John K. Davis, Executive Director

New Year, Get Organized!

Are you ready to get organized for a new year? One of the most powerful organization tools that I depend on every day is Nelson Email Organizer.

NEO is an Outlook plug-in that automatically organizes ALL of your email in a way that is both powerful and simple. Email is huge in my daily activities and it is hard for me to imagine how I handled it all before NEO. If you get more than 25 email messages a day, NEO will save you significant time while making any email message instantly accessible and it does this automatically, with no effort on your part.

For the month of December NEO is being offered at a 25% discount with greater discounts (up to 60%) for selected volume purchases. Click on the NEO ad in the left column and check it out.

Diggdot.us

Link: TechCrunch Instantly Hooked on Diggdot.us.

If you are a news junkie, this is for you.

Michael likes Diggdot.us, but I prefer a similar service; SearchFox.com. The advantage of SearchFox is the ability to choose the RSS feeds that are merged by the service. This allows integration not only of Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular, but other favorite sites as well. SearchFox takes the additional step of using AI to prioritize the stories in order of your reading preferences, so I get what I really care about filtered to the top of the feeds whenever I log on to SearchFox.

Get 1-Click Answers

You may have heard me rave about GuruNet (here is an example: GuruNet). I have used this service for years. It enables you to Alt-Click on any word or phrase when you are writing in any software application, reading any file with text or just surfing the Web and a window pops up with tons of information about the item. Here is an image that shows kind of what the window will look like:

Notice the amazing list of resources in the left column--and these are in addition to the Dictionary, Thesaurus, Sign Language, WordNet, Wikepedia, Encylopedia, Investement Information, Politics, Translations, Images, News and, depending on what you are researching, many other tabs that run across the top of the main window. It is the most useful on-line tool I have seen.

Well, the application is now FREE! I have added an Answers.com plug-in on the left column of this page. Try it out. Type something like "elephant" in the Answers.com entry field and press Enter.

If you like the service, download the 1-Click Answers software you will find at the Answer.com Web site and install the application on your computer. You will be Alt-Clicking in no time!

NEO Discount

OK, so I have been absent lately. I think my funk is over and I will be a bit more social and active here in the future. At least, that is how I feel today.

So, the folks at Caelo Software are giving a "Get Organized 20% Discount" for the latest version of Nelson Email Organizer. I have written about this Outlook plug-in here:

Reclaim Your Brain

NEO Rocks!

First Impression

Configuring NEO

NEO simplifies my life significantly every day. I encourage you to check out NEO. It's a fantastic time-saving organizer for Outlook email that will make Outlook work for you rather than against you ;-) !

NEO is on sale now until the end of February at a 20% discount. Click here to reach the NEO page at

Caelo Software.

To get the 20% discount, use this promotion code when buying NEO on their website: Promotion Code 05NY689

You'll be amazed at how much easier managing email is with NEO.

Configuring NEO

There is not much that needs to be done to reap the advantages of NEO email organization after installing the software, but there is one chore that is a bit intimidating. After the installation process is completed you will notice that although NEO correctly names many correspondent folders, there are many others that need attention. This happens because NEO finds only an email address or is confused about whether the name it finds is an individual or a company. NEO also makes a separate folder for each email address when you might really want multiple email addresses in a single correspondent folder. So, to get maximum utility from the software one must go through the correspondent folders and clean things up.

It is a one-time task, for the most part. Correspondent folders can easily be viewed by “tree” order. NEO uses three folders when set for this view of the correspondent folders--New, Current and Dormant--that can be configured to meet your needs. So, once you initially get the names cleaned up, it is easy to view the new correspondent folders from time-to-time and make any changes where NEO makes an error in constructing the folder name.

This initial clean-up process will also enable you to create bulk mail folders for messages that belong under that tab instead of the correspondent tab. Or, you may find situations where you want both a correspondent folder and a bulk mail folder for the same messages. Either can be easily accomplished as you go through the process of cleaning up the correspondent folders.

When this project is completed, the full power of NEO is at your fingertips. The other configurable components of NEO like using categories, various tag states, creating hot folders, moving unsorted bulk mail into appropriately named bulk mail folders, and creating search folders are good things to do and are much less labor intensive to accomplish.

You will also want to play around with the many option settings in NEO. There are many alternatives under five tabs in the option window; General, Workflow, Reading Pane, Format and New Mail. After reviewing NEO Help concerning these matters, it may also be a good idea to read the many suggestions about these options shared by successful users at the NEO website. People find amazingly different ways to use the power of NEO and what works best for you will be mostly a matter of personal preference.

NEO Progress

NEO Pro 3 Beta published a new build today. It corrects a number of problems I reported and others that I did not actually perceive as a problem. Caelo continues to make good progress.

