Liaise: Possibly The Coolest Email Add-On Ever (Video)
Liaise is an email add-on launching today that analyzes the free-text contents of your emails as you write them for task-related information, including assignee, deadline and priority. It then helps you manage all your tasks in an interface beside your email inbox, pulling up all the emails associated with a particular task or person you're set to meet with, automatically.
This impressive tool is launching today at the DEMO conference, where it may very well steal the show. Liaise is currently available only for Outlook, but if you're an Outlook user then it's worth your time to download. Outlook user or not, you'll want to check out the video demonstration below.
I really hope that this product will support GMail sometime soon (perhaps with some Google Gears integration?) but for now this is the first software in a long time that's made me give Windows a second look. This level of automated task-tracking and organization, with minimal interruption to your existing work-flow, has got to offer a competitive advantage. The elegance of the real-time analysis and the usefulness of the language processing, at least in theory on the day the product launches, is the kind of experience that reminds us how much innovation is still possible.
The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers who click this link will get access to download the application.
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Let me get this straight, just so I understand you:
You are thinking of changing your entire computing platform over a software feature being introduced by a new company (a start up, which may or may not survive the long term)?
Really? Hyperbole? You would not wait for the gmail or some Mac (I assume you are Mac).
That is some strong statement there. Let me look at that video.
Nice find Marshall.
If only they had it for gmail! I don't know if that will happen anytime soon though. Keeping up with gmail would require a lot more work than just Outlook since gmail is always changing elements of it's software.
You know what? Gmail needs a plugin API! Not just for labs but for anyone to plug into. Maybe that's the next big thing?
-JB
Ok, Ok, I see what you mean, Im not even halfway through and I am impressed. Where's that old XP box - oh wait! Parallels.
Corporate Email overload is a serious issue these days.
The video itself illustrates the mindset problem with email "using liaise (email) to ensure this gets done" to many people just dump their management into an email.
There seems to be a trend to revisit email and work it over for "today" - collaborative/social/interactive use.
I wonder if its not best to leave email to die of natural causes and focus development on new tools.
I wonder if approaches like this could just make things worse.
I agree with Martin. Although the technology looks impressive (I will give it a try, but my #1 concern with outlook addins, since outlook is already slow and phat is: does it slow down outlook?) this almost looks like another layer of complexity. We use wrike for project management. If we want the email to become a task, we simply cc: wrike. That way, email adapts to the PM, but we have only one PM tool...this way, it seems like Liaise competes with the PM
This is Awesome - finally, an addition to Outlook (and in general the Micro(scopic)Soft suite ) that I need and will actually use vs. the other 95% which are nice to have but not essential!! Thanks Liaise... you have nailed it..looking forward to the mobile pieces too!
Outlook plug ins are hard, very hard. I wish MSFT made them easier as it would give great apps like Liaise a shot at helping us save time and effort.