Do you ever get too much email? You're
laughing right? All of us get too much email. I work with several people who get so much mail they can't keep up unless
they go through it all weekend. It's a growing problem that needs to be addressed. The convergence of many new
communication services is helping with this problem, but not until there is widespread use will it really show its
advantages. It typically takes longer for enterprises to adopt emerging technologies than the consumer market where
adoption has, in fact, already started.
Companies have many more issues to deal with when it comes to using IM, Voice over IP, video conferencing and web-meetings including security and misuse. As collaborative tools advance and become commonplace in every area of our lives, corporations will find ways of dealing with the challenges and ensure that the benefits far outweigh the cost.
A tool developed by Microsoft Research will help us cope with too much email until the unified communications front gets here. It's called "Social Network and Relationship Finder" or SNARF. Way cool acronym, don't you think? Basically this tool will sort and group your Outlook messages based on any number of metrics you choose. It has a lot of promise, including ways to rate message importance. The tool is available for download, but, as are all of the offerings from MSR, is still in the experimental stages. It runs on Outlook 2002 or 2003 and hasn't yet been tested on Exchange or MAPI servers, hotmail, etc. It does NOT work with Outlook Express. It is pretty cool.
1. You know, maybe I'm just falling into the stupid user category, but I think I know my stuff a bit more than that. I've used Snarf for the past two weeks and I hate everything about it. It's slow. It's obtrusive. And it doesn't seem to be anything more than a different view of email. Not feeling Snarf.
Posted at 6:24AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Aaron Brazell