The last couple of Notes 8 Tips talked about the new selection model and conversations. In this post, we're going to combine those two ideas and talk about managing conversations. You may notice that when you expand a conversation in your Inbox, all of the threads (i.e., the pieces of that conversation) are highlighted.
The reason for this is to alert the user that when the conversation is collapsed, the same is true. All the threads are selected.
This is important because it helps us understand that when we act on a collapsed conversation, we are acting on all of the messages that make up that conversation. If I hit the delete key on the message above, I get the following dialog box:
If I thought I was just deleting one email, this kind of warning can be a bit surprising. It's certainly not something that I wish to do by mistake. (Admittedly, I've never checked the box to suppress future warnings). However, this opens up ways to manage my Inbox much more efficiently.
Here's an example:
Have you ever been away from the office for a few days? Did you notice that, while you were out, things didn't stop happening? Many times you'll come back to find an email from a colleague asking you to respond immediately to their urgent request, copying many others on the correspondence. You think to yourself, This person must not have realized that I was out of the office when they sent this email.
Of course, you had turned on your Out Of Office notifications before your extended absence. The sender of the email would have known that you would not be responding immediately to their urgent request. However, you may still be wondering if you need to respond or not. Did the sender of the urgent email get his response from someone else?
In the past, you would have spent time sorting through your Inbox trying to figure out if there was another response while you were away. The longer you were away, the harder this would be to do because the emails keep coming even if you're not around to read them. With conversations in Notes 8, I can expand the conversation and scan the threads to see if the urgent request has been addressed. If it has, and I don't need the information in the conversation, I can delete the entire conversation thread. This is where deleting the entire conversation suddenly makes sense! I can delete the collapsed conversation and all of those emails relating to the urgent request that filled my Inbox in my absence are all gone! I don't have to go through and delete them individually in a vain attempt at staying under my Mail File quota!
The preceding scenario is not the only reason that having all the messages in the conversation selected is useful. I can drag and drop an entire conversation into a folder for future reference. This helps me keep the number of emails in my Inbox to a minimum (which also cuts down on the time to load and search my Inbox). I have been viewing my Inbox in conversation mode for over a year now, and I can't imagine how I ever lived without it!
I don't always want to act on the entire conversation, however. Often, people will respond with history, making some of the information contained in the messages redundant. What if I am only interested in keeping a subset of the messages in a conversation? That's where the selection model comes in. With the conversation expanded, I can choose only the messages I wish to delete or move by holding down the control key and clicking on them.
This way, I can keep only the information that I will need to refer to later.
Dwight Morse | 8 November 2007 11:01:14 PM ET | | (0)
