A few days ago, Aliza provided some excellent planning advice on how to pick a company phone system. I’ve written in the past about three options for incoming service: Google Voice (which now lets you use some of its features with your existing number), 3jam, and Grasshopper (which is now reportedly profitable.)

This time, let’s look at a business phone system that provides both incoming and outgoing service, plus actual phones. The folks at RingCentral have kindly set me up with one of their packages, the RingCentral Office. They also offer RingCentral Online, an inbound service similar to those listed above, but we’ll focus on the Office package for simplicity.

Options

RingCentral Office has three pricing levels, ranging from a one-line, 10-extension plan for $49.99 per month to an 8-line, unlimited extension plan for $179.99 per month. Each plan comes with various combinations of toll-free and local numbers, as well as toll-free or local dedicated fax numbers. You can also port your existing local or toll-free numbers to RingCentral.

All plans are advertised as having “unlimited minutes,” but (as is apparently the norm among VoIP providers) “unlimited” actually means 5,000 minutes per month; if you go over that, you’ll be charged 3.9 cents/minute. That works out to roughly 2.5 hours of talking per day. Are you and your colleagues on the phone that much? At my company, we aren’t, but some folks might need to be aware of this limit.

What You Get

RingCentral Office includes all of the features that have become standard for Internet phone services. They offer numbers in the U.S., Canada and the UK.

RingCentral offers two types of phones. The phone RingCentral provided to me is a Linksys (now owned by Cisco) SPA942. At first glance, it looks much like a modern business phone. But instead of plugging it into a phone jack, one connects it to the Internet using a standard RJ-45 network cable. If you only have one Internet connection, you can plug the phone into your internet connection, and then plug other devices into the phone. I was pleased with the phone. It’s relatively easy to operate, but strangely, it doesn’t support a headset, something I’ve gotten quite used to.

If you would prefer to use your existing phone equipment, RingCentral also offers an ATA adapter which connects the Internet to regular phones. Since most people aren’t technically-minded enough to want to fiddle with ATAs or configuration of phones, RingCentral ships their equipment pre-configured. All I had to do was plug in the power and the ethernet cable, and the phone was online and ready to use. RingCentral tells me that they provide their phones at or below wholesale cost; a little research confirmed that their equipment prices are quite low.

When you or your colleagues are out of the office, you can use the web site and Windows- or Mac-based softphone application to send, receive and manage calls and messages. One of the unusual features of the softphone app is the ability to view incoming calls and reply with a short message like “I’ll call you back in 10 minutes” without actually answering the phone call. There’s also integration with Outlook’s contact list.

For iPhone users, there’s a native application that provides easy access to voicemail (separate from the iPhone’s built-in voicemail) and faxes. You can also use the iPhone app to make calls showing the Caller ID from your business line — without displaying your iPhone’s telephone number. Similar native applications are being developed for other platforms; I gather that the BlackBerry is next on RingCentral’s list. I didn’t test RingCentral’s software, but I’ve gotten positive feedback from others who’ve used it.

Ordering

When ordering, you’ll be asked to specify the plan you want, the number of lines needed, as well as the number of local and toll-free numbers. You can create a plan that meets your specific needs, and you can change plans at will, since you don’t need to sign a contract. If you return the phones, the return will be subject to a restocking fee.

RingCentral boasts that its services can be priced and purchased directly from its web site without needing to call (although it does offer ordering by phone). While web ordering is certainly possible, I found the website to be less than clear in explaining the differences between the various plans and options. RingCentral tells me that a redesigned site is on the way.

Quality

Of course, in a business environment, call quality is key. In my tests, I (and the people I talked to) agreed that our conversations were clear, loud, and with none of the delay that sometimes plagues services like Google Voice. RingCentral tells me that the service is SIP-based, but that they’ve done significant signal processing so that anyone with a DSL, cable or faster Internet connection should hear excellent sound quality. Dialup connections aren’t recommended, for obvious reasons.

