Simply Use SimplyFile – Inbox Zero Part II

♫  I’ll tell you simply I’m fallin’ for you;
I’ve never felt this way before…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Sara Hickman.

(click image to enlarge)

Continuing our discussion of getting to ‘Inbox Zero’ this second post in the series of posts dealing with email is about SimplyFile – an intelligent add-on to Microsoft Outlook (2007 or 2010).  Of all the ‘tips’ that I put forward doing “60 Tips in 60 Minutes” type presentations, this is the one tip for which I receive the most feedback.  I use it all the time on my PC and I didn’t realize how much I depended on it until our IT department took it away for a bit (they were implementing a document management system and wanted to ensure that everything was working well before starting to reintroduce software).  It is now back on my PC (upgraded to version 3.1) and I am a happy camper once again!

What does it do?

In the words of TechHit:

“SimplyFile is an intelligent filing assistant for Microsoft Outlook. It helps you file email messages in your Outlook folders quickly and efficiently. Due to SimplyFile’s advanced folder prediction technology, one click of a button is all it takes to send a message to the right folder! SimplyFile includes an advanced algorithm, which quickly learns about your filing habits and then starts to predict where you will want to move every message. So after you train SimplyFile for a bit, filing a message to the right folder becomes literally one click – much faster than drag and drop.

If you tried to sort messages into various folders with rules, you know that rules can become complicated and hard to maintain once you have more than a dozen of them. SimplyFile does not require you to maintain any rules. Its algorithm keeps track of messages and folders and does all the work for you. Try it for yourself and you will be pleasantly surprised by how accurate it is!”

I totally agree with those statements…SimplyFile makes dealing with email a breeze..and it saves so much time. There is another benefit – by using SimplyFile to quickly organize and file both incoming and outgoing emails, you can organize all client emails (both in and out) into the same client folder in Outlook.  No more looking thru “Sent” to find something that you did on a client file.

Another tip:  If you use Adobe Acrobat (standard or professional) you can convert all those emails in a client folder into an Adobe Portfolio document (a big PDF containing each email as a pdf document).  That allows you to archive the client email folder as a PDF portfolio and delete the email folder from Outlook when the file closes (knowing that all the incoming and outgoing emails are in there courtesy of SimplyFile).

After a few hours of use, you will fall in love with it. After a few days, you will wonder how you ever lived without it!

–David J. Bilinsky, Vancouver.