I also took advantage of their 50% discount offer. I paid a very reasonable $25 for upgrade to the new version when it becomes available. This offer will expire on February 29, so if you are a current NEO user, click on the NEO ad in the side column and take advantage of this pricing.

Use of the new features is becoming second nature as I continue to enjoy the beta software. I think my favorite is the consolidation of multiple stores of email. All my messages whether in my personal folder, archive folder or Hotmail folder are now consolidated in NEO. When I go to a correspondent folder everything is integrated. When I do a search the result contains matches integrated from all of my message stores. This consolidation is wonderfully convenient.

The other biggie is the new filtering capability. I find what I'm looking for with ease because of filtering. Let's say I want to find a password sent by a website service. I click on the Correspondent tab, type the first few letters of the company name or individual's last name to quickly move to the correct correspondent folder. I then click on the receive filter so all of the messages I sent to this correspondent are filtered out and only messages to me are visible in the view. This often cuts the messages down to a small number so what remains is visible, but I can quickly add a date filter to zero in on the message I'm after if I need to further reduce the range. These actions are quick, intuitive and powerful.

I am also enjoying the use of categories. NEO automatically picks up the categories of messages pulled by NewsGator, my RSS aggregator. So, if I want to see only the product review posts from the PC Magazine site, getting there is a snap. I also use categories to identify messages from certain groups of correspondents. I get a lot of messages from church members, so assigning categories like "CRC" for messages concerning the Constitution Review Committee enables me to quickly review all the messages concerning the work of that group; so easy, simple and enormously helpful.

The Bulk Mail tab is much more useful in NEO Pro 3 because it is now easy to have messages appear in both an individual correspondent folder and a bulk mail folder simultaneously. This means that I can quickly find messages from a particular person in a particular mailing list, or I can see all of the messages from the list by switching between the Correspondent tab and Bulk Mail tab.

NEO Pro 3 is an awesome email organizing tool, and so much of its power is automated that I have to do little to maintain the system.

NEO Notes

Caelo got back to me about the assertion failure. They said it was a tough problem and they have not yet fixed it, but they came up with a workaround that would allow me to get back to using the application. The workaround involved deleting a setting in the Windows Registry. I made the repair and NEO worked again. But I soon discovered that if I moved the NEO tabs to the bottom position of the application’s window, the registry setting would become corrupted and I would have to go through the process of deleting the setting from the registry again. I will leave the tabs at the top until the Caelo developers get this problem corrected.

Every spare second over the past few days I have been playing with NEO. I really, really, like the changes. Not everything is working correctly, but it is beta software after all. Enough is working that I have no desire to go back to the stable NEO 2.5, even though it is installed and all I have to do to use it is close NEO Pro with a click and open NEO 2.5 with a click. NEO Pro 3 with all of its bugs is more useful.

I will write often in the future about NEO basics, new features, how I use NEO and the progression of moving through the beta process. If you follow along you will learn why I love this powerful email organizing tool.

I sent my first list of discovered bugs to Caelo today (the assertion error was not really a list; it was a cry for help). I’m sure they have discovered most of these from other beta testers by now, but the whole idea with beta software testing is to let the developers know what works and what does not. I did not mention the things they knew were not working--the spam folder functionality is not yet included, so I did not include this problem on the list. Here is the list I sent today:

None of these problems are all that serious, but all of them should be fixed before you leave beta:

1. Some pending correspondence folders can be combined with appropriate existing correspondence folders, others cannot.
2. When an active message is read and then deleted, it remains unread. I can avoid the problem by dragging the message from the Active Folder to the Outlook Deleted Items Folder.
3. I keep finding read message in the unread status folder. They are not bold, properties indicate they are unread. They seem to disappear after awhile.
4. I tried to remove a saved search folder and got an assertion failure which I reported to Calera via the error reporting tool. But it is irritating that none of search folders from NEO 2.5 appear in NEO Pro 3.
5. New bulk mail does not appear in the Active folder even though the correct configuration option is checked on the Workflow tab requesting this behavior.
6. NEO Sound Schemes do not work.
7. I was typing a Word document. An Outlook Reminder popped up and I simultaneously got this Windows Program Error dialogue box:

Beta Problems

I almost immediately ran into problems with the NEO Pro 3 beta. After having a great time exploring NEO Pro after initial installation and completion of the synchronization process, I closed the application. A few hours later I opened Outlook and a few minutes later I tried to switch to NEO. This is the error message I got:

Repeated clicking on OK just brings the same error message back. Directly beneath this error message an error reporting message is visible, but the fact that I cannot successfully close the error message prevents the reporting tool from functioning. I had to use the Task Manager to close NEO.

Caelo seems to be a bit overwhelmed with beta support issues and has not yet provided a fix. Another beta version is due out soon and I am hopping it will work on my system. The anticipation is palpable.

