Today's email products have changed little over the last decade, despite thesignificant increase in email usage. For a staff member of a "Virtual" Internetbusiness, in particular, It is not unusual to respond to hundreds of emails a day. They will often find themselves answering the same questions they have responded tomany times before and their email software offers little functionality to addressthis repetition.
It was this realization that spurred Xequte Software to develop Cruise Control, anemail responding program built from the ground up to enhance the productivity ofheavy email users. Functioning as a stand-alone email client or as an add-in forMicrosoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Gmail, Cruise Control offers an optimizedworkflow, automatic guessing of the best response and quick access to commonly typedtext.
Designed around the tenets of Email Productivity experts, a key function of CruiseControl is "Process All Messages" which displays each of your Inbox messages in turnand allows you to instantly reply, forward or archive them. If an action is notpossible immediately, you can delay a message and it will return to your Inbox onceit reaches its specified due date
Cruise Control saves you from "Email Déjà vu" by allowing you to easily save anytext you have typed as a response template or text snippet. In this way you needonly think of the best answer to a particular question once and it will be availablefor instant reuse in future messages. Cruise Control will even use Bayesiananalysis to guess which response is relevant for each message based on your pastreplies.
Your stored responses are not limited to text, they can also include attachments,formatted rich text and embedded images and "Fields". Fields allow you to insertinformation that changes with each message, for example, the recipient's name (soyou need never type "Dear Tom" again), the date, a download link for the productbeing discussed or even information retrieved from another program.
Whereas Responses are complete replies to a message, "Quick Text" are small snippetsof text that you commonly type. The can be inserted into your messages with asingle click, or even assigned to keyboard shortcuts or "auto-text". For instance,type "myweb" to insert a clickable link to your web page, "productimage" to embed apicture and rich text description of the relevant product, or "attachprof" to attacha company profile document.
At the heart of Cruise Control is a powerful Responding Window that provides all ofthe information you need to immediately dispatch a message. This includes theoriginal message, complete with an integrated Attachment Viewer that displays commonfile formats without launching them. A search panel lists the complete history ofthe current contact and allows you to find other relevant messages. You also haveimmediate access to your responses and Quick Text snippets.
Cruise Control offers a powerful set of rules to assign message to differentprofiles. In this way you may choose to respond only to "Support" emails, forexample. The reply address and signature will be changed, and irrelevant Responsesand Quick Text will be hidden.
Other features include "Product Guessing"; if your company offers a selection ofproducts, their names (and any nicknames) can be specified and Cruise Control willdetermine which are mentioned in each message. With this it will personalize yourresponse and offer only relevant text snippets. Cruise Control also allows messagesto be forwarded to common recipients or recipient groups with a single selection.
Finally Cruise Control just does some things the way that all email software shoulddo, but frequently do not. For instance Microsoft Outlook cannot even recognize anemail address and will always prompt you to confirm the spelling of any that itfinds. Likewise it will invariably ask you to confirm the spelling of the name ofthe person you are replying to. Cruise Control does not make such elementalmistakes.
Further information, including evaluation copies, can be obtained from the Xequteweb site at www.xequte.com or from sales@xequte.com. Cruise Control runs on Windows95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vi sta and is priced at $49.50(US).
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Abou t Xequte Software
Founded in 1998, Xequte Software creates multimedia and email software for MicrosoftWindows.
Their leading products, MailList King, Smart Pix Manager and DVD PixPlay havereceived numerous top reviews and are some of the more popular products within theirmarket space. Xequte has also developed custom solutions for such companies asOfoto and Shutterfly.
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