Reliability

RingCentral has been around for several years, but only started offering the Office product in early 2009. According to the company, it is now providing its Office service to over 3,000 organizations of various sizes, including some of over 50 users, with the four-line option is the most popular. They have multiple levels of redundancy and backups, but of course, if your local Internet connection or power goes out, you’ll be unable to use RingCentral, or any other Internet-based phone system.

If you are in the market for a virtual PBX system that provides phone hardware with incoming and outgoing service, you’ll want to look at a number of options, including Accessline Digital Business Phone System, FreedomIQ Hosted PBX, and Phone.com Business Phone, Whatever you choose, RingCentral Office is certainly a strong competitor.

Do you use RingCentral?

By positioning itself between traditional project management apps like Basecamp and personal relationship management apps like Gist, Liaise thinks that it has found a useful niche, which it calls “business interaction management.” It claims that it can do this with a very simple setup, no change in work habits, and without depending on others to be using Liaise.

The concept is intriguing: Using two components — a Windows desktop application and a plugin for Outlook 2003 and 2007 — Liaise automatically collects information about projects, deadlines and to-dos directly from incoming and outgoing messages. Liaise users can display a one-line “toolbar” at the bottom of each Outlook message that allows one to set and edit subjects, due dates and priorities for action items to be followed. The information is then fed into a user’s Outlook calendar, and to a popup where one can view, edit and search reports on work in progress. Users may also add and edit items manually. If others in a workgroup are also using Liaise, changes to priorities and due dates are synced to group members.

Due to feedback from early testing, the Liaise developers decided not to store customer messages in the cloud because of concerns about privacy and compliance. Instead, most Liaise information is stored on users’ local machines using Microsoft’s SQL CE database.

Liaise launches today at DEMOfall ‘09. The Liaise team plans to add components that will capture data from other email programs and platforms, and from mobile devices such as BlackBerrys and iPhones, IM and web-based services. Liaise is free during its beta period (sign up here) and will be offered at $4.95 to $9.95 per month per person thereafter.

As a Mac user, I haven’t been able to try this product yet, but Windows and Outlook users may find Liaise an interesting alternative to traditional project and task managers — you can see a demo video here.

Have you tried Liaise?

I’ve been using Google Voice since it was GrandCentral, and have been quite impressed. But it’s still in beta, and while invitations to the beta are finally becoming available, I understand that they’re still hard to come by.

3jam is billing itself as an alternative to Google Voice, and it’s available today, so I’ve given it a quick spin. This is not a complete review, as there are some of 3jam’s features that I haven’t tried, such as SMS messaging, forwarding to Skype, an API that lets you write your own applications to interact with their service, and “group” numbers that allow multiple users to share voice mail and messaging.

Signing Up and Getting a Number

Signing up for the service is easy. Just select an area code where you want a number and 3jam will display a series of available numbers from which you can pick. You can also enter words to see if you can get a “vanity number” that spells something. You can also port an existing number to the 3jam service for a onetime fee of $25, something that Google Voice doesn’t yet offer. Right now, 3jam is only offering incoming numbers in the continental U.S. If you want an incoming number in another country, you’ll need SkypeIn or another VoIP service.

Pricing

In my opinion, a major weakness of 3jam’s service is its complex pricing structure. For those of us who are used to the clearly-defined packages offered by most cell phone and VoIP providers, it’s bewildering to be confronted with a choice of monthly fees and SMS packages, and to realize that the monthly fees include only a ridiculously small number of incoming minutes (just 30!) and no outgoing minutes at all.

3jam charges a monthly fee ranging from $4.99 per month for a 12-month contract, to $8.99 per month on a monthly basis. Additional minutes, SMS and even transcriptions of voice mails (over the first 30) cost extra. Additional minute rates for calls (apparently both incoming and outgoing) are competitive. The SMS prices are puzzling, though: 5 cents per message to the U.S., but only 4 cents to Uganda or Uzbekistan?

Annoyingly, information about pricing is very difficult to find on 3jam’s web site. The monthly fees are displayed during the sign-up process, but only after you’ve already selected a phone number. A more comprehensive list of pricing seems to be available only in the help section, which I found by doing a search.

