That’s the principle behind year old, Los Altos, Calif. startup Whodini, which is currently in pilot. A sort of extremely pumped up address book or internal LinkedIn alternative, the product scours the Outlook accounts of employees of large companies, analyzing the content automatically to create a profile for each person, which lists their areas of expertise.

This profile is searchable by employees anywhere in the company, whether they’re based in Mumbai, India or Menlo Park, Calif. So if a sales guy in Chicago is looking for an expert on a prospective client or a complicated technical subject, all he needs to do is search Whodini to find colleagues in any part of the world with the knowledge he needs.

Making sense of the mess

Of course, our email accounts are messy places, full of invitations to lunch or maybe even personal missives about topics we’d rather not have broadcast to the company. But they’re also a very rich source of information, explains Co-Founder, President and COO Ani Chaudhuri, using a revealing back of the envelope calculation:

In a large company people send out between 30-50 emails in a day, so lets take the average of 40. Each email, and this is statistical, is about 60 words, so that’s about 2,400 words per day. Now 2,400 words times 200 is 480,000. That’s almost half a million words written every year by an employee.

Contrast that with the once- or twice-daily updates to enterprise social media – and the very rare times, instigated by HR nagging, that people update their profile in traditional company directories – and it’s clear why Whodini focuses on email and why, with the right analysis, that data could prove so useful. Whodini aims to make sense of that disorder and make the results searchable, with the minimum amount of effort on the part of users – no laborious updating, hashtagging or other effort required.

“People document stuff already; it was just not in a form in which it was usable. Our job is to take all that data that is floating around and making it accessible. We are an analytics company rather than a communication company,” says Chaudhuri.

And don’t fret that Whodini will accidentally reveal your embarrassing love of Civil War re-enactments or confidential negotiations. “We show the profile to you before anyone else can see it or search it. It’s all permissions-based,” stresses Bjorn Stromsness, the company’s director of business development, noting that users have absolute control of what goes public. Profiles are also constantly refreshed with users’ expertise in a given area decaying over time, so out-of-date keywords are unlikely to appear on profiles.

Who’s Whodini for?

Whodini isn’t for everyone, as the ability to pinpoint specialized knowledge is more valuable, and more difficult, in some contexts. “If you have a company of 10,000, but 9,000 of them are retail employees, you’re not going to find a lot of utility in what we’re doing,” says Stromsness.

But if yours is the type of firm that has expert knowledge spread across a large organization, the Whodini teams feels its product can make a big impact. “We see the product fitting particularly well within technology, energy, pharma and legal and consulting worlds,” says Stromsness. Large firms of 10,000 should derive the greatest benefit. “The more people you have [who are] having complex conversations, the better we’re going to work for you,” concludes Stromsness.

The product is also probably more beneficial for some types of employees than others, the team concedes. Braggarts and self-promoters, for instance, won’t prosper on Whodini as its evidence-based approach rewards no points for horn-tooting skills. Instead, the product is “the voice of the quiet achiever,” in the words of Stromsness.

“When people are self-nominating themselves for things, sometimes those are more aspiration than they are actual,” says Stromsness. But with Whodini, “everything is validated. If you want to know who’s dealing with a topic, you can find out who’s actually having those conversations as opposed to the person who might want to have those conversations.”

Forget notices of cookies in the break room or chatty camaraderie, Whodini takes a no-nonsense approach to work. “This isn’t about finding out if you’re passionate about cats. This is about finding out if you have worked on UI concepts,” says Stromsness.

What’s next?

The company has raised $2 million in angel funding, and the product is currently deployed in three locations with one more due to be added this week and a large company pilot in the works, but there’s no definitive date for a public launch as of yet. So what is on the horizon for Whodini?

Looking more long-term, the Whodini team isn’t troubled by constant chatter that email might be on its way out. According to Chaudhuri, rumors of email’s demise are highly exaggerated. “Instant messengers are being replaced by enterprise social networking. Email is not going anywhere,” he says.  And even if communication should move to another channel in the future, “we will absolutely tap into that,” says Chaudhuri.

