an 'exclude text' box, conversation grouping (like Gmail), column grouping, and column filtering with Excel like auto-filtering.