By comparison, the Google Voice service does not currently charge a monthly fee, or fees for calls and SMS messages in the U.S. Google Voice charges for international calls at rates that are competitive with other VoIP services. It’s rumored that Google could make the service advertising-supported at some point.

While some people may find 3jam’s à la carte approach to pricing advantageous, I think that businesses will need to know what they can expect to pay; 3jam makes that difficult. The 3jam control panel does offer a running total of calls made and the costs incurred, so users can at least keep track of what they’ve spent.

Setup

Setting up the service is straightforward. You can set incoming calls to the 3jam number to ring on as many as six different phones, not only in the U.S., but in many other locations throughout the world. You can also forward incoming calls to Skype, something that Google Voice doesn’t offer. And you can forward incoming SMS messages to IM services like Google Talk and AIM, which is a nice touch.

3jam offers the ability to import your contacts to its address book from external email accounts like Gmail, and from Outlook, Thunderbird Entourage and .csv files. I was unable to get either Gmail or a .csv import to work, however, and didn’t try the other options.

Quality

Like many VoIP services, sound quality varies from call to call. I had several friends place test calls to me, and we heard occasional echoes, delays and crackles. But generally, call clarity was good — as good as Google Voice, if not better. The transcriptions of voice mails seem to be on a par with Google Voice as well, which is to say, good enough to get the gist of the message, even when some words are missing or incorrect.

Applications

3jam offers three applications that I didn’t try because I’m on a Mac. The first is a Windows-only desktop application for SMS messaging. (The site mentions a web version, but the link to it doesn’t seem to be working.) There is also a BlackBerry app, and a way of having 3jam send messages to you via Twitter.

For people who need maximum flexibility in routing calls and SMS messages, especially internationally, 3jam is likely to be an excellent choice. For those who need to forecast their communication costs, and those who don’t need the international forwarding options, Google Voice is probably a better choice, once it becomes more widely available.

Have you tried 3jam? How does it compare to Google Voice?

While some productivity and project management mavens may decry using Microsoft Outlook for managing projects, it’s often the one application that people keep open at all times on their Windows desktops. MissingLink Project Center from Moore Software Solutions is a lightweight add-in that makes project management features available in Outlook. You can purchase it for $49, with a 30-day free trial available. Can it help you to manage projects without having to add a separate app into your toolbox?

Inside MissingLink Project Center

After installing MissingLink Project Center, it appears as a toolbar and menu in Outlook. It includes the following:

• MissingLink Dashboard: This is the central control panel for setting up new projects.

• Add to MissingLink: This enables you to add items to an existing project and opens the Select Project dialog box.

• Find in MissingLink: This button seems to be for a search mechanism, but in Outlook 2007 I was only greeted with an error message.
• Help for MissingLink: This tool could definitely benefit from a simple quick start guide to get users acclimated to it. There is online help, but it lacks task orientation and spends more time going over the user interface, rather than telling users how to use the add-in to manage projects.

The greatest gaffe with MissingLink Project Center is that it doesn’t take a process-oriented approach. While I am conversant with a number of project management tools, and am a longtime Outlook user, I didn’t find MissingLink Project Center very intuitive. My expectation was that it would offer more wizards and give me a more fluid system for managing projects. Post-install, much to my disappointment, I was only left with an extra toolbar.

I ran MissingLink Project Center on a Windows XP machine with Outlook 2007 and noticed in some places that the add-in breaks from Office 2007 interface standards, because it isn’t accessible from the Add-Ins ribbon, which is irritating.

MissingLink Project Center could be useful for the many non-PMs out there seeking tools to improve their project management, such as freelance workers who want to get better organized with their client work. However, to capitalize on this audience, usability is key and this add-in is just not good enough.

Final Thoughts

In the end, my hope is that future versions of the Missing Link Project Center clean up some of the add-in’s rough edges, especially its usability, and make sure that it keeps up with the interface changes present in Office 2007 and the forthcoming Office 2010. This add-in has a lot of potential, but needs to mature further. I look forward to revisiting MissingLink Project Center because it is a good idea suffering from poor execution.

