Media & Communications Corner: Making Outlook More Useful for Relationship-Centered Professionals

If your outlook on everyday business communications is heavily influenced by, well, Microsoft Outlook, then there's a good chance you've wished at one point or another that you could tweak the software to make it serve your needs more efficiently. The good news is that you can.

A handful of companies have come up with tools to enhance your Outlook experience. Slipstick Systems (http://www.slipstick.com/addins/productivity.asp) offers an A-to-Z a la carte menu featuring dozens of add-ons that you can download and try in conjunction with Outlook in an effort to identify the ones that will actually work for you. Don't have the time ' or the patience? Simply not a fan of the notion of downloading yet another program that you may never use? We tested a slew of them so you don't have to. Our top three picks are ClearContext, Xobni and Gist.

ClearContext

ClearContext, www.clearcontext.com, is designed for those of us with the burning desire to gain some sense of command over our out-of-control inboxes. (The average ClearContext user receives about 500 e-mails a week. If you've never taken tabs on how many e-mails you wade through in an average week, tally it now ' what you find may surprise you.) The program highlights incoming messages from a list of contacts designated as most important, and enables users to file messages and entire conversational threads into recommended folders (i.e., management, personal, Client X) with just one click. A simple, colorful control panel displays various facets of a specified project including e-mail threads, contact details, related documents, appointments and work tasks. Receive a meeting confirmation or assign a to-do via e-mail? You can automatically create task or schedule an appointment with a single click. Perhaps one of the most satisfying tools in ClearContext's toolbox is the ability to defer e-mails, which banishes them from your inbox, to return at a later date when you're ready to deal with them. The basic download is free. Dig it? Upgrade to the Pro version, free for 30 days, or $89.95 when you're ready to commit.

Xobni

Downloading Xobni, http://www.xobni.com/lp/marketinglaw, is like introducing Outlook to speed. When you add this program ' which is, simply put, a sidebar overlay ' it synchronizes with your e-mail. This process could take a half hour or more if you have thousands of messages. But that will be the last time you wait; the end result is a near-instantaneous search capability, far faster than using Outlook alone. And that's just the beginning.

Xobni creates a profile for each person you communicate with via e-mail. Forget wasting time scouring old e-mails for the phone number or e-mail address of someone who contacted you eons ago. Xobni scans every e-mail that hits your inbox and adds any contact information available in the signature line or body to the business card section of that contact's profile (which is stored separately from your list of contacts in Outlook).

For each contact, you'll be able to view his or her virtual business card, the recent conversational threads you've exchanged (much like in Gmail), any files you've shared, and more. You can also view a graphic representation of the times of day you exchange e-mail with a particular contact, which can help you pinpoint the best time to connect, particularly if you're looking for a quick response.

Another cool feature displayed in the Xobni sidebar is the social networking sites each contact belongs to. (Xobni is integrated with LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo e-mail, Hoover's and Skype.) Want to see where a contact went to law school, for instance? His or her LinkedIn profile just may tell you. You'll also have the chance to expand your own social networks by adding your contacts. Xobni's basic download is free. They also recently released a premium version, Xobni Plus, that expands upon the functionality available in Xobni Free. It includes powerful new search features, including support for phrases and Boolean queries and advanced conversation and network filtering, Xobni Rank-powered AutoSuggest, tech support and more. Xobni Plus will set you back 29.95.

Gist

Gist, www.gist.com, adds yet another level of personal relationship management to the Outlook experience by linking your inbox to the Web. Gist searches the Internet for publically available information pertaining to the companies and contacts in your e-mail system, including ordinary Web sites, media outlets, blogs, Twitter and other social networking sites. The program aggregates what it finds into a comprehensive dashboard; scan the dashboard for a fairly comprehensive picture of what's recently been going on with that person or company. Gist does in a flash what you can easily spend a half hour or more doing on your own in an advance of a meeting.

You can fine-tune your experience by assigning importance rankings to your contacts and companies, which can help control information overload by suppressing new data that is less critical to your everyday use. And with Gist being the brand new baby in Webland, it's no surprise that it's iPhone friendly.

The software is still in Beta-mode, so you can expect to invest a bit of time in entering various details about your contacts, such as info about their LinkedIn or Twitter profiles. But once you're good to go, you can bet that Gist will become your go-to tool for staying on top of whose doing what on the Web ' and off.

Nicholas Gaffney, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a lawyer and former journalist. Nick manages Infinite Public Relations' San Francisco office and can be reached at [email protected] or 415-732-7801.

If your outlook on everyday business communications is heavily influenced by, well, Microsoft Outlook, then there's a good chance you've wished at one point or another that you could tweak the software to make it serve your needs more efficiently. The good news is that you can.

A handful of companies have come up with tools to enhance your Outlook experience. Slipstick Systems (http://www.slipstick.com/addins/productivity.asp) offers an A-to-Z a la carte menu featuring dozens of add-ons that you can download and try in conjunction with Outlook in an effort to identify the ones that will actually work for you. Don't have the time ' or the patience? Simply not a fan of the notion of downloading yet another program that you may never use? We tested a slew of them so you don't have to. Our top three picks are ClearContext, Xobni and Gist.

ClearContext

ClearContext, www.clearcontext.com, is designed for those of us with the burning desire to gain some sense of command over our out-of-control inboxes. (The average ClearContext user receives about 500 e-mails a week. If you've never taken tabs on how many e-mails you wade through in an average week, tally it now ' what you find may surprise you.) The program highlights incoming messages from a list of contacts designated as most important, and enables users to file messages and entire conversational threads into recommended folders (i.e., management, personal, Client X) with just one click. A simple, colorful control panel displays various facets of a specified project including e-mail threads, contact details, related documents, appointments and work tasks. Receive a meeting confirmation or assign a to-do via e-mail? You can automatically create task or schedule an appointment with a single click. Perhaps one of the most satisfying tools in ClearContext's toolbox is the ability to defer e-mails, which banishes them from your inbox, to return at a later date when you're ready to deal with them. The basic download is free. Dig it? Upgrade to the Pro version, free for 30 days, or $89.95 when you're ready to commit.

Xobni

Downloading Xobni, http://www.xobni.com/lp/marketinglaw, is like introducing Outlook to speed. When you add this program ' which is, simply put, a sidebar overlay ' it synchronizes with your e-mail. This process could take a half hour or more if you have thousands of messages. But that will be the last time you wait; the end result is a near-instantaneous search capability, far faster than using Outlook alone. And that's just the beginning.

Xobni creates a profile for each person you communicate with via e-mail. Forget wasting time scouring old e-mails for the phone number or e-mail address of someone who contacted you eons ago. Xobni scans every e-mail that hits your inbox and adds any contact information available in the signature line or body to the business card section of that contact's profile (which is stored separately from your list of contacts in Outlook).

For each contact, you'll be able to view his or her virtual business card, the recent conversational threads you've exchanged (much like in Gmail), any files you've shared, and more. You can also view a graphic representation of the times of day you exchange e-mail with a particular contact, which can help you pinpoint the best time to connect, particularly if you're looking for a quick response.

Another cool feature displayed in the Xobni sidebar is the social networking sites each contact belongs to. (Xobni is integrated with LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo e-mail, Hoover's and Skype.) Want to see where a contact went to law school, for instance? His or her LinkedIn profile just may tell you. You'll also have the chance to expand your own social networks by adding your contacts. Xobni's basic download is free. They also recently released a premium version, Xobni Plus, that expands upon the functionality available in Xobni Free. It includes powerful new search features, including support for phrases and Boolean queries and advanced conversation and network filtering, Xobni Rank-powered AutoSuggest, tech support and more. Xobni Plus will set you back 29.95.

Gist

Gist, www.gist.com, adds yet another level of personal relationship management to the Outlook experience by linking your inbox to the Web. Gist searches the Internet for publically available information pertaining to the companies and contacts in your e-mail system, including ordinary Web sites, media outlets, blogs, Twitter and other social networking sites. The program aggregates what it finds into a comprehensive dashboard; scan the dashboard for a fairly comprehensive picture of what's recently been going on with that person or company. Gist does in a flash what you can easily spend a half hour or more doing on your own in an advance of a meeting.

You can fine-tune your experience by assigning importance rankings to your contacts and companies, which can help control information overload by suppressing new data that is less critical to your everyday use. And with Gist being the brand new baby in Webland, it's no surprise that it's iPhone friendly.

The software is still in Beta-mode, so you can expect to invest a bit of time in entering various details about your contacts, such as info about their LinkedIn or Twitter profiles. But once you're good to go, you can bet that Gist will become your go-to tool for staying on top of whose doing what on the Web ' and off.

Nicholas Gaffney, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is a lawyer and former journalist. Nick manages Infinite Public Relations' San Francisco office and can be reached at [email protected] or 415-732-7801.