Outlook - Any Tips on Navigating Your River of Information?

[sehlhorst]

Do people have any outlook-ninja tricks for sorting/parsing/filtering/organizing information that comes in via email?

Specific goals:
• Find all information about a specific topic, say “what do I know about taxes?” or “what do I know about system X”
• Find sub-groups of that information, say “what do I know about taxes in China?”
• Find cross-impacts of information, say “what do I know about the impact of taxes on system X?”

I haven’t been able to make outlook’s search folders work yet, because, for example, the topic “taxes” could be keyed in by ‘sabrix’ or ‘taxes’, and china can be ‘china’ or ‘chk’. And the intersection of ‘taxes’ and ‘china’ is what I need.

Truly, what I need is the generalized ability to find all documents that are relevant to any one (or more) nodes in multiple orthogonal hierarchies.

The only solution I know of so far within outlook is using the catagories capability as ‘tags’. And that falls short of the real need.

Oh Guru, where art Thou?

Scott

[Justin.Burrows]

I use a the two-taloned drunken crane technique of folders and searching.

Talon 1. It has to Hurst if it's to heal.
First, I try to keep my Inbox empty, filing emails in the appropriate folder and using gootodo (http://www.gootodo.com) to capture action items, as described in Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy (http://bitliteracy.com/).

Talon 2. Get your MS Borg Implant (Windows Desktop Search)
I know, I know... But Windows Desktop Search bring with it Outlook Instant Search (http://www.ferris.com/2006/12/07/outlook_2007_ha/), which is on par with Gmail-type searching in terms of response times.

They are both pretty effective email-fu's. But together, they are pretty useful. Especially if you know the general area in which to search. I realize you are looking for a spontaneous generation of topics, but I find the ad hoc method meets my requirements,w hich may be different from yours.

[sehlhorst]

Justin -

I use similar techniques [although I prefer crouching tiger to drunken crane] for ad hoc "I know what I don't know" searches.

I can do a search for taxes AND china to find all of the references that I have.

I'm gunning for the "discover what I don't know I don't know" use case. To do that, I need some pre-organized contextual sets of information, to review for completeness and dependencies.

I use folders too, keeping my inbox empty - that's great advice for anyone. The folders, however, only give me a single hierarchical classification. Even gmail's flat tagging would fall short of what I'm going after. More of a 'browsing' use case, but with the contextual relevance that comes from well defined searches.

[Justin.Burrows]

I see. I was not really that familiar with the abilities of Search Folders (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP073284741033.aspx).

I see where you're going, now. I would totally do yardwork for that.

[sehlhorst]

As it turns out, gmail is a little closer to what I need.

You can set up labels(tags) based on arbitrary terms/filters to autotag incoming emails. For example: any emails with "China" or "CHK" or "Hong Kong" could get flagged with my china label. I could do something similar for "taxes".

Then, you can search your gmail for "label:china label:taxes" and it will give you only those emails that match both tags.

So, this would auto-tag, and if I could only predefine some searches (combining interesting sets of tags), that would get me closer. But still not there. Maybe some form of faceted navigation would help.

Any way to do the autotagging in outlook? Maybe using the categories?

[ddelancey]

I haven't used Outlook in years. I switched, kicking and screaming, to Groupwise, only to find that it's pretty much exactly the same with few exceptions. GW has Find Folders as opposed to Outlook's Search Folders, but they're the same concept. If I'm not mistaken, you need to figure out how to automatically assign categories to items as they come and go, and you want to base that on a predefined set of circumstances. Correct? GW does this with rules - one of the actions available on an item that meets the conditions of a rule is to assign the category (or categories). Once the categories are assigned, then the Find Folders will act on those items. I know that Outlook has rules because I remember using it to set up auto-replies. I don't know if you can assign categories using a rule.

All that to say, can you use rules (for the autotagging) in conjunction with your search folders to get what you want?

[MGoyal]

Hi,

You'd want to set up a Rule in Outlook to assign a Category to incoming emails based on words in the body of the email.

I've used Rules before on Outlook and they work fine for my purposes. I don't remember if there is a simple way to tell which Rules are server vs. client based. I prefer the serve based Rules as they do their thing even when I'm not up and running. (For example, any email that doesn't list me in the "To" header gets automatically moved out of my Inbox to a different folder.)