Have you tried MissingLink Project Center? What did you think of its usability?

We’ve previouslycovered the impressive Microsoft Outlook add-on Xobni. The company behind it has just released a new premium edition of the product called, appropriately enough, Xobni Plus, available for a one-time fee of $29.95. There are a number of productivity-boosting features that are exclusive to the new edition.

Social Inbox

Xobni Plus reveals a great deal about your contacts, and provides instant access to their profiles on some of the most popular social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. This can really come in handy when trying to connect with a new colleague, partner or customer.

I like how these services are integrated with the Xobni interface; with one click you can either add them as a contact on the service or go to the site for more information. The exciting part is that Xobni is continuing to add more popular services, such as Skype.

Another feature that I like is the integrated Google search box; it’s very useful for instant access to a Google search for that particular contact.

I must admit that it’s impressive how many useful features Xobni was able to cram into such tiny screen real estate without making it look too cluttered.

SmartMail

Xobni Plus includes some interesting new options that give Microsoft Outlook some much-needed smarts. For example, right out of the gate you’ll notice the much-improved autocompletion feature while filling out the “to” field for a new email message. Outlook is extremely feeble-minded when it comes to filling that address out, seemingly only supplying the most recent of most-used email addresses. Xobni Plus provides a boatload of names to choose from thanks to its powerful new search engine, which indexes all contacts, including those only found in the “cc:” field. Another useful time-saver is the way it can find an email address just by typing a part of an address, such as the company name.

These are all features that Outlook should have built in by now. Over the course of a few days, these seemingly small time-savers made a big difference to my productivity.

Search and Rescue

Also available in the Plus edition is a souped-up search feature. You can not only search for contacts but also any keyword or phrases in the subject and message body. There’s also an advanced search query builder for ultra-detailed searches.

There’s also the very handy ability to search and filter within threaded conversations and within each contact’s network, which would allow you to look for that colleague of one of your contacts that you have forgotten the name of, for example.

The Bottom Line

Here are some other benefits that come with the Plus edition:

• One year of tech support
• No ads
• Multiple .PST file search

The free version of Xobni is very useful and might be sufficient for many people’s needs. However, for power email users, Xobni Plus offers more than enough features to warrant the one-time expense of $29.95 (with a charge of $9.95 for each additional computer you want to use it on).

If you’re a Xobni user, will you be upgrading to Plus?

I’ve written in the past about both gwabbit and gwabbit for BlackBerry, nifty tools designed to help you capture and create contacts from within Outlook or on your BlackBerry device.

It turns out the folks at gwabbit are having a contest. I know I am always interested in the chance to win free stuff, particularly when the prize is a Flip MinoHD video camera, an oft-mentioned device here on WebWorkerDaily.

The contest is simple — the five folks who get the most friends to try gwabbit win the big prize. I don’t recommend spamming your friends and social-networking sites just for the sake of winning, but if you have some friends who might benefit from gwabbit, or are willing to help you out, this custom Flip cam is a nice prize.

Get full contest details to learn how to enter and win.

Does gwabbit help you with your contacts? What would you do with a Flip MinoHD?

New applications or enhancements to existing ones can provide big efficiency benefits, but there are also many simple tweaks, unsung tips, and new ways to think about the tools that you already use that can help you work better. In this post, I’ll share five ways that can help you accomplish more and experience less hassle. You can take advantage of many of these tips in minutes.

Double Up On Monitors. We’ve covered the efficiency benefits of using dual monitors before. While some users like sitting in front of one giant monitor these days, for the same cost you can buy two (or more) reasonably priced monitors, put them side-by-side on your desktop, and use the displays as one fluid desktop. I recently switched to this kind of setup, and I’ll never go back. The time I save simply loading web pages and applications is substantial, and it’s also just easier to work this way. Windows XP and Vista both offer dual-monitor support out of the box, as does Mac OS X. Give it a go if you haven’t tried it.

