ThinkingRock Forum

I'd like to suggest one simple form of integration with Outlook (and maybe other email clients) so to preserve the very nature of TR and yet help those of us who rely on Outlook for email and PIM functions.

My suggestion is to create a way so that an email from the Outlook client can be automatically moved as a Thought into TR Thoughts screen so that it is ready for the GTD style processing in TR.

This would help in my view as the move to TR would be smoother. After all, much of our thoughts and then actions derive right from email.

I am now an Outlook GTD plugin user as Outlook is the most importante source of info, and my hands-on experience shows that this kind of integration is very important.
TR implements very robustly the GTD processing schema, better than the GTD plugin does, and this is what I really like. Linking TR to Outlook in a simple and straigthforward way would be for me a big step ahead for TR.

Regards,

Aldo B

We will be shortly working on your suggestion. We were thinking that TR will look at a dedicated email address. The email body text will become the notes.

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Claire
ThinkingRock Analyst and Tester

Hi Claire,
the only point I see with dedicated email addresses is that corporate users may have problems/extra costs in getting a dedicated email address other than the standard one provisioned by company IT staff.
Maybe a light 0utlook plugin that adds a toolbar that allows selecting an email message from an 0utlook folder and sending it to the TR inbox (sort of "Send to TR" button) would be enough
Regards,
Aldo

You will be able to use any email account e.g yahoo, gmail

I see that there may be problems for TR connecting to the outside mail server and being blocked.

We will probably NOT be writing an Outlook plugin, but if anyone would like to do that we will help with the TR import side of things.

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ThinkingRock Developer

...Maybe I did not explain well. I'd not see need for. TR to contact any mail server. Simply, finding a way so that from outlook it is possible to move a message to TR-Inbox assuming that TR and Outlook are installed on the same PC. The Outlook side of the integration would need to know where TR db is and how to post a topic into the inbox. No ideas so far on the other side of the integration, ie from tr to outlook

Regards,
Aldo

I think there would be serious problems in the idea of outlook integration:

- What about portability? Many TR users are using Linux or Mac.
- What about standards?
- What about people who does not want to pay money for a piece of software like Outlook?

I think TR dev team should keep focusing on open standards and interoperability (XML, Java, ICAL, PDF reports, txt files, ...).

So the obvious way to get e-mail integration would be connecting to a mailbox via IMAP. That would be compatible with EVERY existing and future mail client on EVERY platform.

The outlook plugin you describe should be developed outside the core dev team if there is enough interest.

I got your point but I do not see the problem as the kind of integration I was thinking about would not imply modifying TR code thus binding it to a specific email client, outlook or other clients.

To keep it simple, I was thinking of a file based integration where the email client plugin writes/reads to/from TR database files, thus preserving 100% of TR independence on other pieces of software. And I fully agree with you this should be kept outside the mainstream development.

On the other side I am convinced that in the long run inegration pays a lot.

Many of us work intensively with email, and as many inbox items are originated from the email environment I think that some time saving mechanism to quickly move an email from the email client to the tr environment would be of great help.

Maybe a specification doc on how to act on tr database files to create an inbox item would be more than enough to begin

I know some tools which works with emails. But yesterday evening I was in the Internet and couldn't find anything. This morning to my good fortune I noticed on a soft blog a next software - pst export tool. And it solved my issues for seconds and utterly free of cost as I bore in mind. Besides it helped some of my familiars too.