Quick Tip: Efficiently Manage Your Email

If you are anything like me you process most information through your email inbox. Reminders, tasks and requests flow into my mail client at an incredible rate and traditionally I’ve used an elloborate filing system to process it.

After reading (and then re-reading) David Allen’s Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity it dawned on me my futile attempt to manage it this way was utter madness.

Here is my simple email process as it now stands.

1. Do the action for anything that will take 2 mins or less.
2. Create a new task and define the next step (important!) from each email that needs action.
3. Create a new task as a reminder for anything that can be deferred until a suitable time.
4. Forward anything that needs someone else to action and delete it immediately (trust others).
5. File anything that you may want to pick up in the future but don’t have time for at the moment.
6. File anything else under clients or suppliers, don’t use sub folders as a good search tool will find any specific email you may need in the future.
7. Delete everything else.

Ongoing and this is important, review tasklists from no.2 and no.3 daily and do, file or delete as above. Monitor folder created from no.5 on a monthly basis.

I’ve not had an empty inbox since 1994 and now it is. I’ve even gone as far as archiving all email that is older than 6 months and I now have a happy, clean and manageable mailbox. Reducing stress of it being there and the backup requirements on our infrastructure.

I’m off to tell our clients.

Theme Building Made Easy (Nearly)

We’ve enjoyed working with Drupal and WordPress to provide a range of client websites.  Both tools cover most of the requirements for content management (CMS) that you are ever likely to need. They are mature products and the community support is excellent.

Themes or templates (whatever you like to call them) usually take the most time and as a non-designer it can take even longer. I was excited to see recently the buzz surrounding a new product called Artisteer which made claims to easily generate themes for both Drupal and WordPress alongside the other well deployed CMS Joomla. I was a little skeptical as well if I am honest, having been a developer of websites for nearly 15 years I’ve tried many website generator products that simply failed to live up to the purpose they were designed for. It didn’t take long, 10 minutes and my faith had grown in Artisteer exponentially. It is suprisingly simple to use and does exactly what it says on the tin.

To get you started Artisteer lets you choose your CMS and then will automatically make a suggestion layout for you. You can then use the ‘Ideas’ menu to make some more quick suggestion changes to colours, fonts, layout and background. It then also has CMS specific suggestion options such as header, blocks, buttons, menus and so on.

Once you have a reasonable layout you can then delve deeper into the menu system to modify your base layout and brand a theme for your specific needs. I am not going to go into major detail as you can read about the features on the Artisteer website but you can trust me when I say that there isn’t much you can’t do with it.

With all the positives there are inevitably aspects of Artisteer that would stop someone with no experience completing the end result to a professional manner that all clients should expect. We are currently working on 7 themes and all so far have required a degree of manual intervention to make things work smoothly. Good skills in CSS are still required and because we have that we are getting some great end products.

Overall Artisteer can help a seasoned developer rapidly produce a theme that can be modified to suit far quicker than building one from scratch or using an existing theme as a starting block. This process can save many hours which in my opinion is well worth the $130 license fee.

Artisteer has become a instant friend of Intelligenta and being a stickler for the rules of the web I was pleased to see my first theme passed the W3C validators with flying colours….Impressive!

(We will update this post with examples as they are finished and signed off)

Fresh? We hope so!

Many of our clients have Intelligenta services on a monthly basis. This is a traditional approach that IT service providers take and one that can get out of hand easily. The usual monthly question, ‘Why hasn’t Joe Bloggs Inc paid yet’ resulted in the usual discovery that Joe Bloggs Inc hadn’t received their invoice. Clients are funny like that, not paying invoices they haven’t received.

I spent 5 months in Brisbane last year on the approach to my wedding and then several months after waiting for a visa so my wife and I could return home. During this time in between my reduced input to client work I thought best to discover a new way for Intelligenta to manage billing. Not an easy task as it seems as there are literally hundreds of different applications all of which are offer a different level of features with licenses that range from free to several ££££. Some of these applications were great but overly complicated, some fell short and others made my laptop break. Overall it wasn’t a very satisfying venture.

Last month I read a great post from the Business Opportunites Weblog recommending some tools for startups. One of these tools happened to be Freshbooks a leading provider of online invoicing. So finally at the beginning of this week after waiting eagerly for a month I decided it was time to give Freshbooks a go.

Easy to sign up, a simple interface that is fully brandable, this is definitely a good start indeed. After quickly working my way around the interface reviewing the features and settings it didn’t take me long to get that this might fit our requirements perfectly. I also suspect that Freshbooks is built on Rails which gives it an extra gold star.

You can create and store clients, products or services for multiple use (write once, read many) and once these are setup you can begin invoicing. As the majority of our clients are monthly we will make good use of the recurring invoices feature. The whole process from start to finish was quick, easy and not in the least bit painful (goodbye mailmerge).

Even though we have only been using Freshbooks for a few days now we can already see the huge benefits of the estimate feature too. This allows us to either create and track a new quote for a client or to simply store ad-hoc products and services ready for easy invoice generation at the beginning of the month (goodbye spreasheets).

Early days I know but based on our initial impression we didn’t hesitate to pay for a subscription and with all monthly billing setup to automatically generate invoices at the beginning of the month our hopes are high. In July we may even set them to send automatically too and just wait until we start using the timesheet feature.

Signup and try and Freshbooks today we have and I’m excited to see what happens on the 1st June.

Three, Two, One….Zimbra

Asking a client to be a guinea pig is never easy. You can understand the reluctance particularly when it threatens the fundamental communication tool for their business. That said we’ve built an exceptional level of trust over the past 7 years and we came to an agreement to push forward with our proposal and so in December 2008 we saw our first Zimbra customer.

Moving an email system is not without risk but we carefully worked with the existing MS Exchange supplier to make the transfer as smooth as possible. Zimbra has a great MS Exchange migration tool and PST importer which helped significantly and as the data moved overnight the client woke to a new morning on a new system with most of the users unaware that the change had even taken place.

Inevitably as the morning progressed we get a few issues popping up. First one…where are my Outlook Notes? Huh? Outlook Notes….? Who on earth uses those? Well apparently the big boss of the client does. Oops and double oops we think as a quick search reveals that the Zimbra Outlook Connector doesn’t support notes! The team at Zimbra obviously has the same approach to Outlook Notes we do and it simply turns the notes folder into empty mail folders on import. Still not to be beaten at the first hurdle we devise a cunning plan of restoring them to Outlook as notes and using a simple Outlook backup plugin we secure their future…happy boss, happy us!

Lunchtime, all of the missed permissions during the transfer for shared calendars and inboxes are back in place and all seems well. Well until big snag no. 2! It seems that the Outlook integration with the client’s CRM is causing issues by locking the offline Zimbra mail file and causing Outlook to go blank. It only happens on 2 or 3 of the machines and NEVER in testing so we are a little confused. After a lot of digging around we discover that Outlook and the CRM talk to each other in a couple of different ways, one works (and in our opinion the correct way of doing things but we would say that wouldn’t we?) and the other doesn’t. Calm is restored and….relax.

And so the day passes and the next, so with very few issues the client is happy and so are we. Zimbra is an exciting product, easily the best alternative to MS Exchange in our humble opinion. Threatened a little by the Microsoft/Yahoo! takeover we really do hope that they sort the public license out for this as soon as possible to allow forks should the ‘bad thing’ happen. With exciting developments on the mobile edition, a Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and the best Ajax webmail client we’ve seen things are looking good for Zimbra.