I always look forward to the new Microsoft Office releases; I look for those cool new features that will make my work life easier or my presentations cooler.  Wow ok I guess I am a bit of a nerd but I also look forward to football season and UFC fights as well!

Debra Shinder did an article for Techrepublic, I assume she was one of the privileged few with access to the alpha testing of Office 2010 and she has some screen captures and a list of her top 10 favorite new features.  Make sure you check out the deleting conversations in Outlook and the linking to documents in OneNote.  I always thought OneNote was a joke and not very useful but lately I have found some really good applications for the tool and I’m really looking forward to it seeing some love from Microsoft for OneNote in 2010. http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=900&tag=nl.e103

So in keeping with our review of Microsoft Outlook Plug-In solutions we decided to setup a little experiment to compare one of the brightest stars in the industry Xobni and another product we had looked at once before Lookeen.  The heart of both products is Outlook productivity through Search.  So we setup 3 test sets where we had emails, attachments, contacts, appointments, and tasks.  We did not try multiple .pst files maybe we will try that experiment at a later date.  The results were interesting, but not surprising both products index your email folders keeping track of what you receive and send so expectations were that both would perform equally well.  Both products presented basically the same information and the speed was almost identical, so this required us to look at more subjective matters such as aesthetics and personal opinions.  We stayed away from price but the two products are only separated by about $10.

Xobni - Their integrated model with Outlook and fashionable user interface won them a lot of points among the staff here.  They had nice features such as analytics and well organized information window that quickly displayed contact information, conversations, and files exchanged.  On the downside they did miss one email in our tests that Lookeen caught and the integration does take up a bit of room in an already busy Outlook window.

Lookeen - The product seems to find the emails, appointments, and tasks as fast as Xobni and the results are displayed in a separate window that can easily be displayed alongside Outlook or on a second monitor(even better).  This product is not as pretty as Xobni and it is missing some nice features most notably the analytics but if you are just looking for search capability it is a good product.

At the end of the day we have mixed reviews internally but the majority of people are using Xobni free version currently with a few looking to upgrade to pro.  Lookeen hasn’t disappeared but with pricing being similar most people went with Xobni at least for now.

As a non-programmer but with years spent working with teams designing and developing software products across several industries it always amazes me at how people look at the outward appearance of software differently.  The graphical user interface (GUI) is always a point of interesting conflict and would probably rival most United Nations meetings on how much people disagree about the look, feel, and functionality.

We are working on a new integration into Microsoft Outlook and had a design meeting today where we sat around and discussed how the solution should look and feel.  When we came to the part on user interface, more specifically, the outward facing portion there was quite a few points of debate.  The two primary points were that software integrations should be completely embedded and only really visible at the point they are required.  The other is that there are certain levels of customer expectations to have the availability to features like toolbars in Windows products after the installation.

So, should software integration for a Microsoft office product, be completely embedded and basically hidden until the point the user requires that functionality?  Or should the software be a bit more obtrusive and sort of hang around in the toolbar all the time so that you know where to go and get it when you’re ready? 

Explanations from both groups:

Software hidden – If software is designed properly then there is no need for an obtrusive toolbar.  Especially when integrating into another product it should just work when required and only be visible when necessary.  A toolbar should only be necessary if that is the best way for the user to access the functionality.

Software visible – When people install a new piece of software there are expectations that the software is out and visible upon installation.  Yes over time as people become more comfortable with the application they may choose to hide or remove certain functionality like a toolbar.  But for marketing and customer expectations software should be as visible as possible during the initial installation.

What do you think?

Advertised as a search tool add-in for Microsoft Outlook, Lookeen is suppose to make finding emails, conversations, and attachments that reside within Outlook faster and easier.  So I decided to give the 14 day demo a try.

So how does it fair against the existing Microsoft Outlook 2007 search? Lookeen did a great job of finding every email, appointment, and attachment with the related search terms I tested.  Outlook was able to find the same files but not the appointments, but basically at the same speed.  Lookeen separated out the appointments, emails, and attachments into separate tabs while Outlook can only manage them in one view.  Outlook does however highlight the text in the email that matched my search term which allowed me to quickly identify if that item was of interest to me or not.  Lookeen also had a few other nice features to mention:

·         You can search for activities over the past day, week, or month and Lookeen will sort those into appropriate categories.  It was even able to pull up tasks and Microsoft Live messages I sent to colleagues during the search period.  However the messages were in a .xml file format that took a bit of time to parse. 

·         You can search conversations with a sender or contact by clicking on an email from that person or their contact information in your contacts list.  This was helpful when I tried finding some email conversations with a customer that I knew were only a week or two old.

·         It has a find similar “stuff” function that looks for email content that is similar to the highlighted email.  It appears to pull similarity from words in the subject line and not the content body, but still a reasonably quick and useful tool.

Overall like most Microsoft Outlook Add-in application the majority of the solution is mirrored from functionality already in Outlook that may not be as user friendly, quick to access or aesthetic as we would like. But the search by contact function and the ability to sort out items in the Lookeen result window were very helpful and made reviewing the information easy.  From what I can tell after a few days of playing with it Lookeen seems to be a pretty good addition to my life inside of Outlook and worth a try for anyone who hasn’t yet figured out how to manage those hundreds of emails you get and send every day.

