A Zimlet for Highly Effective People: Task Reminders
Posted on August 12, 2009
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In the last 3 posts in the Power Zimlet series we covered tools for improving email and contacts: contact organizer, ignoring conversations and attaching emails to messages. Today we are turning to a new application in ZCS that many, including myself, find incredibly useful - Tasks.
Zimbra Collaboration Suite has had the Tasks application for some time now, but as of yet it doesn’t support reminders. And without reminders it is hard to keep track of Tasks at hand, making it sometimes hard to use. This new Zimlet fills that gap by providing a reminder digest once a day.
Zimlet 4: Tasks Reminders
How the Zimlet works:
Once a day (when you first login), this Zimlet searches for your Tasks (and shared Tasks) and displays a list of all Tasks that are overdue, in-progress, etc. This list is shown only for Tasks that are due 2-weeks (14 days) from today and continues to show for 2-weeks post due-date. This date range is user configurable.
Additional Features:
- It also has a “Send Email” Feature, which helps in follow up of tasks. For example: You might want to send mail to someone asking why they are lagging behind their tasks, etc.
- You can click on the Zimlet and press “Show Again” to see the Reminder dialogs again anytime.
Below is a picture of the Tasks Reminder dialog that appears (sorted by date urgency).
As usual, you can get this and learn more in the Zimbra Gallery.
Up next: Emoticons in Email
Ignore (unimportant) conversations
Posted on August 12, 2009
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Power Zimlet #2
Every now and then we get messages from co-workers and others that we are not interested in. It gets annoying especially when it becomes a huge back-and-forth thread of conversation. And we fall into this gray-area where we don’t necessarily want to manually filter them or, we don’t want to see such conversations either. So we end-up constantly deleting them as and when they arrive.
For example: I am a front-end engineer and I belong to a broad-distribution list called ‘engineering’. And although I usually read messages from this distribution list, at times I see message-threads regarding server-side engineering or something else that I don’t necessarily care about.
So ideally, we should be able to click-a-button to unsubscribe or ignore a ’specific’ conversation but continue to get other messages as usual.
Now with this Zimlet you get a ‘ignore’ toolbar button. When you click on the ‘ignore’ button, this Zimlet takes the subject of the message and creates a filter ‘on-the-fly’ and also move that message to “Ignored Messages” folder. Because of this filter, we will prevent any future messages of that thread from showing up in your Inbox or your folder.
And secondly, as you know, since such message threads lasts only for a week or two so, we expire these filters every 10-days(by default). This expiration date also helps in keeping the filter from bloating.
PS:
- You need to manually Turn-ON the Zimlet by clicking on it in the left-panel.
- We only create a single filter called “Move these messages to Ignored messages Folder” and we add/remove ’subject’ conditions within this filter.
For more information and to download:Visit Zimlets Gallery
The Power Zimlets Series: Five New Tools For Zimbra Users
Posted on August 12, 2009
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As a long-time Zimbra developer and employee, I’ve spent countless hours each week using Zimbra email. I love the overall experience, especially because I have been able to tailor it to my personal style using Zimlets. They are easy to create and over time I have built quite a few. So without further ado, the following is the first of a 5 post series featuring new Zimlets which I think are incredibly useful and empower Zimbra users.
Zimlet 1: Attach Emails
Every so often I miss the ability to easily to attach an earlier email while composing an new email message. This Zimlet does just that, it adds an “Attach Email” tab in the Attachments dialog in Mail Compose. Once you click on the Email tab you can search for emails that you want to attach or just scroll the list. You can even ‘browse’ for emails by clicking on the folder tree. Finally, something I really like is with any of these methods you can also select multiple emails and attach them simultaneously.
Here is how it works… assume you are composing or replying to an email and now you want to attach some earlier email…
1. Click on the Add Attachment Button
2. Click on the Attach Mail tab
3. Search or browse for emails (in this case below I’m looking in the Sent folder)
4. Select the email(s) you want to attach
5. Click Attach button
You can repeat these steps again if you want for more emails or other attachment types.
For more screen caps and the download check out the Zimbra Gallery.
Note - you need ZCS 5.0.15 and above or 6.x to use this Zimlet.
Next post… Ignoring Conversations.
eBox Platform 1.2 is ready to download
Posted on August 12, 2009
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Hi fellow eBox users!
You favourite development team proudly presents the availability of eBox platform 1.2. This release represents a big leap towards our goal of providing the best and most complete easy-to-use open source unified server for SMEs.
You can read more about this new release here.
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