As a fan of kitten videos, I’m often embarrassed by my inability to attach said videos to emails I’m trying to send the rest of my local chapter of American Society Of Kitten Video Lovers (ASKVL). While 50MB may seem small to some (and it’s a file barely big enough to hold a kitten video let alone a video of a kitten and and a baby monkey), it’s enormous for some mail systems. In the end, I have to use Dropbox or SugarSync to share the video with my intended recipient, adding an unwanted step in my kitten video sharing experience. It’s enough to make me cry uncontrollably into my Lemon Zinger tea mug!
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ou may be tired of hearing about task managers, but Producteev is a task management service worth writing home about. Few people enjoy using complicated product, task or CRM managers, so Producteev has built a solution with a user-friendly interface that is channel agnostic, and even adds a bit of gaming mechanics. Producteev is a workable alternative to solutions like Basecamp, though the space will surely be keeping a close eye on Dustin Moskovitz’s Asana. → Read More
In November 2009, when Microsoft announced the release of the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010, the company also introduced an entirely new add-on for its Outlook product that we haven’t heard a peep about since. That’s about to change soon.
The product, dubbed Outlook Social Connector, essentially aims to make Outlook more social by integrating streams from Windows Live and third-party networks directly into the widely used communication app and its familiar interface, among other features that will enhance the functionality of Outlook and other Microsoft products. → Read More
Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.
Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics. → Read More
At the start of this year’s TechCrunch50 conference, last year’s TechCrunch50 winner, Yammer, is making a significant announcement about a partnership with Microsoft. Yammer, a micro-messaging tool for enterprises (TechCrunch uses it), is releasing a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and an app for Windows Mobile phones. Yammer is also joining Microsoft BizSpark, a program that encourages startups to build on their software.
Yammer, which recently launched a “likes” feature, threaded conversations and a new push-enabled iPhone app, is rolling out “Yammer For Outlook,” a Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 plug-in that afford users much of the same functionality as Yammer desktop app. From a secure, separate pane within the Office client, Yammer users can post status updates, view feeds, reply to messages, upload attachments, send messages to Yammer groups, and invite colleagues. → Read More
While it is pretty much the standard email client, Microsoft Outlook has long had problems rendering HTML correctly in emails. And the latest version, Outlook 2010, due sometime in the next several months, doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better — and it actually may be worse. And a lot of users aren’t happy about it at all.
A group of people apparently felt strongly enough to create a site called Outlook’s broken — Let’s fix it. The site is simple, it’s a constantly updating stream of users tweeting out their desire for Microsoft to fix this problem with Outlook. Right now, it’s just about 6,000 tweets, but it’s growing about a tweet every second (even at this hour of the night here in the U.S.). When a new tweet comes in, that user’s icon appears on the screen next to hundreds of other icons that had previously tweeted about it. And as the stream updates, random tweets about fixing Outlook are flashed on the screen. → Read More
Webmail in the educational market appears to be a three horse race between Zimbra, Gmail and Outlook/Microsoft Exchange. And today, Yahoo’s Zimbra won out against the other two in a bid to provide for Stanford University. This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in “.edu”. We hear the contest to sign Stanford was particularly heated, and in the end, Google had less luck than when it won the chance to conduct the biggest deployment of Gmail to date across Australian schools. Zimbra may have won out at Stanford for its particularly strong mobile support (with ActiveSync), as well as its synchronization and administrative functionality. It also boasts certain enterprise-friendly features that Gmail has yet to offer. More information about this roll out can be found on Stanford Report. CrunchBase Information Zimbra Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
In news that certainly is not making the existing RSS Aggregator companies happy, Microsoft Outlook program manager Michael Affronti has soft announced that RSS will be integrated with Outlook 12. This will not only hurt the NewsGators and Attensas of the RSS space (those that have Outlook plugins to display RSS feeds). It will also impact Bloglines and others as users inevitably move their reading habits to the email client. The ability to drag stories right into subject folders, that may or may not contain emails as well, is just too useful to ignore (and that’s why I liked Yahoo’s integration of RSS with email so much a few weeks ago). Robert Scoble also wrote about this, and brings up a very important point. Users want RSS in many different ways (mobile, web when they are away from their home computer, etc.). Syncronization is extremely important and this may be the niche that allows existing players to survive. And I also agree with Robert when he says that RSS integration with Outlook will get millions more people using RSS. → Read More
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