Changes You Will Notice in Outlook, After Installation

Color Coded Inbox (Contact Prioritization)

Your Inbox is now color coded, with e-mail from your most important contacts displayed in bright colors. This is a core IMS capability and one of the strong benefits of using IMS. See the next tab on this page for details on how to use that and, if you desire, how to turn it off.

Startup Splash Screen

You'll see a Manage-Your-Now! Special Edition ClearContext IMS splash screen every time you start Outlook now. That way you know you have the new MYN version.

New Toolbars

You will see two new toolbars, one in the main Outlook window, and one inside your Outlook items (like e-mail, tasks, and so on). See the third and fourth tab of this page for details.

New Folders in Folder List

You will see some new folders under the Inbox.

You'll learn later how to use some of these. If you stick with the pure- MYN approach completely however, you will never use most of these; they will work behind the scenes. If you use ClearContext Topics, additional folders will appear here, one for each topic name; that location is settable by the way.

ClearContext Menu

A new menu is added to the main Outlook menu bar called ClearContext. Once opened, here is what you will see:

Nearly all the items on this menu are also found as icons on the toolbars, and those icons are what I usually use when I need the corresponding tool. I'll describe those in the toolbar tabs. Beyond that, there are four unique items on this menu of immediate interest to you:

Inbox Views

This menu (only active when you have the Inbox open) allows you to change various Contact Prioritization views More on this on the next tab.

TWC Inbox Views

This menu (only active when you have the Inbox open) allows you to change to various TWC-MYN specific Inbox views.

Options

Look near the bottom of the menu, and you will see an Options entry. This is where all the configuration and preference controls are. There is a lot there. You'll enter this control when you have specific chores to do. There is no one page that documents the Options dialog, rather, you will need to explore the ClearContext User Guide to find all the ways to use the Options settings, via each of the functional areas in that guide. I'll link into some specific settings in other pages of this guide.

Help and TWC Help

Notice near the bottom the TWC Help entry. That jumps you back to the custom MYN-ClearContext IMS help pages, like this one. The regular Help entry above that goes directly to the ClearContext Corp. site.

Contact Prioritization: The Color-Coded Inbox

What is It?

By now you see the color-coded e-mail in your Inbox, that appeared after installing the software. This is arguably the most useful, non-TWC-MYN feature of the ClearContext software. The brighter colors indicate e-mails from "important" people, and the duller colors are from less important people. Obviously, this can be critical in making sure you see and read your most important mail first. This feature is well documented on this page of the ClearContext Corp. User Guide

Different Views of Contact Priority

Upon installation of the software, a default version of this color-coding is installed that groups mail in the same date-grouped ways as Outlook did before the installation. But you can choose other priority groupings. The best way to do that is to open the ClearContext menu and select the Inbox Views submenu. Some views selectable there, for example, place all mail from your high-priority contacts at the top of your Inbox. Experiment with the various views in that menu to see if any work well for you. See this link into the ClearContext Corp. User Guide for more information.

Turning Color-Coding Off

Some people do not like the color coding and want to turn it off as quickly as possible. No problem. Using the same ClearContext menu, TWC Inbox Views submenu, choose MYN Messages. This puts your Inbox back to a non-color coded view. Messages by the way is the name of the view that normally ships with the Outlook Inbox, and this pretty much matches that. You can also select and change these views using the Advanced Toolbar Current View Selector, as described here. However the list there is complicated.

Read vs. Unread Mail

One reason some people decide to turn off color-coding is that they find it harder to determine which e-mails have been read, and which are unread. If that is why you are considering not using color coding, I encourage you to wait and try the feature for a few days. You will get accustomed to how read and unread mail in different colors look. Also realize you can start using the icon at the left edge of each e-mail; a closed-envelope icon means unread, and an open icon means read.

Main Toolbar

Here is the ClearContext main toolbar.

You can configure what buttons appear on this toolbar. The default toolbar in the MYN version of ClearContext IMS actually has a few buttons removed compared to the regular version of ClearContext. Specifically, the File Msg button and Defer buttons have been removed; that's because those buttons do things that are inconsistent with the MYN system. That said, they can easily be added back in, as I show next.

Adding or Removing Buttons from the ClearContext IMS Toolbar

To add or remove buttons from this toolbar, you do not use the standard MS Office Add or Remove Buttons command. Instead, do this.

