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Outlook Policies

This is a question that I’m investigating that I could use your help for.

I’m trying to find out if its possible to force Outlook to use a specific email template; the twist is an enterprise setting: I need to do this across 3000 desktop Outlook installations, and centrally administer the template. The goal is to get an entire company communicating in a visually consistent, professional fashion.

So - does anyone know? Does MS have an application-level policy system that could be used to do this? Or is there another approach?

Also: I’ve posted this same question to Yahoo Answers to see how well that service works for a relatively technical query.

email, outlook, templates, yahoo! yahoo+answers

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Any Need for Orgoo? Or: yet another webmail service

TechCrunch profiles Orgoo, a new online email service. It offers everything that’s good about Yahoo!, the new Hotmail, or GMail with an Outlook-like AJAXy interface and 3gb of storage.

Its source of value and differentiation is IM integration - Orgoo is integrated with all of the IM clients, as opposed to its competitors who integrate only with their house brands (GMail with GTalk, etc.)

My question is this: given the high marginal cost of switching email services (in terms of notifying all of your contacts, etc), and the relatively low marginal benefit of IM integration (how much of a hotbutton issue is this?) does Orgoo have a business model? Especially when one considers that email is a commodity service, that fancy AJAX interfaces are derigeur, and that the market is crowded with hugely resourced and well financed options, is there any point to this?

Without more differentiation, I don’t yet see any reason for any more than a small niche to switch. Perhaps Orgoo is just positioning for a quick-flip develop-to-acquisition cycle a la Oddpost.

EDIT: Michael popped by to point out in the comments that Orgoo is positioned as a front end - i.e.: it can be the UI for whatever email service you choose, accessing your mail service by POP, as with Outlook on your desktop. That would expand the appeal of Orgoo to include those currently separating service from UI, but I wonder…

1. How big an existing segment that is - i.e.: how many email users are their for Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. that could switch to Orgoo?
2. Of the existing split service/UI market segment, how many are dissatisfied enough with their current solution to consider switching?
3. How many of the single service (UI/service) email market segment would consider separating the two and using Orgoo?

I’d still hazard a guess that the potential user pool for Orgoo is relatively small… but I’m generally skeptical about everything.

email, im orgoo

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NBC Buys RSS to E-mail Service R-Mail; Part One of a Social Strategy?

Roger Cadenhead draws our attention to the sale of rss-to-email service R-Mail, to - oddly enough - NBC. R-Mail.org is a wicked simple site with a “subscribe via email” widget for blogs, a very simple UI, a top feeds list (which shows an international user base), and so on.

According to Rogers…

The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily, though I suspect a zero’s missing from the last figure.

Founded in 2006 2005, Rogers considers R-Mail to be one of the most missed stories of late, having been passed over for coverage in favour of Zookoda. With 50,000 users, a one-person team (Randy Charles Morin), and now a successful buyout (sum unknown), it does seem like one that’s flown under the radar.

That being said, there’s nothing on how much NBC paid, or what their plans are for the service. Morin’s blog notes the news, but adds nothing more to it. If they picked it up for a song (and hired Morin in the process, then it may have been less expensive than developing an email subscription service in house. The current NBC site includes neither RSS nor email subscriptions, and has the enigmatic byline “social-networking coming soon.”

email, nbc, rmail, rss social networking

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Mark Evans: Communications 101 - some further thoughts on email

Mark Evans, Canadian B5 blogger, writes a good post on quality of communications in our hyper-connected present. I won’t re-iterate the whole thing, but in quick summary his position is that physical meetings and phone calls hold value above and beyond the email paradigm that many have come to accept as the default form of communication.

I’m one of those. I love email, for two reasons that Mark didn’t mention:

1. Contiguous conversations discontinuously: Email let’s me have a conversation when I and the other participants want to have it. I can respond to emails when it suits me, prioritizing tasks independent of the immediacy of the medium in which they reside. The way workflow works for me, this is paramount: I’m a “burst” working, functioning best in roughly 40 minute blocks of hyper-productivity. Catch me in the middle of such a block and I’ll be surly and distracted (ask my wife - sorry!). Catch me outside, and I’m cheerful, helpful, etc.
2. Paper trail: For indexing and ass-covering, email is awesome. In my blogging, I love communicating by email because it gives me a searchable index of facts that I’ve compiled in email conversations which would otherwise be scrawled in one of my frequently lost notebooks. In my day job, I love the paper trail: it keeps everyone accountable and transparent.

So - call me a ogre-ish jerk if you will, but I love email and online communications in general.

communications, email, markevans phone

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The Annoyance of Registration Email Validation

Right now, I’m trying to write reviews of two services. Both require registration to get deep into, and both registration processes require a validation email link to be clicked, and after more than an hour of waiting, neither service has managed to deliver that activation email yet. Is there some poor personal literally sending these out? Or are the tubes clogged? Or has my mail server gone to bed for the evening? Who knows. Email validation can be really annoying. I would think a captcha would be as effective at rooting out robots, which leaves little purpose for the email other than confirming that a member did indeed type their address in correctly.

captcha, email, registration yawn

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