Feature Requests - Grouping and GUI

[naorm]

Hi,
just installed the product for evaluation - and after one day - it sure looks impressive- and i keep diggin into it. Some ideas poped up while using it.

1. Grouping in Prioritized by Day View
One of the features i'm missing is the ability to have a "priority" based sorting while maintaining the ability to have the messages grouped by day, or week. (Like in the default Oulook by day grouping)
Using the native outlook "Received" field is not good enough since it includes the time stamp aswell which makes it useless for grouping. And defining a new field as formula doesn't help, since outlook doesn't know how to group by such field.

The most obvious field to use would be CC-ReceivedDay but your format of
"- yy,yym,mdd" makes meaningless header for the group.

As a quick solution - If you could create another field which will be populated by you together with the CC-ReceivedDay but will contain the informaition in DayName dd/mm/yyy it will be possible to still the priority sorting - yet to group the emails by date.

What do you say?

2 - Topic Assignment Field Length
While using a "real life" enviroment where usually one keep his emails in a nested folders stracture - i found out that when i have a topic e.g. "Conferences/APAC/Something 2005" - it can't be seen well enough when you try to scroll down the list since the presentation is limited to 30-31 chars - can you use another method for this display (e.g. with auto-fit)???

Thnx
and keep that good work

[brad]

We really appreciate the suggestions. To address your specific points:

1. Other users have also requested advanced grouping within our views. We have made this feature a high priority on our enhancement list and will be looking at adding several new fields to support grouping and other view customization. We plan to address this functionality as soon as possible.

2. I understand exactly what you are looking for here. We will investigate this and other GUI suggestions and post a followup in this thread with potential solutions and anticipated timeframes.

Thanks again and enjoy the product.

[naorm]

Brad,

thnx for the previous answers and I hope I'm not nagging too much - i guess being a product manager in the past seems to urge you to find missing features;)
here are some more ideas maybe will find their way to the product roadmap.

1.Bulk change of contacts priority -
I have few hundreds contacts in my personal address book - will it be possible to have the priority field as part of the fields available for the address book view - so I can filter out part of the contacts and bulk assign to all of them the right priority instead of one by one?

2. Adding Custom Action to Outlook Rules
The AutoAssign feature is very strong and very useful for me - but fairly limited in the complexity of queries - e.g. having one rule with multiple addresses (not from the same domain) and with several variations on the subject line, or choosing for example items which I'm on the To: list or CC: list, emails addressed to a mail-list etc.
I think it will be beneficial to add the ability to assign priority and topic via using "custom action" in the Outlook native rules - instead of you having to develop the whole rules infrastructure to accommodate with complex rules - just use the built in for the more sophisticated users.

3. Alerting
Adding an alert to a specific thread - i.e. when an email arrives and is assigned to a specific thread or topic - a message box can appear (maybe it can be achieved by using Outlook internal rules in combination with custom actions?)

4. Adding a Category classification dimension
Since the classification is based on topics which are basically reflection of a file structure sometime it is needed to have another dimension to classify the messaged - e.g. getting an email from a customer on which you work with a partner - you would want to file the email (=>"assign topic") based on the customer - but still to find it based on the partner name, or by region etc. - by enabling population of the category field of outlook (which is useless now) this multi-dimensional classification can be done.


One last remark - (well last for now at least ;) ) - One of the things I always checked with other vendors of email productivity tools (which are not so many… as you would know) is the forward looking feature plan.
This was one of my main decision if to buy a tool or not - in most cases the customers are left in the dark - you can never know if the features you are looking for, will be part of the next one or two releases or not.

It's not about spending the money to buy the product - it's about the time it takes to learn and "think" the tool's way in order to maximize the its benefits. I know it's problematic for a software company to put something on it's roadmap and commit to it, without checking it carefully - but at least some basic mapping of what we should expect in the next releases and what are the planned releases would help - personally I can live with some features the product lack if I know they are supposed to be addressed in a defined timeline. - i think it will help to built much stronger customer loyality for your product - but of course this is only my view - don't know if other users share the same view with me.

[deva]

Thanks very much for your detailed posts. This type of feedback is incredibly valuable to us.

As you're aware, we're a relatively new product in the marketplace. We got some great feedback over a few months of beta-testing, but now that we are out in the marketplace for everyone to evaluate, we are getting a lot of new feedback.

In fact, in our most recent minor upgrade release, two features (sub-domains in Auto-Assign, bulk apply of auto-assign rules to inbox) came directly from user feedback on these forums.

We definitely appreciate your request for more insight into our roadmap and we'll definitely be providing more information on future plans once we have a better idea of how important various areas are to our users. For the time being, we are very actively evaluating all the forum and email feedback we receive to make sure that our roadmap priorities are aligned with what our users want.

We are committed to having regular upgrades incorporating as many new features as possible. As we finalize these plans we will be posting updates here to make sure that we are in sync (and incorporate your feedback on these plans into our planning process) as well as to help you consider our future plans to see how we match up with your needs.

Best regards
--
Deva

[brad]

Thanks again for the detailed requests:

1. You can add the ClearContext Priority Field, in integer form, to your Contact view. As an example, select the Phone List view, right click the headings bar and select the Field Chooser menu item. From there, go to User Defined fields and select New. Add "CC-ContactPriority" as type "Integer." Drag this newly created field into the title bar of the tabular phone list. The field will be added and can be sorted. The integer values correspond to our priorities: Very High = 2, High = 1, Normal = 0, Low = -1, and Very Low = -2. We will be looking into providing a user friendly bulk update process in a future release.

2. Utilizing the Outlook Rules module makes a lot of sense for our power users. We are looking into it for future release, but timing will depend on the ease of integration into Outlook. We will post more detail as we develop it.

3. Alert functionality is definitely something that will be added to the product. Right now it's too soon to say how broad or flexible that functionality will be.

4. Currently you can use the category field of Outlook for additional classification. As discussed in an earlier post, we are looking into classification by multiple topics. In addition to the technical changes required, this change also impacts the user interface; making this change a relatively complex one.

As Deva mentioned, these suggestions are very valuable to us. As we finalize our plans for future functionality, we'll be taking all the feedback we have received into account and releasing a draft roadmap here for discussion prior to implementation.

[naorm]

Thnx for the detailed answers and the serious approach towards your customers - i'll be waiting to see those features and others reaching the product.

BTW - The field trick for the contacts worked like a charm - thnx.

[brad]

See this post for more detail. I am anxious to hear your feedback.

[naorm]

thnx - i'm moving over to the new thread

[brad]

We have completed testing and posted v1.1 which addresses some of the items you have requested. For more detail see this post.

[brad]

FYI - instructions for implementing Group By views are located in this post.