Recently, my Mac hard drive failed and I lost all my work of filing documents into nice organized folders on my desktop. Fortunately, most all of my documents live in my inbox in their own files. Thanks to improving search functionalities over the last several years, I've come to rely on that inbox for everything. Still, there's always better ways to improve the functionality and experience. That's where companies like ClearContext and Xobni come in. Both companies recently launched plug-ins to Microsoft Outlook that give the inbox a more Google Gmail interface and feel. Deva Hazarika, ClearContext founder and CEO, recently stopped by the Vator studios to announce the free version of his inbox management tool product.
The free product essentially lets people process through messages faster, and put information related to a message (contacts, attachments) at the their fingertips. ClearContext prioritizes messages by analyzing email history and identifying the most import contacts and highlighting them through colors.
ClearContext, which is seeking to raise additional capital this year, lets people file away their messages faster or file away entire threads into folder with a single click. Now that's a good idea. What's the difference between ClearContext and Xobni?, I asked.
"ClearContext focuses on threads, topics, and folders to
organize related information together, while Xobni focuses everything around
the messages that a single individual has sent. This is the 'project
vs. people' difference," he said.
Ulimately, ClearContext hopes free users will turn into paying users for the more enhanced product.
Besides our interview, Deva walked me through the relevant features and functionalities. I'll share those with corresponding screen shots.
All active stuff is organized into an overview
dashboard like this so people can get a view of all pending
to-dos/appointments/etc:
Related emails, contacts, attachments, appointments are organized into a project dashboard like this:
Finally, with ClearContext's Attachment Explorer, you can navigate through all the attachments related to a project or set of projects just like navigating through files on your desktop:
