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You hear a lot of comparison between companies. Google will beat Microsoft, or Microsoft will devastate Google. Twitter will become the New Google, or the New Facebook, or the New Media. Yahoo will become the New Yahoo. You get the idea. But there are two things that become obvious when you think a moment. One is that all these companies are juggling for a future business landscape dominated by communications. The other is that they’re all trying to fit a complex issue into their own undersized boxes.

Look at some of the tools either available today or that are currently being touted:

Google has introduced Wave that allows users to add others into an ongoing collaborative conversation incorporating email, real-time chat, and concurrent rich format text, photos, gadgets, and information feeds from the web.

Twitter offers real-time communications from one person to any number that might want to listen, extended to greater numbers using hash tags.

Facebook and LinkedIn allow someone to invite extended networks of people, share messages, photos, video, links, and other forms of information.

Blogs on any of a number of platforms allow people to write for an audience that can subscribe through a number of ways, drop in casually, or even stumble across the blog.

But as powerful and useful as some of these tools can be, they only address some of the communications needs that present themselves. A little more thought suggests a number of communication goals that people might want to achieve:

Decide on whether to communicate one-to-one, one-to-several, one-to-many, one-to-very-many (full broadcast), several-to-several, or many-to-many.

Choose whether communications happen synchronously or asynchronously, so all the people involved may participate as they wish on their own time, or all connect at the same time.

Pick any combination of writing, audio, images, video, applications, or masses of data.

Allow one party to do the communication and others to receive, limited participation for some of the audience, full participation for any of the audience, or any degree of participation and interaction for all parties.

Use any combination of communication mediums, including computers, handsets, specialty devices like e-book readers, broadcast radio and television, satellite radio and television, and Internet connectivity.

The list is varied because we’ve had everything from letters to telegraph to telephone (including party lines) and television and radio and the web. And as communications have developed, the interplay of these different needs evolves on a number of scales. I may want to listen to someone’s produced entertainment and not want to spend extra money for on-demand access. I might feel like watching a ball game with friends. It could be that I want to write something and let other people read it in print. Or I could use the paradoxically ephemeral and permanent form of online publishing. The point is that people and companies have different needs for different times, and no single tool is capable of satisfying all of them.

That is why the talk of “killer apps” or one company’s offering being the be-all-and-end-all is poppycock. None of them can do everything, and to insist that Twitter can be the new media or that Wave replaces all simple email and messaging or that broadcast is dead is short-sighted. There will continue to be developments and invention. Bright people will find additional ways to incorporate features and capabilities. But to say that one tool will supplant all others and server everyone’s needs? Might as well get your degree in physics, hold your breath, and wait for a unified field theory to be proven beyond all doubt.

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Marketers are quickly learning—if they don’t already know—that the more targeted their e-mail content is, the higher the likelihood that their messages will be opened and read. Many looking to increase their e-mail relevance quotient may turn to dynamic content as a panacea. There are several stumbling blocks, however, that can trip up even the most seasoned e-mail veteran. Derek Harding, founder and CEO of digital marketing company Innovyx Inc., explained the biggest problems in a successful dynamic content program and how you can get around them:

You have dirty data. This problem certainly isn’t new. Online and offline marketing campaigns suffer if databases are dirty or incomplete. However, the problem is intensified for those using database records to create dynamic newsletter content, Harding said. “If you have data that’s incomplete or wrong, you’re going to end up sending dynamic messages that are mistargeted or contain the wrong content,” he said. The fix is no surprise: Clean your database at least once a month. Another important step is to implement integrity rules so it’s harder to make mistakes. “If you’re targeting an industry, create a preset list that people have to choose from,” he said. “There could be 12 different ways to say someone works in finance. A human might look at a group of titles and have no idea if the person is in finance or should be getting, for instance, stories about manufacturing.”

You underestimate budgetary needs. Depending on how many stories you’d like to provide, it can be very expensive to create dynamic, content-filled newsletters. Marketers decide that they want to slice and dice their lists by tens or hundreds of categories, but they forget that each of those categories may need unique content. There’s no easy fix, Harding said. Your best bet is to start small, segmenting your list based on product interest or broad industry categories. “You might get excited and think you’re going to target all these users, but you lose track of the fact that you’re marketing to make money and drive revenue growth,” he said.

You don’t do the right kind of testing. Marketers want to make sure the content that goes out is spelled correctly and renders well, but with dynamically generated content, they should be equally as worried about how a reader’s hand-raising is going to affect the look and read of the newsletter, Harding said. “You need to test the boundary conditions. What happens if someone’s profile doesn’t match any of your target segments and they don’t get any stories? What happens if someone’s profile means they are going to match all 20 of your segments, and they are now going to get 58 stories? You should check each story for spelling and grammar, but then check the upper and lower levels of variants and how having those upper and lower levels affect the newsletter design,” he said.

You never asked recipients to give you demographic data to begin with. Maybe your database is made up of names of people who entered a contest at a trade show. Maybe it comprises people who signed up—using an e-mail address and a name—for a white paper. Without additional information, you might not be able to provide truly personalized content. Harding suggests letting your list know that you’re going to send a dynamic newsletter and asking them to provide what you think are the top five or 10 most relevant pieces of identifying information. Also, keep in mind that you can ask people for that information in incremental steps. And if they don’t want to provide any additional information? “Make sure you’re still generating a generic newsletter for those people who don’t have any data matching up,” he said.

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Gmail is far and away the best online email management system out there right now. But a lot of people still use it like a regular email service, never touching some of its power-features that can really help with email overload. So Google launched a new Tips area of the site today to serve as a reference point for how to become what it calls a “Gmail Ninja.”

It breaks the tips down into “White belt,” “Green belt,” “Black belt,” and “Gmail master,” based on your level of expertise. While the White and Green belt stuff is mostly for neophytes, there are some good tips in there that you may have forgotten along the way while using Gmail. The later belts are the ones that contain some of the good stuff though, particularly some of the big keyboard and search shortcuts, that I always forget to use.

Google has also made a PDF version of the list for you to print out and “pin to your wall,” which would undoubtedly draw a lot of ridicule, but could be useful. And if you really want to be ridiculed, if you’re one of the first 1,024 to fill out a form on this site, you’ll get a laminated version of the guide for free. If you miss out, you can still buy one for $1.25, which would bring yet more ridicule.

Here’s an overview of the tips:

White Belt

Use stars to indicate a note is special.
Reply by chat.
Organize your email with labels.
Clean up your inbox using “Move to” — it works just like folders.
Search your mail instead of sorting.
Archive messages to tidy up your inbox without deleting anything.
Import your email and contacts from your old address.
Spice up your inbox with a theme.
Join forces to rid the world of spam.
Green Belt

Talk face-to-face with video chat.
Use Tasks as a handy to-do list.
Use filters to control the flow of incoming mail.
Highlight important emails using filters and colored labels.
Send email from your phone.
Preview attachments without downloading them.
Avoid email gaffes with Undo Send.
Tell your friends what you’re up to with a status message.
Never forget an attachment again.
Tell everyone when you’ll be back with vacation responder.
Nothing says “I’m excited” like a bouncing happy face emoticon.
Black Belt

Get through your mail faster with keyboard shortcuts.
Use search operators to find the exact message you’re looking for.
Filter your email with personalized email addresses.
See which messages were sent right to you.
Make Gmail go where the internet doesn’t.
Quickly add multiple attachments to an email.
Add “(EOM)” to the subject of one-liner messages.
Set up canned responses instead of typing the same reply over and over again.
Click less and watch more using YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp previews.
Use quick links to get anywhere in Gmail with one click.
Send and archive in one step.
Gmail Master

Bring Google Calendar and Docs to Gmail.
Send SMS text messages right from Gmail.
Forget to sign out of a public computer? Sign out remotely.
Personalize your RSS feeds in web clips.
Access your mail via https.
Search for superstars by name.
Use Gmail on your own domain.

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is launching Xiant, a software company that helps people organise their email accounts. The company’s first product, which is still being tested, is an add-on to Microsoft Outlook called Xiant Filer.

Xiant suggests where mail should be stored based on previous filing preferences, instead of requiring users to write filing instructions in Outlook. Xiant spokesman David Postman explains: “You just right-click and it suggests where it thinks you might want to file it. The more you do it, the more it learns those things.”
The product was originally designed for Allen himself. His investment company, Vulcan Technologies, claims that Allen asked his developers to come up with an email management system for his over-crowded inbox. It says the product worked so well he decided to turn it into commercial venture.

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Wednesday morning, the world is sending tweets of dissatisfaction to Microsoft over Outlook 2010’s poor display capabilities. The Email Standards Project — a group dedicated to improving Web standards support and accessibility in e-mail — has started a grassroots Twitter campaign asking Microsoft to improve the way Outlook 2010 will render HTML-based e-mail. Currently, Outlook 2010 is being tested in private beta.

The group’s online headquarters is the Website fixoutlook.org, which tracks the number of people joining ESP’s campaign to lobby Microsoft. The site also features a link to let you get in on the action. By clicking on “Have Your Say Now,” the site opens up your Twitter profile with a message directed at the Microsoft Office Twitter account: “Wow! @msofficeus is breaking HTML e-mail by using Word to display emails in Outlook 2010. See fixoutlook.org and RT.” If you include the fixoutlook URL, your Twitter profile picture will be displayed on the campaign Website.

Logic of the Campaign

If you’re an Outlook user, then you’ve probably noticed that any e-mail you receive containing images and other design elements looks completely different in Outlook than it does when you see it online or in another e-mail client. That’s because Microsoft has, since the release of Office 2007, tied Outlook to Microsoft Word’s HTML rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer’s. Microsoft says its primary reason for doing this was to let Outlook users take advantage of Microsoft Word’s editing and formatting capabilities. But that meant Outlook lost its capability to properly interpret e-mail messages based on HTML.

This can be problematic, because many large and small businesses use design templates to send out newsletters, advertisements, bills, and other notices by e-mail. Since these templates are based on the same design standards as a Web page, it would make sense to use a Web browser’s rendering engine to display these messages — something that Outlook did before Office 2007. The result of not using IE’s rendering engine is that any e-mail with background images, specifically placed headlines, or side panels doesn’t look the way its designer intended when displayed in Outlook. Take a look at this picture comparing an HTML-based e-mail in Outlook 2000 and in Outlook 2010 to see the difference (click the image to enlarge it).

Microsoft’s decision to tie Outlook to Word is very shortsighted, according to ESP, since Outlook 2007 has only a 7 percent market share among e-mail clients. So while Microsoft Word’s capabilities may augment the experience for Outlook-to-Outlook users, it handicaps anyone trying to open a Outlook-created e-mail with other e-mail clients like Mozilla’s Thunderbird or Apple’s Mail.

Outlook 2010 Beta be Better

Microsoft Office 2010 products, including Outlook, are currently in an invite-only beta testing phase. Redmond often allows the general public to participate in its beta testing phase, but decided against this strategy for Office 2010.

It’s unclear how many people are testing Outlook, but when it announced Office 2010’s beta phase, Microsoft said the test group would include thousands of users.

Despite its smaller beta group, Microsoft may get more feedback about Outlook 2010 than it bargained for. At the time of this writing, ESP’s Twitter campaign has registered well over 10,000 tweets and is growing fast.

Office 2010 is slated to hit stores in the first six months of next year, and will come in 32- and 64-bit versions.

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Microsoft’s decision to change the rendering engine in its Outlook mail client from HTML to the Word rendering engine back in 2007 wasn’t one of its most popular moves. In fact, there are still more than a few Outlook users who are hoping against hope that an online campaign might result in Microsoft backtracking with Outlook 2010 and going back to HTML rendering.

Microsoft’s response: Outlook isn’t broken and Outlook 2010 will include the Word rendering engine, just like Outlook 2007 does.

The Outlook team posted its response to the Twitter-based campaign designed to convince the company to go back to the HTML rendering default on the Outlook Team blog on June 24. From that post:

“First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages.”

The post, authored by William Kennedy. Corporate Vice President of the Office Communications and Forms Team, goes on to say that there is no consensus in the industry around which subset of HTML would be appropriate for e-mail. He blogged:

“There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The ‘Email Standards Project’ does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products.”

Microsoft reiterated the reasons it moved from HTML to Word for e-mail rendering in athis white paper.

What do you say, Outlook users? Do you think Microsoft is right in sticking with Word as the default e-mail rendering engine for Outlook 2010?

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June 23, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under guest posts

Note from Phil: E-mail is a tough beast to overcome, and it is a constant struggle for me to keep up with all the e-mails I get each day. So rather than just me talking about it, I thought I’d bring in an expert to share HIS tactics on making e-mail work.

Convert Your E-mails Into What They REALLY Are To Find Your E-mail “Sanity”

Guest article from Randy Dean, The “Totally Obsessed” Time Management Guy and E-mail Sanity Expert
E-mail is an amazing communications tool. You can send files, information, tasks, and more in almost-real-time to just about anyone with a valid e-mail address globally. But many people are struggling with e-mail overload and overwhelm these days, and from my consulting and training on the topic, I think I’ve figured out part of the reason why: people are keeping their information in e-mail format rather than converting those e-mails into what they really are: information, tasks, calendar events, and/or contacts.

Most of the time, an e-mail is a delivery mechanism for a piece of valuable information and/or a task. The person is sending you information via e-mail to “inform” you of something you need to know. Sometimes this information is directly relevant to an existing client, project, co-worker, etc. In these situations, if there is no action – it is simply knowledge to keep for later use and reference, then the prescribed action is to file that information. Get it OUT of your inbox, and get it into a proper subfolder or archival folder location. Then, you won’t keep looking at that e-mail over and over again to remind yourself you didn’t have an action you needed to complete – out of sight, out of mind (until of course you need to reference it later.)

Oftentimes, it isn’t just information you are receiving – you also have some form of task or deliverable you are expected to do because you received the e-mail (and sometimes you receive multiple tasks per e-mail.) In this case, convert the e-mail to a task (or tasks). In MS Outlook, this is most easily done by selecting the e-mail via a single left click, holding the click, and then “dragging” the e-mail to the Task function icon (to the left), and “dropping” the e-mail on the Tasks icon. This will auto-launch a new task in MS Outlook, with the task being titled the subject line of the e-mail (and the full text of the e-mail being in the open note area at the bottom of the task. Note: most commercial e-mail programs offer some other way of doing this – possibly via a “right click” rather than a “drag & drop”). Usually, the subject line of the e-mail isn’t really the task you need to do – you have to quickly overwrite the title of the task with the actual task you need to complete, and then set up the other information (due date, status, category, etc.) But using the drag & drop capabilities in Outlook to create a new task from an e-mail literally takes seconds, and once you’ve done this, you no longer need that e-mail in your inbox – you can file it into a subfolder as mentioned above and/or just delete it (that of course assumes you don’t have multiple tasks in that single e-mail. If you have multiple tasks, “drag & drop” one time for each and every task until all tasks are accounted for in your task list.)

Of course, sometimes your e-mails actually are an invitation to a meeting or event, and/or contain information on a valuable new personal or professional contact. If that is the case, MS Outlook also allows you to “drag & drop” to the Calendar and/or Contacts functions, using the same left-click & hold, drag & drop routine mentioned above. You can quickly create new calendar items and contacts – usually in a matter of seconds – with virtually no typing (especially if you cut & paste from the sender’s e-mail signature when creating a new contact).

By converting your e-mails into what they really are – information, tasks, calendar items, and/or contacts (and yes, some e-mails are actually several of these in one), you no longer need to keep those e-mails in your inbox. You can then stop re-reading your messages over and over trying to figure out what you need to do, and start administering your tasks, information, calendar items, and contacts in a significantly more efficient and productive manner. Best of luck taming that e-mail beast!

About the author: Randy Dean, the “E-mail Sanity” Expert, is a popular speaker and trainer on time and e-mail management for major corporations, federal agencies, top universities, and national conferences. He is the author of the new book, Taming the E-mail Beast: 45 Key Strategies for Better Managing Your E-mail Overload (Sortis Publishing, 2009), which is launching right now on Amazon.com (learn more at http://www.TamingEmailBook.com.) You can learn more about Randy and his speaking/training programs at http://www.emailsanityexpert.com and http://www.randalldean.com .)

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SOUTH BEND — Police are warning area residents about an email scam that has resulted in a “flurry of telephone inquiries” to their department.

An email is circulating that looks to be from DHL Worldwide Delivery, according to Capt. Phil Trent. The email indicates a package containing $250,000 in U.S. currency is awaiting delivery to the recipient. All that is needed is $150 and your address and phone number, according to the email.

Most of these types of scams are from offshore sources and contain spelling and/or grammatical mistakes, Trent explained.

While this particular scam references DHL, there are several other variations circulating, Trent added, and police have received a high volume of complaints over the past month.
Police urge you to refrain from clicking on any links within the emails and recommend you delete them immediately.

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Microsoft applauded the momentum of its Live@edu as 14 new Universities from around the world decided to embrace the Cloud-based email service for their students, faculty, staff and alumni. In excess of 200,000 students worldwide will now have potential access to the suite of online services that are integral components of Microsoft Live@edu. With Live@edu, the Redmond-based company is offering organizations in educational systems in markets around the world free access to no-charge communication and collaboration services.

“Our goal with Live@edu is to equip the next generation of leaders with a rich set of productivity and collaboration tools as they move from campus to business environments,” explained Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of the Office Product Management Group at Microsoft Corp. “It is exciting to see students, educators and IT administrators choosing Live@edu to enrich the learning experience and to prepare students for future success.”

Microsoft welcomes aboard Live@edu the Washington State University, the University of Sydney, Australia, the Alexandria University, Egypt, and no less than 11 universities in Sri Lanka. Via Live@edu, Microsoft offers Universities Cloud-based email, collaboration and storage services that are intimately connected with the company’s on-premise solutions. In this regard, customers have access to Office Outlook Live, Office Live Workspace, Windows Live Messenger, and Windows Live SkyDrive.

“The Live@edu service met all our internal IT requirements and offers functionality that the university’s system could not compete with. Our students now have the advantage of a greatly increased mailbox capacity as well as the option to have an e-mail account for life,” revealed Bruce Meikle, chief information officer at the University of Sydney. “In addition to these student benefits, the IT department now has an easy-to-manage and scalable e-mail service that will help take the university into the future.”

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he U.S. Army will allow soldiers at bases in the United States to access Web-based personal e-mail and some social media and networking Internet sites — including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr — from military computers.

Army officials hope the new policy will bring consistency to an often-conflicting patchwork of regulations, orders and rules for users of Army computers.

The orders were issued last month “to address inconsistent Web-filtering standards” on different Army computer systems, Stephen Bullock, spokesman for the Armys 7th Signal Command, told The Washington Times.

Previously, network managers at different Army installations effectively set their own policies about access to the networking sites.

“These are sites that soldiers are encouraged to use to get the Army message out. The Army has a presence on these sites. … There is no reason to block them,” Mr. Bullock said.

The order covers systems under the operational control of the 7th Signal Command, Mr. Bullock said. Systems run by the Army National Guard, for instance, would not be covered.

In addition to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, the bookmarking site Delicious and the video-sharing site Vimeo are also covered. The Army has a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and its own channel on Vimeo.

Mr. Bullock said other social-networking and media sites, including MySpace, PhotoBucket and YouTube, will remain off-limits under a Department of Defense order issued two years ago.

The May 2007 order blocked access on all U.S. military computers to 12 social-networking and media sites.

Timothy Madden, spokesman for a task force involved in Pentagon computer policy, said the earlier order was issued “to maximize the availability of [computer network] resources to support Department of Defense missions.”

“You can pick up a newspaper any day and read about the negative consequences of social media sites,” Mr. Madden said, adding that issues for the military included operational security and the possible transmission of malicious software.

“The Global Information Grid is a war-fighting platform,” said Mr. Madden, referring to the Pentagon’s worldwide computer network. “We have a responsibility to make sure it is available.”

Some observers see the policies as inconsistent, if not incoherent.

The military is “schizophrenic” in its attitude toward the Internet, said defense technology writer Noah Schachtman, who first reported the Armys new policy on his blog for Wired.com.

“There are elements in the military that are really warming up to social media,” he said. “Several senior officers are dipping a toe into the blogging business.”

Some in the military are concerned about the possible use of interactive Web sites by hostile intelligence agencies.

At a Department of Defense conference last month in Florida, two representatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency made a presentation showing how information from LinkedIn, a professional-networking site, and other Web sites could be used to help a foreign intelligence service build up a target list for its spies.

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