Go to the ClearContext menu, choose Options.
Click the Preferences button.
Choose the tab labeled toolbar. You will see the dialog box below.
Use the Add or Remove buttons to build the button list on the right.

The Main Toolbar Buttons

Task

By far, this will be the main button you will use in the MYN system, either from this toolbar, or from the Item Toolbar inside an e-mail message. This button converts (copies) an e-mail into an Outlook Task. This is a core best practice in the TWC-MYN system, and there is a whole chapter (lesson) on it in the book (2nd Ed.), Lesson 7, so expect to use this button a lot.

The beauty of the ClearContext Task button is that in the Task that it creates it copies both the e-mail text and the e-mail as a file attachment. Out-of-box Outlook cannot do that, and this is a very useful feature; in my opinion it is worth the cost of the software alone.

Configuring how the Task button works

Out of the box, this button does not include all the text of a long message; it truncates the text. This saves storage space and scrolling time when finding the attachment. Some people prefer to have all the e-mail text copied into their task (I do). To change that setting, go to the ClearContext menu, choose Options, click the Preferences button, and you'll see the following ClearCOntext IMS Preferences window. Click the Tasks/Appts tab. In that tab select the top check box: Copy entire body of Message, do not truncate older responses, as shown below.

For a full description of how to use this button, study this part of the ClearContext IMS User Guide.

Schedule

Just like the Task button, the Schedule button converts (copies) an e-mail into an Outlook Calendar item. Note that the setting made above for the Tasks button also applies to this button.

Topic Button and Topic Drop Down Field

These two adjacent tools are the primary ways to assign a ClearContext Topic to an e-mail, for later filing. You can either click the drop down for a quick set (and even type a new topic name into it), or click the Topics button for a more thorough user interface.

The ClearContext Topic filing approach is a parallel universe to the Outlook Categories approach; the latter is discussed (quite completely) in Lesson 8 of the book. See this page in my user guide for a discussion of the two approaches, pros and cons, and how to merge them. And see this page of the ClearContext Corp documentation for a full discussion of Topic filing.

Unsubscribe, Alert, Do Not Disturb, Dashboard Buttons

These are all good features MYN users will want to use; the ClearContext Corp documentation covers these well:

http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/unsubscribe.html

http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/alerts.html

http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/do_not_disturb.html

http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/dashboard.html

Item Toolbar

This is the ClearContext toolbar that appears within Outlook items like e-mail, tasks, and so on. The appearance of this toolbar depends on whether you have Outlook 2007 or not, and it depends on whether you are working within an e-mail item or not.

If you are using Outlook 2007 it has the new Ribbon look. Here is how the ClearContext tab of an e-mail item looks:

If you are using versions prior to Outlook 2007, there are two toolbars added to the top of an e-mail item:

Non-e-mail Items

If you are in a non-email item, a much reduced toolbar is available. In 2007 is is under the Messages Ribbon tab. In prior versions only one of the toolbars above is added, and with fewer items.

The Buttons

As you can see, the buttons in the e-mail versions match well across the two versions, they just look different.

These buttons also map cleanly to the Main Toolbar, so go to the previous tab of this page to see links into documentation for these. The advantage of placing these toolbars here inside the Outlook item is that without these you'd need to close the item and select the mail item in the Inbox list before you could use the main toolbar, so having these toolbars inside the item saves time. This is particularly true for the Task button.

Also note that a few buttons on these item toolbars are not on the main toolbar, as covered next.

Followup Msg Button

One very important button not on the main toolbar, but here, is the Followup Msg button. A TWC-MYN best practice is to create follow-up tasks for loose-end items you are waiting on. One place many of these come from is when you send a message and expect to be waiting for a reply. This follow-up task will remind you to chase the recipient after a certain length of time. You can create these by hand per pg 136 in the book; however using the ClearContext Followup Msg button gives you a better, one-step way to create these. See pg. 141 for a brief discussion. Also see this link for more on the how the button works.

Priority Button

Another button here that is not in the main toolbar is the Priority button. This allows you to change the ClearContext Contact Priority for the sender of this e-mail. This makes their mail stand out more (or less) in the Inbox color coding. For more on this, in the link that follows, find and study the section called Manual Priority Adjustment: http://www.clearcontext.com/user_guide/contacts.html