by Boyd on August 18, 2010
Apple’s built-in Mail client is great for most users “as is”, but some small business operators may want additional functionality and features. Staying organized, managing your email and Getting Things Done can all be more efficient by adding features through Mail’s plugin architecture. Here are a few of our favorite tools:
MsgFiler
This is a small, popular plugin that offers pretty much everyone a quick boost to workflow efficiency. It only does one thing — with a single keystroke you can bring up a window to quickly file messages into any one of your mail folders. Believe it or not, this is a huge timesaver compared to drag and drop, especially when you’re working on a laptop and have that trackpad to contend with instead of a mouse.
Unlike Mail’s built-in smart mailboxes functionality, which allows you to view your email based on certain criteria, MsgFiler lets you file any selected messages quickly and easily. The plugin is shareware — your $8 purchase price removes the initial alert when using the application.
Mail Act-On
Mail allows you to define rules that are applied when a message is received. Mail Act-On takes email management a step further — by allowing you to define keystroke combinations that will perform any action you’ve defined on a particular message. Do you regularly forward messages to an assistant or colleague? Move messages to an application such as OmniFocus? Post them on a company website? Log them into a trouble ticket system? With Mail Act-On you can automate any of these actions (and any others you can dream up) with a single keystroke. This is great for GTD and “Inbox Zero” adherents who maintain ACTION and ARCHIVE folders and invariably assign emails to one or the other as they read them. It’s easy to set up without getting a programmer involved, and the developer offers lots of great tutorials. Mail Act-On is free for 30 days and then $24.95 to register.
MailTags
If you’ve ever appreciated the ability of Outlook or Entourage to associate messages with projects, add comments and other tags to email messages, you’ll love the MailTags plugin. Offered by the same developer as Mail Act-On, this plugin easily and efficiently allows you to tag messages with projects, comments, etc., and to find your added metadata with Spotlight. You can add reminders, contexts (great for GTD) and due dates, then create smart mailboxes for any of the tags you’ve created. Mail Tags will also automatically apply tags from earlier messages when you get new emails in the same thread. It integrates with EagleFiler, OmniFocus and DevonThink so that when you move a message into one of those applications the tags remain in place. MailTags is free for 30 days and then $29.95 to register.
Bonus Tip
Speaking of email productivity, we wanted to offer one other tip that’s saved us hours. Do you ever deal with clients or vendors whose mail servers keep packaging their messages to you as winmail.dat files? Invariably the solution offered by the client is for you to work with their IT department to get the problem fixed — typically a real time suck. A simple solution? TNEF’s Enough, a little utility that easily decodes these attachments. Simply save the winmail.dat file to your Desktop, launch TNEF’s Enough and open the winmail.dat file from the utility’s File menu. Ta da! You get a readable attachment and don’t have to waste your time pestering your client. TNEF’s Enough is freeware.
More Plugins and Resources
Hawk Wings is a great place to find plugins, tips and other helpful add-ons for Apple Mail. All of the plugins we’ve discussed in this post are listed on this site, as well as many others, all with a nice description of what they do.
Have you found other tools that increase your productivity with Apple Mail? Let us know in the comments!
by Boyd on August 10, 2010
While the use of shared calendars can be a huge benefit to the workflow of small businesses, many options aren’t really a good fit for them. In this post we review some of the options and offer one approach that has worked for many of our clients and may be a good fit for your business as well.
Why Integrate Calendars?
Shared calendars can allow all members of an organization — or a team within an organization — to create, view, edit and share appointments without having to send a flurry of emails and invitations back and forth. If set up properly, a solution can work well with your existing workflow, integrate with a variety of mobile platforms, and allow team members to access the group’s calendars from any location, with any device, and keep the entire team in sync in real time.
This is particularly important when the schedules of multiple users need to be considered — team meetings, client presentations, and appointments that require the presence of another team member. Having access to a shared, up-to-date calendar allows everyone to confidently schedule appointments without having to check with HQ or risk having to reschedule due to conflicts.
Common Approaches and Challenges
It seems that most of our clients interested in shared calendars have tried one of two approaches: Using Apple’s own MobileMe service, or using a program management or CRM solution such as Basecamp or Daylite that include shared calendaring as part of their feature set.
MobileMe, offered by Apple, is a simple solution for wirelessly sharing calendars and other information among multiple devices (such as an iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC). For $100 a year you can keep all of your information in sync.
Many small businesses attempt to use MobileMe to share calendars — by syncing multiple computers and mobile devices to the same account. While economical and practical for personal use, this approach has a number of shortcomings for small businesses:
- Personal vs. Shared Calendars: With MobileMe, it’s all or nothing — you aren’t able to maintain a personal calendar on your computer and share a business calendar with other team members in a read/write format.
- Data Loss: We have seen a number of issues with data loss or corruption when organizations try to sync too many devices with MobileMe.
Solutions such as Basecamp, Daylite and other sophisticated tools undoubtedly offer great options for calendar sharing (and many other great functions for small businesses as well). But for some small businesses these tools include features they simply don’t want — task assignment, project scheduling, collaboration, etc. — and may seem more like using a bazooka when all you need is a flyswatter.
Many of our clients just want a reliable, simple, effective, no-frills option for sharing calendars — one that allows them to maintain their current workflow and use tools their employees already know.
Our Solution: BusyCal by BusyMac.
BusyCal is a simple program that allows you to sync with Google Calendar and share calendars on a LAN. It allows users to maintain their own personal calendars and also share group calendars with their teams. Although it replaces iCal with its own calendar, the interface is virtually identical — making it easy for your employees to make the switch without retraining. It integrates seamlessly with bonjour, iPad/iPhone (via iTunes or MobileMe), offers helpful features such as recurring To-Dos and sticky notes that can be shared with others on your network, and lots of options for customizing fonts, styles and colors.
Hosting the calendars at Google has the added safeguard of ensuring that if any user accidentally deletes a calendar on their local machine, the calendar will still exist in Google Calendars. In fact, calendars can’t be deleted on individual machines, they must be deleted on the Google site. BusyCal also has the ability to automatically back up your calendars on a schedule that you specify, making recovering from accidental appointment deletions refreshingly easy.
How to get started with BusyCal:
- Create one or more free Google Calendar accounts. (You can have everybody share one, but then if you need to exclude a user down the line you’ll need to change the password to restrict access. We usually recommend creating one per user so that you can selectively share/unshare and give everybody customized access to the calendars they need.)
- Back up your existing calendar data and export it in an iCal or CSV format.
- Import your existing calendar data into your Google Calendar account on the Google site. You can also import data from Entourage, Outlook or other calendar applications you may be using.
- Install BusyCal on every user’s machine. Then use its Google Integration function to link it to their Google Calendar account (or the single shared account if you decided to go that route).
- Sync to your Google calendar account.
- BusyCal will now keep your changes — and anyone else’s — up to date. You can access your calendar locally through BusyCal, or on the web in your Google Calendar account. Your iPhone or iPad can interact directly with Google Calendar as well, ensuring that you’re up-to-date no matter where you are. BusyCal will automatically track who last edited a particular appointment.
With BusyCal you can still maintain personal calendars on your own machine that aren’t part of your shared Google Calendar account, and you can still use MobileMe for two-way syncing of your data.
If you want to keep using iCal instead of BusyCal, BusyMac also makes a little program called BusySync that will keep your iCal and Google Calendars up to date without requiring that a particular application has to be open. BusyCal must be open for syncing to take place.
Have you found another shared calendaring approach that works for your business? Please let us know!