Flex Your Mouse Muscle. Some of the most surprised comments I’ve ever gotten for any post on this blog came in response to a post called, “Nine Ways to Make Your Mouse Roar.” I made the point there that you may well spend more time with your mouse each day than you do with any person, and yet, a lot of people install a mouse without ever consulting the documentation and finding out what it’s capable of. Do you have a mouse with a scroll wheel? If so, in any tabbed browser, just click your scroll wheel while hovering over a link on the web to open it in a new tab. Or try this: In the middle of a web page you’re looking at, click once on your scroll wheel. Your cursor should change shape. Moving up and down with the mouse will let you scroll the page, and do speed scrolling. If your eyes are tired, hold your Ctrl key down and lightly push your scroll wheel up a few notches. The size of the text on the page you’re looking at will increase, and you can  hold Ctrl and scroll back down to return it to normal size. There are many more of these tips in the original post.

Become a Word Power User. There are plenty of nifty ways to squeeze more productivity from Microsoft Word and make it easier to use. For example, if you need to leave a document but want to have your cursor sitting right where you left it in the middle of an editing session when you return, you don’t have to leave your document open. Go ahead and close it. When you reopen it to resume editing, hit Shift+F5 to take your cursor back to precisely where you left it. Do you have multiple Word documents open and need to take a break? To rapidly save all open documents, hold down the Shift key and go to Word’s “File” menu. The usual “Save” menu choice will show up as “Save All.” There are many more of these tips in the posts above. Check out this post and this one for more essential efficiency tips.

Get More Out of Outlook. While it’s almost nobody’s favorite email application, many of us must use Microsoft Outlook for work. If you do, you’ll find eight good efficiency tips for it in this post. For example:  Do you often forget to respond to important Outlook messages? To set a reminder — visible in your Inbox — to act on or reply to any message, right-click on the message you want to set the reminder for, select Follow Up, and choose your Due By time and date. When you click OK, the message will be flagged for you to remember to respond to it.

Reboot Your Wi-Fi. In this recent post, I described how important it is to do a regular, cycled reboot on your home Wi-Fi setup. I also described how the combination of the cycled reboot and changing Wi-Fi channels can eliminate dropped signals and other common problems. Several readers provided comments with Wi-Fi efficiency tips of their own, including free, open-source firmware applications that can give you much more control over your Wi-Fi router, and better performance through boosted signals. Many of us are very dependent on Wi-Fi all day, so look into how a few simple tips can help you be more wirelessly efficient.

Share your tips for boosting efficiency in the comments.

TechHit’s OutTwit, a free Twitter client for Microsoft Outlook, hit version 1.0 this morning. If you’re a heavy user of Outlook and like to have everything in one place then OutTwit might be worth a try.

OutTwit downloads tweets to an Outlook folder (make sure you follow TechHit’s advice to create a new folder and tell OutTwit to use it, otherwise you will end up with with a very messy inbox). It incorporates all of the standard Twitter client features, including grouping and URL shortening. Today’s release adds support for picture posting services such as Twitpic, Posterous and Twitgoo.

OutTwit works, but it feels clumsy compared to a dedicated Twitter client. I certainly won’t be switching from twhirl, as I’d rather keep my tweets separate from my email; I think they fulfill separate roles. However, some users might like keep everything in one location and be able to use Outlook to manage, archive and search tweets.

Similarly to Spreadtweet, which is a Twitter client that looks like an Excel app, OutTwit can disguise Twitter usage, so I imagine it might be popular in workplaces where Twitter might not be looked upon favorably.

Have you tried OutTwit? What did you think?

Xobni, a very useful Microsoft Oulook plug-in that we’ve covered with glowing reviews previously, has droppped its beta tag with version 1.7, released today.

As well as dropping the beta tag, the latest version concentrates on performance improvements. According to Xobni, Outlook now starts 31 percent faster, while Xobni itself loads 42 percent faster. Users with large inboxes should notice even greater benefits. You can also now choose not to start Xobni until you need it.

Xobni is a free download, although the company is working on a premium service due to launch this summer.

Do you use Xobni?

