Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Hanselminutes Podcast 30 - Outlook Add-Ins and Personal Productivity Enhancers

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Hanselminutes Podcast 30 - Outlook Add-Ins and Personal Productivity Enhancers

Posted in Podcast

My thirtieth Podcast is up. This episode is about 3rd party add-ins for Outlook that can be used to greatly enhance your productivity (and get your Inbox to zero messages!)

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

Subscribe:

This show was FULL of links, so here they are again. They are also always on the show site. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature.

We talk about three main Outlook-Addin in this show, Speedfilter, Taglocity, and ClearContext.

UPDATE: ClearContext has emailed me with this great information for folks:

"Tell your listeners to use the following coupon receive $15 off the purchase price: ZEN15. All purchases made between now and our v3 release date will receive a complimentary upgrade to 3.0 at no extra cost. This coupon is good through 11/1/2006."

Office 2007 – our current product (v2.0.6) works well with 2007. That said, we’re currently beta testing 3.0 of the product which is intended to support 2007. We have posted some screen prints of our 2007-specific features here.
Additional v3 Enhancements – in addition to our "Made for 2007" features we have implemented some UI enhancements that I think you will find interesting. In particular:
- We now have an Unsubscribe from Thread feature that works much like Omar's ThreadKiller
- We have implemented an advanced Topic Selector UI that makes it easier to assign Topics and file
- We also have built in a Topic Query on Send function that allows customers to assign Topics as they send messages, which in turn can be used to move sent email from the Sent Messages folder to their respective Topic folders.
More detail on the 3.0 release can be found here.
If any of your listeners are interested in checking out the beta of 3.0, drop us a note at beta@clearcontext.com

The folks at Taglocity ~~have offered this special 25% ($10) off coupon code for Hanselminutes listeners- "ZEN4647015965"~~ - and it's good until the end of September.

UPDATE: "Hi Scott - Thanks for the review of Taglocity. As the 'new kid on the block' it's good to see some healthy competition in this market. So in that spirit, we'll match any other vendors coupon offer - just use the coupon ZEN15 from today and you'll get $15 off the purchase price of $39 for Taglocity Pro! That's a big saving when compared to the 55 dollars others are costing..."

We'll post any additional coupons as they show up. Enjoy!

Links from the Show

Speedfiler (hmw)	David Allen (Getting Things Done)	GTD with OneNote 12 (hms)
Taglocity (hmy)	Offical GTD Addin (no OL2007) (hmu)	Scrial Consistancy (hmr)
ClearContext (hmt)	GTD in Outlook 2007 - Omar (hmo)	Installpad (hmx)
Search vs. Filing vs. Tagging (hmz)	GTD in Outlook 2007 - Simon (hmp)	Write your own Outlook Add-in (hn0)
Time Management in Outlook 2007 (hmq)	GTD Command Line (hmv)

NEW COUPON CODE EXCLUSIVELY FOR HANSELMINUTES LISTENERS: The folks at XCeed are giving Hanselminutes listeners that is Coupon Code "hm-20-20." It'll work on their online shop or over the phone. This is an amazing deal, and I encourage you to check our their stuff. The coupon is good for 20% off any component or suite, with or without subscription, for 1 developer all the way up to a site license.

Our sponsors are XCeed, CodeSmith Tools, PeterBlum and the .NET Dev Journal. There's a $100 off CodeSmith coupon for Hanselminutes listeners - it's coupon code HM100. Spread the word, now's the time to buy.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. There's a number of other ways you can get it (streaming, straight download, etc) that are all up on the site just below the fold. I use iTunes, myself, to listen to most podcasts, but I also use FeedDemon and it's built in support.
- Some other clients are Doppler (also suppose Windows CE), FireAnt, Nimiq, and PrimeTime Podcast.
Note that for now, because of bandwidth constraints, the feeds always have just the current show. If you want to get an old show (and because many Podcasting Clients aren't smart enough to not download the file more than once) you can always find them at http://www.hanselminutes.com.
I have, and will, also include the enclosures to this feed you're reading, so if you're already subscribed to ComputerZen and you're not interested in cluttering your life with another feed, you have the choice to get the 'cast as well.
If there's a topic you'd like to hear, perhaps one that is better spoken than presented on a blog, or a great tool you can't live without, contact me and I'll get it in the queue!

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

Posted at 2006-08-25 03:57 PM by Scott
Comments [4]
Permalink

Tracked by:
"Outlook Move Item - Hanselminutes Podcast 30" (TD - IT - Christian Deger) [Trackback]
"HanselMinutes Review of Outlook Add-ins" (ClearContext Corporate Weblog) [Trackback]

Friday, August 25, 2006 5:52:13 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Hi Scott,

I really enjoy listening to your show. During this podcast, was the "Fred's Bank" comment inspired in anyway by Steve Martin?

Also, check out today's daily WTF. There's a screenshot of someone with so many unread messages that outlook is displaying -2 (think DWORD wrap).

Keep up the good work.

Mark Ingalls

Saturday, August 26, 2006 8:57:02 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Cool. I checked out SpeedFiler and really digg it. I now got rid of my tree view and just use Ctrl+Y to navigate around the 600+ folders I have.

Bil Simser

Monday, August 28, 2006 8:19:54 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I've taken more of an "archive everything and search for it with GDS" approach, but I definitely see the value in the tools you mentioned. I'm a bit surprised, though, that no free tools (other than trials and "personal" editions) got mentioned.

Before I became a Gmail convert, back when I used POP3, I used PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net). It's a Bayesian heuristic analysis tool that works as a POP3 proxy, adding mail headers to tag the messages as it retrieves them. Very cool stuff.

There's a plug-in for Outlook that enables PopFile support with Exchange Server (http://www.vargonsoft.com/Outclass/). It looks like it's abandonware, though.

Cam Soper

Friday, September 01, 2006 9:45:51 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I'm surprised you didn't mention Microsoft Research's SNARF (at http://research.microsoft.com/community/snarf/ ). SNARF stands for Social Network and Relationship Finder. It's probably worth checking out if your 'email community' consists of thousands of people (mine doesn't). The Tablet PC show on The Podcast Network, however, still likes ClearContext better.
(http://tabletpc.thepodcastnetwork.com/2005/12/26/the-tablet-pc-show-025/ )