I’ve had occasion to point several people to this already and, who knows, with luck it will be relevant for me sooner rather than later.
On the getting of agents. (Note: In its previous version, this piece was a comment posted to Slushkiller, but I ve gotten a surprising number of… [Making Light]
Some more friction reducers from Marc to investigate.
MessageSave and EZDetach make mail management a lot easier.
Reading some of the e-mail questions I receive from readers and scanning through some of the older posts on the Getting Things Done forum, it appears that many people are struggling with two problems related to Outlook e-mail
- How to save e-mail for archival purposes (say, on a CD), to improve Outlook performance, and/or reduce the server space used by IMAP or Exchange servers.
- How to manage attachments to e-mails when archiving
An elegant solution for Outlook users comes in the form of a pair of small add-ins for Outlook from TechHit – MessageSave and EZDetach. These add-ins are available as two new buttons on the Outllok toolbar and provide a number of ways to quickly process your accumulated mail and define rules for new incoming messages.
MessageSave gives you the ability to save e-mail messages as either native Outlook e-mail files (.msg) or plain text (.txt) files. You can save individual messages or process an entire hierarchy of folders at once. A wide range of options are available fo adding data points to the saved file names including date received, sender, etc. This makes sorting the output folder contents a lot easier.
There are advantages to saving in both formats, of course. Text files are a lot smaller than native Outlook messages. Saving in native format preserves formatting and makes reintegration into Outlook darg-and-drop simple (if you choose to delete the messages from your .pst file or Exchange folder after saving them).
I was able to reduce my personal .pst file from 95 MB to under 20 MB by saving all my older messages to a folder on my hard drive. MessageSave preserves the folder hierarchy (optional) so my very idiosyncratic filing system is unaltered. And, because Lookout, which has become an indispensable part of my Outlook setup, can index and search file folders, my ability to find whatever I’m looking for is preserved.
EZDetach provides a nice solution to the problems associated with storing attachmnts to e-mails in your .pst or Excahnge files. You can save the attachments to a local folder (or network share) and maintain a link to that file in the e-mail message. This obviously saves space equal to the size of the attachment while maintaining the association betwee a message and an attachment. When saving the files, you can have an exact copy of your Outlook folder structure created and attachments can be inserted back into messages when you forward them. You can even reestablish the link if you move the file after detaching it.
Both of the tools are quick to install and easy to use. EZDetach costs $18.95 and MessageSave runs $24.95.
Just got around to adding Feedster search over in the right hand column here.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU: SEARCH BAR NOW WORKING.
Thanks to some help from my brilliant friend in Scotland, Aalia Wayfare at The LeftHander (who previously fixed the gap in the middle column of my permalink pages), the “SEARCH SITE” bar in the upper right corner of my blog is now working. Instead of using Google, this bar now uses Feedster’s search engine. From the testing I have done, not only does it pick up all references to keywords anywhere in my archives, it also updates every day, so you can even use it to find references on my seven-day home page and category pages. BTW, Aalia has just ponied up for a Salon Blog.I’m still hoping that Google will get around to re-crawling all my pages, which should up my hit count by about 400 hits per day, and help people who rely on that search engine to find my site. I’d like to thank these wonderful people for helping me revamp my blog to make it easier for Google to crawl, and for readers with slow connection speeds to use: In addition to Aalia (who has also fixed my metatags): fellow Slogger Philip Vassar at Just Playing, Arve Bersvendsen at Virtuelvis , the blogless Ken Hirsch at No Pundit Intended, and Seth Finkelstein at Infothought, as well as Radio’s intrepid Lawrence Lee at Tomalak’s Realm. These guys are wonderful, selflessly helpful, and persistent and knowledgeable about all things technical. Thanks, guys!
In the meantime, if you’re one of those unhappy with Google’s unpredictable behaviour, you can add a Feedster search bar to your own site by going here.
Some good advice about how to be more intentional and mindful in your information gathering and analysis. Apropos of that, let me point, once again, to Ellen Langer’s excellent work on Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning. You might also want to take a look at the late Don Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner.
Active Listening (and Reading). Piers Young wrote a post called Listening and Anecdotes. Something he said made me realize that getting great advice is one thing, actively thinking about it and doing something with it is something else! He quotes one of the pieces… [John Porcaro: mktg@msft]
Here’s an interesting distinction to meditate on. The biggest challenge lies in the slipperiness of defining what it is we want “out of” either people or organizations. When that is as hard as it frequently is in the realm of knowledge worker, it takes an immense amount of trust to let the knowledge workers in your organization figure it out for themselves.
Busy People or Productive Organization. Busy People or Productive Organization — What is the distinction between…
“We need to get the most out of our people?”
and
“We need to get the most out of our organization?”
…other than the fact that the former leads one to the idea of keeping everyone busy and the latter, if taken seriously, leads one to making sure that they aren’t. Just something to think about. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
Nice collection of recent resources focused on Corporate blogging.
More Corporate Blogging Resources. The theme of most advice to corporations considering an excursion into blogging – if you believe, say, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble or Six Apart’s Mena Trott, is “be honest” – in other words, a complete break from the usual practices in corporate communications. That said, as the other articles in this nice summary on corporate blogging note, this new media is an excellent communications and marketing tool, allowing you to connect directly with your employees and customers. Also worth reading from the same author: Strong words free your mind. By Amy Gahran, Contentious, March 30, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
Bah! Humbug!
What’s the April Fools Day equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge?
About the only good thing I have to say about the day is how quickly I was able to delete crap from my aggregator. I can’t say whether any of it was funny or clever because I deleted stuff as quickly as I recognized it.
More evidence that I’m a boring old fart.