I’m often surprised by the number of people who use Microsoft Outlook as their primary email and information manager who don’t also take full advantage of its contact capabilities. While I wouldn’t say it compares with a full blown CRM system, it is certainly a capable program for maintaining contact information.

I think the main reason for this lack of adoption is that the process for capturing and maintaining this supplemental information in Outlook is just too tedious. The information you need is likely included in all those email signatures, but it takes a lot of cutting and pasting to parse it out and place it in to the proper fields.

Enter gwabbit – an Outlook plug-in, launched today at DEMO, that makes this process ridiculously easy.

The idea is simple really. Gwabbit runs in the background, scanning your email and alerting you if it finds new contact information within. A single click of the gwabbit button and it creates (or updates) a contact record with the info it gathers.

The update functionality is particularly handy, as it can let you know when the information you have is out-of-date or incorrect.

I’ve been playing around with gwabbit for about a week now and it generally works as advertised. Depending on how your contacts arrange their information, it can occasionally get confused but it was always easier to clean up than it would have been to start from scratch. If it finds ambiguous or incomplete information, it will also prompt you to clean it up or correct it. Highlighting the signature block can help point it to the right place.

The notifications can initially be overwhelming, so it’s good that you can configure them. I ended up turning off all prompts and just using it manually to capture information a bit more selectively. It was really quite easy to go through my email archives and quickly build up a contact list.

Obviously, once this information is stored in Outlook it’s easy to sync to a multitude of mobile devices or export for use in your CRM.

gwabbit isn’t a life-changing application by any means, but if Outlook is the hub of your communication and contact info, it is a handy way to automate something you’re already doing, or should be doing, pretty regularly.

gwabbit is obviously Windows-only but it does support a myriad of Outlook versions from 2000 up to the current Outlook 2007.

A downloadable 14-day trial is available that you can use for up to 20 contacts, above which it will cost $19.95.

Do you use Outlook to maintain your contacts? How complete is the information you keep?

If you use Outlook and sometimes get replies to your emails saying, “I think you might have forgotten the attachment,” you should check out Outlook Attachment Reminder, a simple VBScript macro. When you click the Send button it checks the body of the email for “attach” in the text (so it will also catch “attachment”, “attached”, etc). If “attach” is present and there is no attachment to the email a warning message pops up.

Outlook Attachment Reminder in action

This is a really simple yet effective macro. It’s something that I had actually been meaning to put together myself for a while but never got around to.

If you use Thunderbird, you can try a similar add-on: Attachment Reminder. Google has a similar feature in Gmail Labs —  Forgotten Attachment Detector — but it doesn’t work for me.

(via Lifehacker)

Although I prefer and primarily use Gmail for the majority of my email needs, I do connect it via IMAP to Microsoft Outlook as well. And while there are many options available to extend the functionality of Microsoft Outlook including taglocity and Clear Context, Xobni is the one that I seem to come back to.

I’ve detailed my week with Xobni experience in the past and continue to find Xobni a nice addition to my Outlook experience. Recently they added LinkedIn integration and today they are announcing a whole slew of additional connections.

In this latest release, Xobni brings integration with Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Hoovers and greatly enhanced Skype functionality.

Each of these services is opt-in and are neatly integrated into the Xobni Sidebar upon activation.

The capabilities introduced vary but highlights include:

Yahoo!Mail : Message previews are availabe from within Outlook and are fully searchable using Xobni. Contacts and attachments from your Yahoo! Mail accounts appear in the Xobni sidebar.

Facebook: View status messages, profile pictures and other recent updates your contacts have made via Facebook

Skype: Big improvements here as you can now view status, send messages and initiate Skype to Skype calls all from the Xobni sidebar.

Hoovers: Pulls company information like description and size based upon the email domain of your contacts.

I am seeing a big increase in the number of aggregators and universal inbox applications like Gist, which seeks out more information about your contacts, or Fuser which brings all of your communications together in one place.

As we connect with people through so many various channels, having a way to tie these communications together and connected to your contacts is becoming more critical. If you’re an Outlook user, these Xobni improvements look to be a step in the right direction.