First Impression

I’m amazed. NEO Pro 3 is significantly improved over NEO 2.5--an improvement that far exceeds the normal advances in a mature application from version to version. At first blush I must admit that I feel blown away by Caelo’s ambition.

NEO has always been a compelling plug-in for Outlook. Email management is supposed to be Outlook’s main thing, but everyone who uses it to manage more than 50 email messages per day knows that it falls short in many ways. NEO has always been what Outlook was supposed to be all along.

The big deal flows from the way NEO handles the filing--it is all automated. Here is a good diagram of how it works:

NEO Rocks!

I have been an enthusiastic user of Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) for years. The application works with Outlook to make email management a cinch.

NEO will be updated to version 3.0 any day now. I’m really excited about the new features. I will be writing a lot about the new software in coming weeks and will reveal many details about this awesome utility.

For now, I encourage you to view a Macromedia Flash tutorial (requires sound), that does a good job of explaining the basics about NEO: Tutorial for NEO Version 3

You can get more information now about NEO at their website.

Obscured Vision

My prior post here of December 23 promised information about the latest version of Vision, the desktop knowledge management tool from Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc. (MWT). I would never have predicted that it would take a month for me to report back on this matter, but problems with the application prevent me from using the software and technical support as been unable to find a solution.

Once Vision had catalogued the information in my PC, I opened the application and began exploring its features. I quickly noticed that the thumbnail service was not working.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

I have a Vision!

In the past I have written about Scopeware Vision, the software developed by Mirror Worlds Technologies (MWT) for individual PCs, and concluded that it was great, but not nearly as powerful as the server-based version of Scopeware. Recent improvements in Vision have put this conclusion into question and I have decided to do another thorough exploration of the application.

One of the criticisms of Vision in my prior trials was the degree to which the application hurt performance on my desktop workstation. The server-based product has a significant advantage in this regard--all of the processing is being done on the server so the only work my desktop machine has to do is open a browser window and display the contents on my monitor. Vision is wholly contained within my desktop computer, so my computer is doing all of the work. This was a problem for me.

When I installed Vision this time, things looked like they might not have changed much. The installation wizard warns the user that Vision needs to index and catalog everything and, if you have a lot of files and email, it might take two hours. The Scopeware Vision Activity Console that comes up to display progress also recommends that you not open the application until after this process has completed.

I knew about this situation in advance because of my prior experience with Vision, so I chose to begin the installation late in the evening and left the PC to do its thing while I got a good night sleep.

Seven hours later I returned to see how things went. Vision was not yet done getting things ready. The progress bar showed that 91% of the work had been accomplished.

It is true that I have a lot of files on my PC and I have a huge stockpile of email. With a gigabyte of RAM running on a 2.3 MH CPU I assumed the wizard’s warnings would be a bit on the overstated side in my case, so I was a bit shocked to find the process continuing after seven hours of full access to my system.

I needed to do some work, so I opened Outlook, NEO, Word and Quicken and completed the tasks I needed to do. Vision very cooperatively paused its indexing and cataloging and I was please to find no performance hit as I worked. One minute after my activities were completed, Vision kicked back into gear and was again making slow progress in its effort to learn all it could about the information on my computer.

I need to run some errands and meet someone, so Vision will again have complete control of my hardware for a few hours. I’ll finish the installation when I get back and begin a thorough evaluation of the software. The next post here will probably be next week after I get clear about this latest version of Vision.

Reclaim Your Brain

In a BBC News article, Brian Wheeler presents an interesting explanation of the challenge we face in managing knowledge. He begins:

More information has been produced and stored in the past five years, than at any time in human history. E-mails, text messages, mobile phone calls, TV, websites. We are drowning in the stuff. But how much of it has added to the sum of human knowledge? And has anyone thought what it is doing to our brains?

The amount of information presented to each person every day would fill two floppy disk drives.

The ease with which one can now publish information has turned millions who would once have been only consumers of culture into active participants in creating culture. This is rapidly transforming cultural dynamics. But the issue of how to effectively manage the exploding volume of information is becoming central to every netizen.

Try Scopeware

The Operation Gadget | Thinking About Trying Microsoft OneNote 2003 article begs the question: Why not use Scopeware, or Vision if you are not on a LAN? Specifically, when talking about OneNote Dave Aiello says:

The problem with this approach is the serial nature of each planning pad. If I try to go back to something I did last year, it helps to first remember the approximate date that I did something. If I can't do that, I have to grab my pads off the shelf and start browsing through them.

As I have said before, OneNote is great as far as it goes. But if the goal is to find what you are looking for, nothing works better than Scopeware.