In fact, future plans include connecting to “other email clients and maybe other sources of unstructured data as well,” according to Stromsness. Other product improvements in the works include scores, which measure each person’s level of expertise in a particular topic, and a once-a-week alert showing users who in the company is working on similar things and worth getting in touch with.

And as the product develops, another hot trend in the business world could benefit Whodini — the rise of remote working and dispersed organizations can only help a firm whose aids people in pinpointing exact expertise spread across the globe.

“The way we look at it is the current platforms, whether it is email, social networking or collaboration tools, all of them assume that you know the people that you need to know – the right people are already at the table. Are the right people really at the table? By discovering people that you don’t know we increase the possibility of having better people,” says Chaudhuri.

Who wouldn’t want to know the perfect person at that critical point in time? It’s a fabulous concept which all depends on the quality of the analysis whirring unseen inside the black box of Whodini’s proprietary technology. Pretty soon public, real world field tests will prove if this is not only an awesome idea, but also an awesome product.

At Net:Work, we’ll explore how companies can harness social tools — and the data from them — both now and in the not-so-distant future. The event will be held in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

Image courtesy of Whodini.

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Unlike Gmail’s forgotten attachment reminder, CodeTwo’s plugin is user-configurable. You can add to or modify the list of keywords it looks for, alter the text of the alert, and you can also opt to have the application scan the email body, subject line or both (the default). Handily, Outlook Attachment Reminder only scans material you write, so if you compose a reply and the quoted original message includes one or more of the keywords the program looks for, it won’t trigger an alert.

Outlook Attachment Reminder is freeware and can be downloaded from the CodeTwo website.

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• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
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Harmon.ie provides an interface for Microsoft SharePoint directly within Outlook. It simplifies collaboration and document version control by letting users send live links to SharePoint documents, rather than emailing individual docs that are hard to manage. Users can edit, rate, or tag documents, and see and manage previous versions, all directly inside Outlook. According to the developers, enterprises that have large investments in SharePoint have found that using Harmon.ie has increased end-user SharePoint adoption from 30 percent to as high as 80 percent..

Harmon.ie 3.0, being released Tuesday in beta, adds social features that recognize that collaboration is about people as much as documents. The new “people” tab in the Harmon.ie sidebar lets users see colleagues’ profiles and availability. Presence notifications are geared toward work environments, since they can be used to show what project or document an individual is working on. The people tab also displays a multi-threaded activity stream, and lets workers call, chat or video conference using Microsoft Lync/OCS, Lotus Sametime or Cisco UC.

Harmon.ie 3.0 also simplifies the creation of ad-hoc groups centered around a specific task. The “suggested colleagues” feature recommends possible group members based on the frequency of interaction (by email, chat or voice) and by whether they have co-authored or co-edited documents in the past.

Since Simon wrote about Harmon.ie a few months ago, several other apps have added some similar features to the email interface, for the simple reason that many workers in the enterprise spend a lot of their time there. Xobni, for example, offers “gadgets” for such enterprise collaboration tools as SharePoint, and several services, notably Rapportive and Gist, provide social connections directly from the email interface. And for organizations that don’t use SharePoint, Egnyte recently announced tools for file-sharing within Outlook.

Harmon.ie 3.0 is currently available in beta. The free version includes the SharePoint interface, but does not include the social features. The enterprise version of the software, which includes the social components, is priced at $125 per user, or on a subscription basis for $50 per user per year. In addition to the SharePoint version, the developer also offers a version for Lotus Notes, and another for Google Docs, although the latter does not currently include social features.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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Scrubly provides similar “de-duping” functionality to the Personal Assistant tool provided by unified online address book service Plaxo that I wrote about earlier this year, but it’s considerably cheaper and provides a few features the Plaxo tool doesn’t:

• Address books are automatically backed up before cleaning them, so original files can be retrieved and restored at any time (reassuring if you’re concerned the de-duplication process may accidentally remove some entries you don’t intend it to).
• It can automatically update Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail address books after cleaning them up (Plaxo can also do this, but only if you pay for its Premium Sync service)
• Scrubly groups compatible duplicate contacts together, merging them into one complete entry.

It’s easy to use: Just sign up, then either authorize the Scrubly app to connect to your Gmail/Google Apps accounts and/or download the clients for Outlook or Apple Mail. You can set up multiple address books in your Scrubly account; each one is scrubbed and backed up separately. When you hit the “scrub” button on an address book, Scrubly scans it, looking for duplicates, junk entries (those that contain very limited information, such as only a name) and “loose match” duplicates (entries that Scrubly thinks are probably duplicates but they aren’t exact matches; you need to review these individually). Once you’re happy with the results, you can re-import the scrubbed address book (or books) back into your email app (or apps).

If you have fewer than 250 contacts to clean up, Scrubly is free. More than that, and you can either opt for a one-time cleaning of address books with an unlimited number of contacts for $9.95 or buy an annual subscription, which costs $24.95. It worked pretty well in my testing, successfully de-duping both Gmail and Outlook address books. However, note that Scrubly only has de-duping tools; it doesn’t attempt to automatically keep your address books up-to-date like Plaxo’s Personal Assistant does, and it can’t connect with the variety of services Plaxo can, either. If you have a mass of contacts spread across various different email and social media accounts, and want to de-duplicate entries across all of them, Plaxo’s pricier service (which costs $79.95 per year) may be more useful. But if you’re simply looking for a way to clean duplicates from a particularly messy address book, Scrubly offers a simple and cost-effective solution, particularly as you can opt to pay for a one-time cleaning.

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Inbox Rules

Nearly all modern desktop email clients (including Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Outlook) support inbox rules or filtering. Using these rules you can specify that incoming email that meets certain criteria can be routed to certain folder or even deleted entirely. The easiest way to do it is to just route emails from certain senders to a particular folder, like sending Twitter and Facebook notifications to a “Notifications” folder, for example. Unfortunately, given the variety of bacn that most of us receive, you’ll likely have to set up a large number of rules to deal with all of the bacn, and every time you start getting bacn from a new sender, you’ll probably have to set up a new rule. You could try setting up more generic or complex rules (matching certain strings of text in the body of the message, or using complex conditional rules) to try to avoid having to set up a new rule for each sender, but in my experience it’s very difficult to do this in such a way that filters all of the bacn without also accidentally catching some non-bacn email, too.

Outlook

If you use Outlook, there are a couple of third-party tools you could try: ClearContext Personal and NEO Pro.

ClearContext Personal (see my post about it here) actually works in a similar manner to Smart Labels, filing unimportant emails, like social network notifications, newsletters, e-commerce emails and other bacn into categorized groups, taking it out of your inbox. It’s all done completely automatically, with no need to set up complex inbox rules. ClearContext Personal is available as a free download (.exe) for Windows 7, Vista or XP, and Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. Note that it only works with Exchange Mail and POP, not IMAP.

NEO Pro is an email organizing tool. Rather than working as an add-on, it’s actually a separate app that you can use to automatically categorize and organize your email. It’s a very powerful and flexible tool, but it’s rather pricey at $49.95 , which is probably a bit expensive if all you want to do is filter bacn from your inbox. The 60-day free trial can be downloaded here.

Apple Mail

I’m not aware of any apps or plugin for Apple Mail that can automatically filter bacn emails, but Mail Act-On, a plugin from indev.ca, provides a way to apply actions to multiple emails simultaneously, making it easier to keep your inbox organized. It costs $24.95, with a free trial available.

Thunderbird

Again, I’m not aware of any extensions for Thunderbird  that will work in the same way as Smart Labels, but it does incude a built-in Bayesian junk mail filter. You can hit the “Junk” button  and over time you will train Thunderbird, Unfortunately, it’s not as granular as Gmail’s Smart Labels and will result in bacn in the same junk mail folder as regular spam, but if all you really want is to get bacn out of your inbox, . There are some details on how the junk mail filter works on mozillaZine.

Unsubscribe

Of course, rather than setting up rules or plugins to deal with the bacn in your inbox, you can always stop it at the source, by unsubscribing from the various newsletters you’re not reading and changing the settings on your social networking accounts.

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Installation is straightforward; although if you have a large inbox, it may take some time to do its initial sync. After installation, you’ll discover that NEO Pro isn’t just a simple plugin for Outlook; it’s actually a separate program with its own interface that seamlessly syncs with Outlook. I actually quite like this approach; many of the third-party add-ons for Outlook that I’ve tried in the past have ended up cluttering my screen with additional toolbars and sidebars, leaving less real estate for the actual email. The interface is well designed and is similar to Outlook’s, with large panes showing the contents of your inbox and the currently selected email.

NEO Pro’s main strengths lie in two areas: its organizational and search features. The program automatically categorizes your email, and then offers many different views of it. By clicking on the tabs, you can switch to views showing email by date, status, attachment, or sender. Each view can then be further refined using filters, so you can quickly bring up a view that shows all of the emails in your inbox with Microsoft Word attachments, for example, and then refine that to only show emails with Word attachments from certain senders. NEO Pro’s search is virtually instantaneous; it’s much faster than Outlook’s own sluggish search on my machine. Search can either be performed on the whole email catalog, or on any filtered view of your email.

NEO Pro’s probably going to be most useful for power users who constantly deal with a lot of email; the wealth of organizational options and tools available (and correspondingly, the large number of buttons in the interface) might be off-putting for less experienced users and those who don’t deal with large volumes of email. That said, the interface is similar to Outlook’s, and there is plenty of documentation available, including a handy quick start guide.

NEO Pro’s a flexible and powerful email organizing tool that’s worth trialing if you or your users spend a large amount of time in Outlook. NEO Pro is little pricey: A single license costs $49.95, with volume discounts available. The 60-day free trial can be downloaded here. Note: NEO Pro 5  is not yet compatible with the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010; 64-bit support should be available in the next minor update.

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Auto-filed emails can be accessed via a sidebar in Outlook; you can scan through a category, and mark all the emails as read or delete them with a single click. You can also teach ClearContext to file other types of email by dragging them from your inbox to the appropriate category; future emails will then be filed automatically.

To make sure that you don’t miss anything important, once per day you’ll be sent a daily digest email that lists all of the emails auto-filed that day, together with some statistics about your email usage.

ClearContext Personal will also help you pick out the more important emails in your inbox; emails from known senders are highlighted in green, while emails from important senders are highlighted in red. This is a bit like Gmail’s Priority Inbox; ClearContext automatically tries to figure out who your most important contacts are during its setup, and you can also mark senders as important manually using a button on the toolbar.

ClearContext Personal is available as a free download (.exe) for Windows 7, Vista or XP, and Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010.

Note: Although I had early access to ClearContext Personal, I haven’t been able to test out how effective it is. That’s because it doesn’t support IMAP, only POP and Exchange Mail. When I asked ClearContext about this, the company said that the number of Outlook users using IMAP was very small — in the single digit percentages — and it had to focus its priorities where the users are. While I’d agree that most corporate Outlook users probably connect using Exchange Mail, many tech-savvy users (the kind of people who would probably appreciate this kind of add-on) will use IMAP to connect to their mail servers; they’re not supported by this release, which is disappointing.

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The app provides for two-way sync between Outlook and RTM (or optionally, one-way sync in either direction), scheduled or automatic syncing of tasks, and the ability include all lists or only specific lists when syncing.

MilkSync is available without cost to Remember the Milk Pro subscribers; RTM free account holders can get a 15-day free trial. It’s compatible with 32-bit editions of Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 on Windows XP (SP2 and higher), Windows Vista and Windows 7 (a version compatible with 64-bit editions of Outlook is coming later in the year) It can be downloaded here.

Let us know what you think of MilkSync in the comments.

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As I’ve written previously, Liaise is intended for heavy email users who collaborate with many different people both inside and outside their organization. The program itself is Outlook-based, but the people who Liaise users collaborate with do not need to be using the same email client.

Liaise automatically captures, organizes and prioritizes action items as one types messages in Outlook. To-dos and tasks are then made available in the Liaise Manager dashboard. Action items can be viewed by initiative, owner, due date or priority.  Project information can be organized into reports, made available for export and printing. Action item due dates may be displayed in the Outlook calendar.

It’s also now possible to create notes, to-dos and tasks outside of email messages in Liaise Lists.

Liaise is available for $50 per user per year, with a 30-day free trial period. The developers are offering a free one-year license to 100 WWD readers at this link.

Let us know what you think of Liaise in the comments.

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