Hi everyone! This post is quite a bit overdue, but I've been holding off until we had a relatively good idea of features and timeline before posting. Our goal w/ 5.2 is to finish off the last chunk of 5.x core functionality and address a few bugs and feature requests from the 5.1 release. We're going to keep this release pretty small so we can get it out quickly and move forward on some bigger picture enhancements for our next major release.
First, timeline: We're aiming for a short beta in late August. This might slip a little bit, but we're working very hard to hit that date or soon after (first couple weeks of September). We'll contact our 5.1 beta list when we're ready to start testing the 5.2 release. If you're interested and weren't on that, send beta at clearcontext an email.
Next, features. I'll break it into a few areas:
Outlook 2010 64-bit support: 5.2 will support 2010 64-bit! See this thread for more details.
AutoAssign/Filing enhancements: This is the main area of new functionality in the 5.2 release, and completes our core v5.x development plan. We'll be making a number of enhancements to make AutoAssign rules creation and management simpler. But more importantly, we'll be adding infrastructure to automatically manage the ever-growing stream of automated emails sent by social networks, e-commerce sites, and all manner of other websites and companies. We're taking everything we learned from our first attempt at addressing that problem with Notification Managers and making the whole process much simpler and more automated. Lots more detail on this coming in the next couple of weeks.
More flexible date management: In both the Dashboard and Organizer, we're going to add more flexibility for viewing and manipulating both start dates and end dates. This will allow people to manage in ClearContext based on start dates while also moving us closer to more complete project management capabilities.
Organizer and Dashboard filters: We're still finalizing this, but we'll be adding more filters to the Organizer so you can view the data in a more flexible manner, whether you manage primarily by dates, projects, categories, etc. We're also working on ways to make it easier for people to view the exact tasks, appointments, and sub-project data they need to see.
Bugs: We've had a few startup and other performance issues in certain configurations in the 5.1 release, including some issues when other programs access Outlook when it's closed. We've also identified a few bugs with single folder filing (for people who don't use a folder structure for organization). We're working on these issues, as well as continuing to improve general performance, threading, and suggestion accuracy.
That's not an exhaustive list, but it's the core set of functionality we're working on for 5.2. Like the 5.1 thread, we'll be posting more detail on each of the sections as well as posting some screenshots in the coming weeks. Please feel free to ask any questions here, and of course any suggestions regarding specific functionality that you would love to see in this or upcoming releases.