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.
Knowledge management is progressing rapidly, but only those who are using the best tools are reaping the benefit. There are four basic tools that every progressive netizen should be using: a personal information management (PIM) application, powerful email clients, a news aggregator and the best search engines.
The most successful PIM on the market is Outlook. One of the reasons this tool is so popular is that many third-party software developers integrate Outlook’s functionality into their product. So, Outlook’s contacts, calendar, task and email items are used effectively by many other digital tools.
Because Outlook integrates a powerful email client, it is also the most successful email application on the market. The importance of efficiently managing email for most netizens is crucial. Outlook’s email management capabilities are good, but not sufficient for most of us. I am an enthusiastic user of Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) which greatly expands my effective handling of email.
NEO is an Outlook plug-in. It uses the Outlook email database, the Outlook file structure and some of Outlook’s functionality. Its magic flows from its automatic organization of the email into seven tabs: Hot, Correspondent, Bulk Mail, Status, Date, Attachment and Search. Almost no user effort is required in this organization process after initial configuration of the software. A click on a tab presents the entire email data pool prearranged using the tab’s organizational paradigm.
For example, a click on the Correspondent tab presents all of your email organized by the contact or email address of the sender and each recipient of the message. Want to see a list of email messages sent and received from your sister? Just click on the Correspondent tab, enter the first two or three letters of her last name and NEO presents the entire history of the email exchanges between the two of you. A click on column headings allows you to quickly sort the list by date or subject. It all happens instantaneously.
The other tabs have similar magic. Bulk Mail presents messages from each of the subscription services you use--Hotmail Services, Yahoo Groups, listserver distribution email, etcetera. Status organizes the email into categories of Active (not yet managed within NEO), Kept, Tagged, Unread, and To-Do. The Date tab automatically distributes the messages into folders marked Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, and every month in which at least one message was sent or received--if the message is in the Outlook database, it is in one of these folders. The Attachment tab presents any email message with an attachment organized in folders that represent file type: PDF, JPG, attached messages, DOC, HTML, RTF, TXT, WAV, etcetera. The Search tab allows you to use Boolean logic (NOT, AND, OR, etcetera) to find email messages that meet the search criteria and then gives you the option of saving the results as a folder that can be viewed and updated with ease--on my database of over twenty thousand messages a very sophisticated search will take ten seconds, most searches take less than three seconds.
I saved one of the best tabs for last: Hot. This tab displays any NEO folder that you have marked as hot. Have a correspondent that you want to monitor closely? Mark the correspondent’s folder under the Correspondent tab as hot and it will appear under the Hot tab. Mark the Today folder under the Date tab, the Active folder under the Status tab or one of the saved folders under the Search tab as hot and each will appear under the Hot tab. The Hot tab is the default tab that opens when you start NEO.
NEO is an awesome tool for managing email.
I will discuss news aggregators (I use NewsGator) and search engines (I rely mostly on Google and Scopeware) in future articles at KM Blogger.