Xobni is a free download and is available for computers running Windows and Microsoft Outlook 2003 / 2007

Can tools like Xobni turn Outlook into the ultimate communication interface?

Sometimes Outlook is a necessary evil. Personally I prefer Thunderbird if I’m going to be using a desktop client, because it’s less cluttered, not to mention free. Still, when I’m at the office working as a contractor for a professional services firm, Outlook 2007 on Windows XP is the standard email client, so I have to make do.

Making do just got a lot easier thanks to Taglocity 2.0, a plugin which brings some much needed functionality to Microsoft’s Office-based desktop email program.

For freelance and personal purposes, I use MobileMe and Gmail, and I rarely have reason to complain about either (excluding the web-based iteration of MobileMe, which is about as consistent as West Coast weather). Gmail’s labels, recent conversations, and filtering options are especially useful. Taglocity brings that kind of functionality and more to your Outlook inbox, at the cost of a little added weight to an already resource-heavy program.

By default, Taglocity installs a pane to the far right of your Outlook browser, and and additional toolbar.

Through the toolbar you can search filter results, and tag individual emails, which works like Gmail’s labels. There will always be people on both sides of the folder/label fence. I use folders at work and labels at home, and I’m comfortable with both, but I like having the option Taglocity provides to label across and between folders.

Threaded conversations is another feature Outlook lacks that Taglocity enables.

By default, the right pane displays conversations with the sender of the email you currently have selected, along with their contact information, if you have them in your Outlook contacts database. You can switch to attachments view to quickly access all files sent between you and that person, and, at the bottom of the pane, view basic analytics including number of messages sent, received, and CC’d to and from that contact or address.

A key feature Taglocity brings to the table in terms of working with a wider group is Group creation and support. User can create, manage, and subscribe to Groups to manage multi-user announcements and FYI notices. A huge chunk of my inbox clutter is due to staff landing/departure notices, non-essential updates regarding other lines of business, and other distracting material that I can check in my downtime. With Groups this is not longer a problem, as I can choose to “pull” this kind of info when I can review it without disrupting my regular workflow. Groups also lets you share tags and set up semantic subscriptions, so that people who need to know something always get the right info, even if they’re just joining the team and without needing to be CC’d.

Even after only a couple of days, I can’t really see myself using Outlook without the added functionality of Taglocity. And since Taglocity Standard is free, I have no reason to stop. Taglocity Professional is $99, but most users will likely find the feature differences not worth the added expense.

Get Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook now and start streamlining your email workflow.

Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with an AOL Mail email address…plenty of AIM users, but no one with AOL Mail – at least no one who will admit it…

Regardless, there must be a good number of such users, to encourage AOL to develop a plugin that enables their users to collect mail from Yahoo!’s email service, a plugin which launched late last week.

Inline with AOL’s recent strategy at the AOL.com home page to embrace and integrate third party content and services within their own properties, Yahoo’s messaging behemoth is now available – albeit as message previews only – within the AOL Mail interface. Users can then click through to their corresponding message at the Yahoo! service.

It’s all kinda, um, underwhelming and the kind of feature that should have been there all along; an indictment of the ‘data prison’ strategies employed by web’s largest properties.

Data portability is a subject I’ve written about many times here at Web Worker Daily, notably with regard to the portability of email data trapped within services such as Hotmail, Google Apps and Outlook…though fortunately (as these links illustrate) each of those services has a third-party ‘jailbreaking option’ to liberate your data.

With much of our personal and professional data now residing ‘in the cloud’ and on remote services, it’s ever more important to press for the ability to export and import data from any service – and insist on the use of standards where possible. I’m sure that the product manager for AOL Mail has come across the IMAP and POP email protocols. Perhaps offering such capabilities by default can weaken the retention of a customer, but its possible to mitigate this by offering data portability or export as a premium option and actually competing on design and features, rather than crippling a service.

Services such as Dopplr and del.icio.us have long had export features baked in – making this central to a service’s design philosophy illustrates a respect and value for the user that is likely to ensure a degree of loyalty.

I believe that there are two types of email users in the world – Filers and Finders.