Memory Aid

A significant component of knowledge management is remembering what we already know. Personal information management (PIM) software provides contact information, a list of things we want to do and our calendar of scheduled appointments; all things that we want to remember.

Those of us who have become dependent on PIM systems notice that reliance on the software dims our memory. We focus on the application in our wireless phone, personal digital assistant (PDA) or laptop computer instead of using our memory to recall those things that are managed within these devices.

A doctoral student at MIT may have found a way to effectively use PIM software without forcing us to focus on the device running the application. From Wired News: Memories in the Corner of My Eye:

Trying to remember a full day's schedule is no mean feat--especially when it's full of business meetings, grocery shopping, kids' soccer practice and music lessons, and sundry other errands. Help may be on the way from a pair of specs dubbed the memory glasses…

WinFS

I caught a short post at Audioblog about the future with WinFS:

The days of using folders as categories/metadata to organize files may be behind us. Well not quite yet. In 3 years if we're lucky.

The sad thing is that so many people have not yet discovered David Gelernter's narrative user interface and the simple, elegant knowledge management system it offers. Scopeware is, I suspect, more powerful, useful and easier to use than Longhorn (Microsoft's promised new operating system now projected for availability in 2006). And yet, it remains relatively obscure.

This amazes me, especially when there has been so much positive press about the software over the past year. "Gelernter's 'narrative information system' will change the world of computing." - Red Herring

"Scopeware is a revolution, one of those simple-sounding ideas that seem obvious in retrospect." - Internet World

"To try the Gelernter system is to fall in love with it. It is elegant, easy, natural, and beautiful. It will prevail." - Gilder Technology Report

"[Scopeware is] a powerful office productivity tool that can cut your business chores down to size." - PC Magazine

5,000,000,000,000,000,000

"If you're feeling overwhelmed by information overload, you may not be alone. The amount of new information stored on various media such as hard drives has doubled in the past three years to five exabytes of new information produced in 2002 according to a study released Tuesday by the University of California, Berkeley.

That's exabytes, as in one byte with 18 zeros behind it, six zeros more than a terabyte. The amount of information put into storage in 2002, five exabytes, was equal to the contents of a half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collection of the entire U.S. Library of Congress, according to the study by professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. The professors estimated that between two and three exabytes of information was generated in 1999." (See InfoWorld: Study documents data boom and the original study is published here)...
Click to enlarge

OneNote

A person who is thinking about managing knowledge in his business and is looking into various alternatives asked in an email message:

Does Microsoft have a licensing agreement with Mirror World Technologies to use their Scopeware Version 2.1, and/or Server-Based Scopeware technologies in OneNote? Did they pirate the technology. What is the difference in the products?

I replied:

No, Microsoft's OneNote is certainly an interesting application and will get attention from people who want to better manage their thoughts, but it suffers in comparison with Scopeware...

Improving Your Vision

Mirror Worlds Technologies recently announced the availability of Scopeware Vision 2.1, a high-performance search utility that integrates real-time information from the web with documents, email and other digital files. This is not the server-based Scopeware that I provide for enterprise customers; it is the version for individual PCs. If you want to use Scopeware’s revolutionary narrative user interface but do not want network information managed, only the information that is located on your PC, then Scopeware Vision 2.1 may be just the thing for you.

Scopeware Vision 2.1 makes use of Real Simple Syndication (RSS), an XML web-based technology that feeds content from websites directly to your personal PC. By incorporating an RSS reader into the traditional Scopeware interface, Vision 2.1 is the first personal information management tool to integrate data on the desktop and real-time content such as news from the web. A copy of the full press release including pricing can be found at the Scopeware Vision website...

Book Archive

First, full disclosure: I am a member of the Amazon.com Associates Program. I receive referral fees when you click-through my site to Amazon.com to purchase stuff. I have a few of the books in my library listed on the About Me page and I hope to have my entire library listed there soon.

Amazon.com is doing something remarkable:

An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog. The entire collection, which went live Oct. 23, is searchable, and every page is viewable.

You can read many other details in an article to be published in the December issue of Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia. Better yet, take a look at the Amazon.com page that describes how to use the Searchable Archive.

I don't know about you, but this impresses me to the max. I think this Internet thing just might be alright.

Professor's Dream

My wife is currently the Dean for Academic Affairs at California Western School of Law, but she will be returning to her first love, being a law professor, in the not-too-distant future. She says they pay her to grade exams--the teaching she does for free. You can imagine her excitement when I told her about software being tested now that reads and grades essay exams successfully scoring the exams within two percentage points of what the professor would have scored the exam (see Discover Online, June 2003)

She is also impressed by this more recent news: software can do a lot of her basic research on her behalf. Text mining uses computers to read large volumes of unstructured data in order to find wisdom and useful insight. See this article in the October 16 issue of the New York Times for more details: Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom.