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Why Chilibase?
Your Outlook® (and you) need a helping hand
Over the past 15 years, e-mail traffic has increased worldwide (without even talking about spam mail!). E-mail programs such as Outlook have so far not been able to lend a helping hand in dealing with the ever increasing e-mail flood. The faster search modi for keywords is one possible answer to this problem. But honestly, keywords and folder structures will not be able to protect you from your e-mail overload. And so, week by week, we spend a couple of minutes here and there to search and sort our mails and spend too much time on trying to gain overview and control over our communication. And the tools we are provided with by Outlook do not really help us tame the e-mail monster, do they?
The Key: People
We have been contemplating solutions to this problem and have come up with a simple and yet astonishingly effective solution: people are the key to a better overview and faster access to your e-mails. Imagine if you were able to see your entire communication with one person: all e-mail messages from and to this person, all appointments and tasks, displayed in one comprehensible window. How much would this facilitate your everyday work? Now imagine if you were able to see the entire communication for a group of people working on one project. By pressing one key you would be able to retrace and understand the whole communication process. You would see who took part in that communication process and to what extent. You would not miss one person or e-mail message. Doesn’t that sound intriguing?
Chilibase: A new way to see your Outlook
"Oh yes; a better overview and a faster access would be fantastic!" you’re probably thinking, "But I use Outlook and I would like to or even have to continue to do so!"
We have good news! Fortunately, you don’t have to lose Outlook, but rather enhance it. Chilibase is an add-in for Outlook that merges completely with the Outlook interface you are used to. In short, this means you can still use the Outlook features you are accustomed to but add new search possibilities. Let Chilibase boost your search in Outlook!
Find information faster!
Why finding e-mails can never be easy enough
When constantly having to search information hidden in our e-mail messages that are neatly (or not so neatly) filed away in folders, this affects us in two negative ways:
Why keywords alone do not really help
Everybody is familiar with this kind of search: when we try to find a certain e-mail message, we type in a keyword and hope for the best. But sometimes it is just not the right word for a search that makes sense. So we have to sidestep and look to another help tool. We start trying other keywords, try names as keywords, look in the folders we have created over the course of our time with Outlook, scroll ... you get it. And this happens more often than most of us are aware of. Each time you have to type in several keywords and scroll demonstrates that the e-mail search functions we have at hand today are by far insufficient.
Why e-mail folders do not really help either
The purpose of e-mail folders is to provide a system of order in our inbox—at least in theory. In reality, folders have several serious disadvantages:
Regain full overview!
Why a single e-mail alone is often not enough
Many questions concerning our communication cannot be answered with a single e-mail. "What time period lies between messages?"; "Who was involved in the communication process?"; "Has there been more than one answer?" In order to answer these questions we need a complete picture of our communication with all participants. A single e-mail is only a small part of the puzzle and remains meaningless without the whole context.
E-mails are an important part of our work process. Their significance for protocolling and optimizing our work process will increase in the future (In professional communication, in particular). Naturally, where several parties are involved it is very difficult to trace a communication process. A simple collection of single e-mails does not provide the necessary overview. In contrast—what is needed in this case is a chronological, complete display of our communication traffic.
Your Outlook® (and you) need a helping hand
Over the past 15 years, e-mail traffic has increased worldwide (without even talking about spam mail!). E-mail programs such as Outlook have so far not been able to lend a helping hand in dealing with the ever increasing e-mail flood. The faster search modi for keywords is one possible answer to this problem. But honestly, keywords and folder structures will not be able to protect you from your e-mail overload. And so, week by week, we spend a couple of minutes here and there to search and sort our mails and spend too much time on trying to gain overview and control over our communication. And the tools we are provided with by Outlook do not really help us tame the e-mail monster, do they?
The Key: People
We have been contemplating solutions to this problem and have come up with a simple and yet astonishingly effective solution: people are the key to a better overview and faster access to your e-mails. Imagine if you were able to see your entire communication with one person: all e-mail messages from and to this person, all appointments and tasks, displayed in one comprehensible window. How much would this facilitate your everyday work? Now imagine if you were able to see the entire communication for a group of people working on one project. By pressing one key you would be able to retrace and understand the whole communication process. You would see who took part in that communication process and to what extent. You would not miss one person or e-mail message. Doesn’t that sound intriguing?
Chilibase: A new way to see your Outlook
"Oh yes; a better overview and a faster access would be fantastic!" you’re probably thinking, "But I use Outlook and I would like to or even have to continue to do so!"
We have good news! Fortunately, you don’t have to lose Outlook, but rather enhance it. Chilibase is an add-in for Outlook that merges completely with the Outlook interface you are used to. In short, this means you can still use the Outlook features you are accustomed to but add new search possibilities. Let Chilibase boost your search in Outlook!Find information faster!
Why finding e-mails can never be easy enough
When constantly having to search information hidden in our e-mail messages that are neatly (or not so neatly) filed away in folders, this affects us in two negative ways:
- We are exposed to stress, because we are not able to do our real work. The consequence: We lose focus for our real tasks.
- As searching for information in the e-mail jungle has become an unpleasant task itself, our willingness to gather information in general declines. Needless to say, this can result in uninformed decision making. Remember the Internet without Google or other search engines. It was so much harder or sometimes impossible to collect the information we needed. Only when the search engines entered the Internet were we willing (and happy) to embark on our information quests. And today, we are so much better informed and able to find (almost) any information we wish for topics we are interested in. Why shouldn’t this be possible for our e-mail messages as well?
Why keywords alone do not really help
Everybody is familiar with this kind of search: when we try to find a certain e-mail message, we type in a keyword and hope for the best. But sometimes it is just not the right word for a search that makes sense. So we have to sidestep and look to another help tool. We start trying other keywords, try names as keywords, look in the folders we have created over the course of our time with Outlook, scroll ... you get it. And this happens more often than most of us are aware of. Each time you have to type in several keywords and scroll demonstrates that the e-mail search functions we have at hand today are by far insufficient.
Why e-mail folders do not really help either
The purpose of e-mail folders is to provide a system of order in our inbox—at least in theory. In reality, folders have several serious disadvantages:
- Once you create folders, you have to maintain them to keep them updated. Folders not only have to be created, but they also have to have a structure in which their existence makes sense. E-mail messages need to filed manually or automatically. You have to decide whether you want to file only the e-mail message you receive or the sent ones, too. You have to decide if you want to create a new folder for a new, small project or to integrate it into an already existing folder. (You get the picture.)
- The more folders you have, the greater the possibility that before you even start looking for a specific e-mail message you have to identify the folder it might be in. In short: you add a folder search to your e-mail search!
- You lose overview. This might sound paradoxical at first, but let’s take a closer look: Each time you want to file an e-mail you have to decide which folder to file it in. And you file it in only one folder, even if the e-mail theoretically would fit into two folders. Therefore, later on it will be missing in at least one folder (assuming that the e-mail message we are talking about has no relevance to further projects or rather folders). So later the e-mail message (and of course its content) will be missing from the communication overview. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as "cross-cutting-issues".
Regain full overview!
Why a single e-mail alone is often not enough
Many questions concerning our communication cannot be answered with a single e-mail. "What time period lies between messages?"; "Who was involved in the communication process?"; "Has there been more than one answer?" In order to answer these questions we need a complete picture of our communication with all participants. A single e-mail is only a small part of the puzzle and remains meaningless without the whole context.
E-mails are an important part of our work process. Their significance for protocolling and optimizing our work process will increase in the future (In professional communication, in particular). Naturally, where several parties are involved it is very difficult to trace a communication process. A simple collection of single e-mails does not provide the necessary overview. In contrast—what is needed in this case is a chronological, complete display of our communication traffic.