Make Gmail You Default Email Client

So, I mentioned a few posts ago that I have stopped using Outlook Business Contact Manager.  As a result, I don't have any use for Outlook  any more and was becoming very frustrated every time I click on an email address in my browser and had Outlook open up. My clunker of a laptop simply didn't like it and took forever.

Thankfully, I searched for about 30 seconds on google.com and found this tip. Now, every time I click and email link it opens a new tab with a gmail email in "compose" mode and automatically populates the "To:" field. Life just got easier.

http://bnee.com/2008/09/make-mailto-links-open-in-gmail-in-google-chrome-browser-windows-xp-and-vista/

Dashboards

Dashboards are the type of thing I stay up for days on end for and miss meals sometimes because I'm so excited about building one. Most of the time, these dashboards are in MS Excel although recently I had the opportunity to build quite a few in Tableau.

However this post is about Google Wave. I mentioned in my last post that I was looking for a way of tracking my projects. Additionally, my microfinance company, Lumana, uses Google Wave almost exclusivley for document generation and archiving. With at least 10 volunteers at all times creating documents, my inbox is easily flooded.

The simple solution is to create a dashboard that links to all related waves. All you need to drag and drop the wave onto the dashboard wave and it automatically creates a hyperlink. Then, simply store the dashboard wave in a dashboard folder so that it's easy to locate. I also created a wave that acts as my "journal", similar to a journal in MS Outlook. Only, I manually link to all the project waves, emails, and websites that I've been working on.

It All Starts with Email and Contacts

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell suggests we struggle to keep track of groups larger than 150 members.  Today's world demands I keep track of many more than that, so I'm always on the look out for things that help increase efficiency.  Recently, with the release of MS Office 2010 beta, I had a chance to check out Outlook Business Contact Manager for free and I immediately loved it.

Finally I had a much more efficient way of keeping track of conference calls and business notes, but most importantly it provided easily generated reports on how often I contacted people and which of those I had neglected.  As a director for Lumana Credit, and with aspirations of one day opening a Global Development Consulting firm, it's important to keep it all organized.

As I kept searching the internet I also discovered Xobni, Inc, an add-on for Outlook, that drills down even farther into contact communication.  It provides reports such as the average response time of contacts and a line graph for the frequency of my emailing throughout the day, week, and months.  With Outlook BCM and Xobni, vital information about my network was suddenly revealed allowing me to be much more conscious of how I interact with others.

The unfortunate part is that my computer is getting pretty old.  Running Outlook was just too intensive on my system and I had to let go of the information I had become highly dependent on.  I typed in "Xobni competitors" into Google and received a list of about 10.  As I checked out each, nothing really hit the mark until I found Gist, which was exactly what I needed.

Gist was the perfect solution and it is free.  It allows me to tag my email and social network contacts, identify the frequency of contact with a company or person, and even use it as a bot for finding relevant company info, and following each social media output a person has (twitter updates, facebook updates, etc).  It's all displayed in an easy to read table that can be filtered by column category (such as last point of contact).  Best of all, it's simple and works in my browser.

Then, It's What Those Contacts are Doing.

Ok, so now I had a pretty functional CRM system that can tell me quite a lot of information, is web-based so keeps my computer from bogging down, and that automatically updates itself.  But don't want to know just what my inbox is doing, I want to know what all those contacts are doing because that's how business opportunities happen.

As I was sitting in the living room of my friend Brett Horvath, I saw he had TweetDeck open.  Here it is, a low memory, client platform that aggregates my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn feeds into simple columns.  The best part is that I can use this as a bot as well to search for relevant info like microfinance, EY Advisory, or even my own name.

With Outlook gone, I'm still searching for some sort of project management system.  It's going to be tough because Outlook had everything in one place.  But, I think I'm set for a while and my network should work much more smoothly.