So in a lot of blog articles the author is creating a story to validate his/her own opinion well this is not one of those blogs.  The team here at Elsinore has spent a good bit of time this past week reviewing workflow best practices and how workflows should look and feel to users.  We thought it would be great to hear from our customers and anyone else visiting our blog on what they thought about workflow design practices.

Sparking from the discussion about swimlanes a new question has arisen.  When do all these possible design elements start making our graphical representation more confusing than helpful?  There are a lot of organizations globally working on standardizing best practices for workflows one of the most notable is business process modeling notation (BPMN).  Workflows can be designed at a high level only outlining the general scope of the process keeping the layout simple.  Or they can be very detailed to the point of showing exactly what activities are being performed; who the emails are going to, what divisions are doing the work, who is responsible for scheduling the meeting, etc.  The information is all available but the key is balance, what elements do you think are important?  And should workflow designers’ error on the side of simplicity or informative?

http://www.outlooktrackit.com/

A pretty straight forward and simple Outlook Add-on, that allows users to flag emails for Follow Up, Delegate, and set Reminder. The software creates 3 buttons that can easily be placed alongside your other Outlook 2007 toolbars.  If a user selects either Follow Up or the Delegate buttons the email is categorized and a copy of the email is sent to a newly created search folder in the Favorite Folders of Outlook.

Follow Up – Defines an email as needing to be followed up on by you sometime in the future.  

Delegate – Means you either have already or need to delegate ownership of some task within that email to someone other than yourself.

The third option Remind Me places a basic reminder flag on an email.  This allows the user to set the date and time of when they want the Outlook reminder notification to remind them about that email.

Ok overall the tool does what it says, a few nice points were:

• Installation was clean and easy
• Toolbar was easy to navigate and use
• When the software places a copy of the email into the search folder it flags the unread property.  This is important because as a user you can see how many emails are in your Follow Up and Delegate folder
• Moving emails you delegated to people into their own folder is good Inbox house cleaning

Now our criticisms:

• Had a couple of times when the buttons just didn’t seem to work, after I restarted Microsoft Outlook everything seemed to work again.
• Well there is not much here that a normal user can not already do by tweaking the Microsoft Outlook rules and writing a few basic macros.
• The email still remains in my Inbox and a copy is sent to the various folders, would have been better if I was given control over how I wanted the emails to move.  Personally I didn’t want the emails left in the Inbox the purpose of categorizing them and moving them to another folder was so I could clear out my Inbox and keep my different work functions segregated.

Overall it’s a well thought out tool that will help you catagorize your emails.  But, if you feel comfortable with adding rules to Outlook or if you are the type of person that’s ok with a little manual work to keep you Inbox clean then this tool probably isn’t for you.

Does Microsoft charge rent?  I mean I already live in Outlook so I thought maybe I could chip in a few bucks and get some modifications made to make my life easier. 

I don’t know about you but as the economy has started going south and more and more people are being forced into multiple roles and responsibilities I have seen a huge spike in the number of emails I receive.  My friends and I were comparing notes last night on how many emails we would have in our Inbox by 8am the next morning, the average estimate was about 50.  A few were higher but they work with international teams so it’s expected that the teams abroad will be working while we are sleeping.  As we were talking I noticed every one of us looked at our email on a Blackberry or iPhone at least 2 or 3 times over the course of a few hours.

So what did I take away from this?  I decided that Outlook has to get easier so I don't spend all day sorting, following up on, and reading email.  I have setup a testing scenario for as many Outlook addin applications as I can, I have identified a few that I have heard about and I’m in the process of researching others.  My colleagues and I will test, rate, and provide feedback on each Outlook addin on how well it helped us do our jobs and make that available to you the readers.  I hope this is useful for everyone and if you have a cool Outlook plugin, addin, or addon application you use today let us know.

Happy Emailing!

Elsinore is pleased to announce that the second quarter of 2008 will see the release of IssueNet 5.0! With the 5.0 release, we have placed a dedicated focus on improvements and simplifications, while resisting the temptation to simply tack on features.

Major IssueNet 5.0 Improvements

1. UI Overhaul - Toolbars and Preview Pane
2. Workflow and Notifications
3. Wiki-based Web Help System
4. Updates to the Intercept, Assist, and Oversight Solutions

The main emphasis has been on distilling and perfecting core parts of the user experience over “checkbox” feature adding.  IssueNet is an extremely powerful product and has only become more so over the 2 years since it replaced Visual Intercept as the flagship.  Simplifying the user experience to best facilitate the use of all that power represents the essense of the 5.0 release.  We certainly kept the dreaded "Featuritis" curve in mind with this one:

The most visible changes in IssueNet 5.0 are to the toolbars and standard views - creating a familar MS Outlook-style view. Simplifications to certain aspects of workflow and notifications have been implemented based on specific user feedback, while updates to the main solutions reflect our continued commitment to provide best practice configurations out-of-box. 

Stay tuned to this space and www.elsitech.com for the official beta schedule, release date, screenshots, and comprehensive release notes!