Taglocity bringing Gmail features to Outlook

Taglocity, a company that aims to provide streamlined e-mail services to the enterprise, announced Thursday that the latest release of its add-in for Outlook will bring much of the functionality already offered in Google's Gmail application to Microsoft's e-mail client.

According to the company, Taglocity 2.0 will bring enhanced search, conversation threading, tags, and automation--all features already found in Gmail--to Outlook. The software will allow users to assign an unlimited number of tags to any Outlook item and automate mundane tasks by running actions once tags are set. The company claims that Taglocity 2.0 will be able to turn e-mails into appointments, assign additional tags, or automatically move messages into specified folders.

Perhaps the most important addition to Outlook through Taglocity 2.0 is the ability for users to use one of Gmail's most prominent features: proper conversation viewing. Like Gmail, Taglocity 2.0 will let Outlook users bring up all related e-mails in a single, blog-like chronological order and group all conversations together in search results.

Bringing Gmail features to Outlook is something many users have been asking for. But because they're not coming from Microsoft, it's debatable whether Taglocity 2.0 will improve Outlook usability. Features aside, name recognition means quite a bit in the e-mail business.

[bensobel]

I think that's a bit misleading. In Outlook, a message can be assigned categories which is the same concept as tag. Also the messages can be viewed by conversation in chronological order. I am not sure I understand why Outlook does not provide "proper conversation viewing". Can you elaborate?

[SunFollower]

The main difference between tags and categories is that the tags can have actions easily applied to the mail such as: move to a certain folder, mark as read or unread, create appointment, create task, etc. Tags can also automatically add or remove other tags. The tags can also travel with your email so, when your message is replied to, it will return to you pre-tagged. Another very important difference is that tags can be used with the filter and search features included in Taglocity which are more complete and porwerful than the ones included in Outlook.

[robstak]

Seems like a cool idea. I'll have to try it out later. However, outlook plugins, for me at least, have always just added clutter without good functionality... well see, the threading idea is great!
-dr. karl

[qnet]

Outlook keeps same-subject messages together. A real conversation threat is based on other headers -- even if the subject line changes, the conversation remains tracked.

[dangtrade]

The gmail conversation viewing is convenient at times - I can't see it working in a outlooks existing interface without it getting too messy / cluttered.

How often do you tag emails - i'm more of a 'move to folder' and organiser, as opposed to a tagger who then needs to filter tags to find related email.

I would like to see the Office Ribbon implemented in Outlook though.

[SunFollower]

I work at Taglocity.
I can tell you that it does not make it messy.It keeps Outlook the way you already set it up, but when you select a message and click the conversation viewer button a window pops up with the the message bubbles which you can expand to reveal each message.
If you are an organizer, you will love the tag actions Taglocity has. The tag actions are carried out when you tag the item such as: move to folder, mark as unread, create task, create appointment, attach tags, or remove other tags.
You can use your tags to reduce work, organize and make things easy to find later on.

[bmn_1213]

I was trying to bring gmail features to outlook as well. My new task is helping out the followup functionality. The best so far for that was <a href="http://www.outlooktrackit.com/">Outlook Track-It</a>. Let me know if you have had success with this toolbar. So far it = amazing.

[MatthiasPeters]

Most important to make Outlook like GMail is search speed! You can do that with Lookeen! Here is the link: http://www.lookeen.com!

Matt