Sure, these categories can apply to us in a lot of areas but I see this polarization most frequently with how we use and store our email. Because we amass such a large amount of data in our email clients, being able to locate and retrieve it quickly is certainly important.

How we go about that certainly differs.

The Filer:

This first group has created an intricate and detailed web of folders that allows them to tuck away their important correspondence.   When needed, they deftly navigate through this system to retrieve their desired item. Most clients allow some sort of filing aspect whether it is through literal folders, tags or labels. Carefully constructed categories allow pin-point accuracy to describe where things go.

In my experience Outlook users tend to be filers. I am often amazed at the sheer number of folders that some of my clients have. Folders for people and departments and projects, nested multiple levels deep. Whether it is because they are used to the traditional file folder metaphor or that the inherent search capabilities of Outlook were so poor, I’m not sure. With Windows Search, Google Desktop, and tools like Xobni now available – we might start to see a shift here.

Outlook filers can get a bit of help with tools like Clear Context as well.

The Finder:

The Finder, on the other hand, doesn’t bother with any of that. The finder creates a big pile or bucket of “stuff”. Need to keep something? Put it in the pile…

Don’t worry that the the pile is large and appears unwieldy, with clever use of search operators the finder, as if by magic, is able to pull out what they need.

I think that those who use Gmail and other web clients tend to be finders. Given the obvious inherent search capabilities, this makes sense. Oddly though, I think Gmail is actually a much better tool for filers than Outlook as the labeling functionality allows for items to be cross-referenced. If it’s about marketing and it’s from Joe, it can be categorized with each and called up with either label. Cross filing in Outlook requires duplication of the item.

Me:

I’m a Gmail user and I’m a finder. I don’t label anything unless it is done as part of a filtering process that automatically moves items out of my inbox to be read or processed later. If I feel I need to save something, I archive it to all mail. If I need to find it later, I search for it.

My take on this is that the time I would spend fastidiously labeling or filing items would be considerably longer than the time I actually spend searching for things. Even if I file, I need to then scan through folders to find the exact item I might be looking for.

Learning the advanced operators is key for a finder. Just getting started- you can activate the advanced search and get a little help.

I am particularly fond of the Quick Links Labs feature which lets me save a particular search to be reused later. I can take the time to craft it once and then keep the query readily available. This really handy item can be enabled in your Gmail settings under Labs.

While I personally have come to accept my finder-ness, I realize that we all have different ways of working. What is important is to recognize how you work and then be sure to choose the tools that best fit that style. Learning how to maximize the functionality of that tool is also key, whether it means memorizing the previously mentioned search operators or using Outlook keyboard shortcuts to zip around effortlessly.

So how do you work with email?  Are you a filer or a finder?

A few days ago Microsoft released a beta for Office Outlook Connector 12.1; essentially a plugin for Microsoft’s near-ubiquitous email client that helps address some of the issues we’ve discussed previously at Web Worker Daily including Jailbreaking Hotmail and Exchange-ing Microsoft for Google.

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector provides Outlook users with the capability of synchronizing messages, calendars and contacts with Hotmail and Office Live Mail accounts, effectively providing offline access for those web-based services – and perhaps more importantly, the ability to make that data portable and transferable to other services, such as Gmail.

Previously, the Outlook Connector was a premium service offered to MSN customers, but this incarnation is free to use, though of course, this may change once the beta period is complete. For MSN customers already paying for the older service, they’ll be automatically upgraded to the Live Mail and Live Calendar editions of Hotmail and MSN Calendar.

Though other web-bases services such as Yahoo and Gmail do offer offline access for messages via various IMAP and POP options, offline calendar and contact data remains haphazardly implemented (as illustrated by Google’s recent launch of OS X contact synchronization).

For once it seems Microsoft is ahead of the Web 2.0 crowd with a release that’s profoundly useful – though as rumors build for more and more Google Gears enabled offline applications, it’s a lead that won’t last much longer. On the other hand, Adobe AIR applications may be the carrier for this new wave of applications.

You can download the Outlook Connector 12.1 beta here…