The Taglocity 2.0 Solution
The solution to today’s email problems is not to abandon email, but rather to extend it
Taglocity™ 2.0, an Enterprise Web 2.0 inspired email productivity and knowledge sharing solution for business email. It consists of two components which work independently or together:
Taglocity 2.0 for Microsoft Outlook 2003 & 2007
Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook is a non-disruptive add-in that delivers compelling personal value for free: more powerful search and better email organization with easy tagging and conversation management features to boost productivity. It also provides a tightly integrated interface to the second component, Taglocity Groups.
Taglocity Groups
Email overload and knowledge waste are technology and social problems. These problems can only be improved so far with a single person and their inbox; to tackle it most effectively takes a community style improvement that can only occur within groups (jump to the video for an overview).
Taglocity Groups is group publishing service - an online (or intranet based) secure repository where shared email can be posted for others to see. This reduces the number of needless CC's and enables on-demand knowledge discovery and reuse.
Interaction with Taglocity Groups is enabled via Taglocity for Outlook or any Internet browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. In addition, members can publish email to their Taglocity Groups with any email client, not just Microsoft Outlook.
Members can set up 'alerts' with their groups to be alerted by email or RSS when content that matches their criteria arrives.
One way of describing what Taglocity Groups does is to think of it as a ridiculously simple 'automatic blog for everyone' or 'inside-out wiki' aimed at people that don't want to leave the corporate email system or change the way they like to work. You just tag your email (optionally) and CC the group and that's it!
Taglocity Groups automatically organizes everything to make it accessible via the Internet as well as Outlook with an integrated search feature. For example, members can choose to include group content as well as personal Outlook information in the same search. The results are merged and presented with preview and conversation grouping options along with advanced pruning capabilities to quickly zoom in on exactly what they're looking for.
Taglocity Groups takes some of the 'push' out of email where others decide what you get and bases it more on a 'pull' where members can decide on the what/how of their internal email information.
This addresses the social aspects contributing to email overload and knowledge waste by subtly encouraging positive email behavioral changes. Members no longer need to CC so much email just in case people may want the information later (aka 'internal spam'); and now it's dead-simple to unselfishly share expertise and knowledge instead of keeping it locked up in scattered inboxes for fear of contributing to the email overload problem.
How it Works
Taglocity 2.0 compliments and improves existing email systems instead of trying to get people to change the way they work. This is achieved with new features and functionality that leverage the ideas and technologies that have worked so well for similar problems facing the Internet in recent years. For example:
- Taglocity provides a low-barrier publishing mechanism to push content into a central repository – that is, get it out of individual desktops where it is typically buried and only accessible by the author and recipients (who’ve archived it correctly).
- Taglocity provides tags to let users create emergent organizational structure instead of having to force content into rigid and often competing folder structures. Each tag becomes like a virtual folder in that content can be filtered by tags – and any one message can have as many tags as needed instead of being forced into one folder (or worse, copies made).
- Taglocity allows group members to automatically share tag collections and it provides tag suggestions which helps with consistency. Tags can be bundled to group commonly used combinations of tags for very quick tagging.
- Taglocity tags can be marked as public or private. Public tags travel with email and replies are automatically re-tagged upon arrival.
- Taglocity tags can have actions associated with them to improve organizational efficiency.
- Taglocity uses the tags, links, and indexing to make searching more intuitive and the results more relevant thereby improving search success and saving time.
- Taglocity provide signals (RSS or email forwarding) to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, and the rest they can ignore: eliminate 'internal spam' (unnecessary CC's).
Summary
Fundamentally Taglocity 2.0 is about the creation of an email productivity and knowledge sharing solution built on top of existing email systems via standard integration and extension interfaces.
People use it for publishing non-private email, discovering knowledge, extracting expertise, sharing tags, mnemonic searching, rating content, bookmarking, commenting, archiving, and attention management with user defined alert based email forwarding or RSS notifications.
This solves the email overload and knowledge waste problem problems by making it much quicker to organize, share, and find information on-demand in addition to reducing the amount of CC'd email that creates unnecessary distractions.
Taglocity simultaneously benefits both the individual and the enterprise resulting in community wide buy-in. Our customers achieve improved individual, team, and corporate performance.
