December 19, 2007

You Are As Productive As the Email Program You Use

What email program do you use to check your email?

I'm sure most of you use Microsoft Outlook, which is what I use.

However, there are other email programs such as: Eudora, from Qualcomm, which is no longer published. Mozilla's Thunderbird, which is very good, and free. I've used it for years and Opera.

There's also a number of web based email clients from companies such as BlueTie, Kerio, and of course consumer focused versions from Yahoo, Gmail and Microsoft Live.

Your choice of email client use can dramatically affect your daily productivity. Why? If you're like most people, your day to day activities are managed within your email program.

If you're using an email program that has limited functionality you'll have limited use of powerful communication, collaboration and task management features.

Let's take a simple look at "shared calendars". Although you can set up a shared calendar on dozens of third party services, its much easier and better to have a shared calendar integrated into your email program.

What about advanced filtering and management of inbound email. Can your email program filter email as it comes it? Can you tag it with different colors? Can you add a task to an email message? Outlook does this very well and is critical for my day to day tasks.

These kinds of features might seem quite basic, and maybe for those "basic" email users, the features are not needed. However, if you are a multi-tasking, knowledge worker, not having these tasks are the difference between a productive day and a note so productive day.

Connect IT writes "We've seen that there's been an evolution in the way that the e-mail client gets used over this time. It's continued to become a richer and richer client application that provides more information and centralizes more of our application requirements," said Bryan Rusche, unified communications and collaboration product manager at Microsoft Canada.

The first additions were calendaring, contact and task functions, and then came the ability to receive faxes via the e-mail client. In the last year, it's been made possible to check, listen to and even respond to voicemail via the e-mail client, Rusche said.

Ask your IT consultant to take a look at what email program (or client) you're using, to consider how you work and see if switching to a better email client would be a good idea.

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