Aug 21, 2007
CircleUp, Inc., the leading provider of social communication services for online and offline communities, today announced the availability of a free downloadable toolbar for Microsoft Office Outlook. By integrating the free CircleUp service with Outlook, used by close to 18 million people worldwide, CircleUp extends its current consumer service to small business, home office and professional users to deliver significant productivity gains in email and group communications.
With up to 90 percent of collaboration occurring through email and up to 75 percent of an organizations knowledge assets stored in email messages*, the need for more streamlined and functional group communication is apparent. Instead of blasting an email to tens, hundreds or thousands of contacts, only to be inundated by a flood of answers, CircleUp enables office managers, event planners and administrators to send a question, announcement or information request to any size group and get back a single, organized result containing facts, decisions, links, photos and feedback that can be acted on immediately.
People who use CircleUp range from sports teams, classroom parent volunteers, and volunteer coordinators to grassroots political organizers and leaders of faith-based organizations. With the introduction of the CircleUp toolbar for Outlook there are many small business and office uses as well, such as:
- CircleUp everyone in the office to ask "What do you want for lunch?" with menus and links for the menu at the Chinese place attached. Get back a single, organized response with everyones order that can be emailed or faxed directly to the restaurant.
- CircleUp all of the employees in a business to ask "Will you be making a change to your benefits election during open enrollment?" and get back an orderly list of people who need the paperwork, instead of a ton of emails (and the risk that someones email might slip through the cracks).
- CircleUp 45 sales reps in the field to ask for suggestions on how to solve a thorny customer problem. Get back a single, organized result that can now be shared by everyone, and found quickly and easily for future reference.
- CircleUp 200 exhibitors participating in a trade show to get last minute information about logistics. Get back a single, organized result that can be output in a variety of different Microsoft Office applications instead of a blast of emails and IMs.
- CircleUp the manager, the traveler, the finance person and the CEO to say "Please approve the attached expenses." Get back a fast, easily tracked response from all parties and a permanent record of the approval that gets the submitter paid much more quickly.
- CircleUp two employees, three customers and one vendor to get final approval on the proof before it goes to production. Get a single, organized response from everyone involved and a permanent record of the approvals.
CircleUp boosts productivity in three ways:
- Reduce email volume - send one request to many people and get a single answer back
- Save Time & Effort - no need to open lots of emails to cut and paste the contents
- Share the Results - the group can share the summarized results and detailed responses in real time online, through email, and via RSS. Results can be printed, or exported to Microsoft Excel, and Adobe PDF, or directly imported back into Microsoft Outlook.
The CircleUp toolbar for Outlook contains a number of different features that allow any user to instantly see dramatic improvements in email productivity and time savings in every day tasks:
- A group leader can initiate a CircleUp or an announcement addressed to a group of any size, and create new circles directly from their contact folder in Outlook.
- Users can see the status and answers of all of the questions theyve sent and received without having to leave Outlook.
- The Grab function allows the user to select names and email addresses from a TO:, CC: or BCC: line in any old email and use them to create new circles and address questions.
- Users can add contacts to circles from AIM and Yahoo! instant messengers, and search for CircleUp questions and answers across CircleUp.
- Users can monitor their questions and answers through a Daily Result email, or in real-time through an integrated RSS feed in Outlook 2007 or any third party RSS reader inside or outside of Outlook.
The free CircleUp Toolbar for Outlook is available now for Microsoft Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 on Windows 2000, XP and Vista platforms.
Source: http://www.circleup.com
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