Web Worker Daily

As earlier announced on our parent site, this week saw the beta release of ClearContext Personal, a free add-in for Microsoft Outlook that is designed to organize your email and make your inbox better.

A little while back I spent a week with Xobni and found it added some nice functionality to the Microsoft Outlook email client. I wondered how Clear Context would compete - or compliment, so I have been putting it through its paces for the last few days.

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Tungle, the meeting coordination web service we covered in February, has made it easier to coordinate meetings with your more mobile colleagues. The newly announced BlackBerry optimized mobile website features the Tungle web service, specially formatted for the BlackBerry’s screen.  After the meeting has been scheduled and finalized, the BlackBerry userwill recieve a specialized invite for use on their BlackBerry Calendar.

The BlackBerry optimized website is joined by an Outlook plug-in in an effort by Tungle to make usage as easy as possible.  Users can now schedule meetings with Tungle either through Tungle’s website in a conventional browser, use the Outlook plug-in, or using the BlackBerry site.

After a long private beta period, the much anticipated Xobni plug-in for Microsoft Office finally went mainstream last week as they opened up the offering to the general public. Press has seemingly always been good to Xobni, they are a favorite of our parent site GigaOm, and their announcement elicited a lot of buzz, including here on WWD.

With all the attention the product was getting, and the promise of “a whole new look at your email” I couldn’t resist giving it a thorough look to see how well it lived up to the hype.

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With Microsoft’s announcement this week that Outlook and Outlook Express will no longer support desktop access to Hotmail accounts raises some interesting questions on data portability.

After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.

However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients

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As covered before, working with calendars is another one of those business necessities that is crucial to running a business. Managing multiple calendars is tedious, but necessary to staying in sync with those in your work and personal life. For example, you may have calendars for each of your co-workers, your personal calendar, and perhaps even your family events calendar.

FuseCal, a new web application, allows you to combine multiple calendars and create one master calendar. Ideally, this means you can take any iCal calendar such as Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, and Yahoo! Calendar and add them into FuseCal, granting you new functionality.

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Scheduling meetings is a necessary chore we face in business.  Managing multiple person’s calendars and finding a good time to meet involves many back and forth emails.  This is especially true when the persons you’re trying to meet with are on another electronic calendaring system.

To tackle this problem, I looked at Tungle last week. Now let’s look at a similar scheduling application: TimeBridge.

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For web workers, anything that can relieve the stress of managing information will be a huge help.  For instance, I manage two calendars, my personal Google Calendar and my work Outlook Calendar.

We have covered a few utilities that have tried to solve the 2-way syncing issue, but none have been rock solid enough to use full time.  In fact, I’ve destroyed my Outlook calendar multiple times trying to sync with my Google Calendar.  This is why I was very happy to see Google has released a Calendar Sync tool.

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Arranging meetings with co-workers and team mates can often be a very tedious task.  The main issue with meeting scheduling the is time wasted trying to arrange meeting times. Microsoft Exchange tools help solve this inside the enterprise, but outside your own company efficiently scheduling meetings becomes difficult if not impossible. Another issue with scheduling meetings is having to work with timezones.

In conclusion, time is wasted arranging meetings because they involve multiple email transactions and/or phone calls.

A newcomer to the meeting coordinating scene, Tungle is an add-on application that tries to take some of the frustration out of arranging meetings.

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