ActiveInbox
Transforms e-Mail Stream into Organized Tasks

The e-communication market is evolving at a quick pace owing to the startup explosion that is offering abundant services in the areas of social networking and mailing. “This combined with the BYOD trend is adding new responsibility on the shoulders of C-level executives to maintain a fine balance between employees’ freedom of choice and organization’s work efficiency,” begins Andy Mitchell, Founder of ActiveInbox. Such balance becomes more significant in the current scenario, where there is no rational way to track efficiency, and guarantee a consistent service experience with customers and vendors. Helping organizations stay efficient and focused, ActiveInbox introduces an add-on for professionals working on Gmail, to turn emails into clearly defined tasks and projects. The tool plays the role of a task manager to guide user across several phases of work completion.

ActiveInbox integrates task organization with communication and collaborative solutions for effective Business Process Management (BPM). “For most people, the inbox is their to-do list—they either ask people to do things, or do it themselves. They thus face two poor choices: copy the tasks into another tool to be tracked, or let the things sink into the inbox, never to be seen again,” explains Mitchell. Such overlooked priorities result in forgotten or missed mails thereby causing reputational harm for the organization. ActiveInbox turns Gmail into a core daily task manager to deter users from wasting time duplicating task lists across multiple tools. “You can get things out of the inbox—which is a constant barrage of interruption and chronologically ordered chaos— into sensible buckets like ‘Today’ and ‘High Priority’ and ‘Project X’,” states Mitchell.

As a tangible proof of ActiveInbox’s efficient functionality, a senior executive and manager of several teams capitalized on the expertise of ActiveInbox to schedule, prioritize, and track every project.The client faced impediments while coordinating with different teams—all using their own separate project management tools and external vendors. The lack of flexibility between multiple tools posed problems for manager to gain project updates and consistent information from teams.

We have developed our solution with an intention to bridge the chasm between email and the other task management tools

The challenge was finally mitigated by ActiveInbox as it could filter the entire email stream to reorganize different notifications and information. “Gmail, being at the center for daily workflow allowed our client to manage diverse projects from one single place,” acknowledges Mitchell.

ActiveInbox moves important emails from inbox to project lists, enables users to summarize long conversations into bullet points so that they need not re-read them, and provides functionality to send later, so late night workers can schedule the emails to go out in the morning. Such strong portfolio of ActiveInbox’s functions is a by-product of company’s experimental nature where every work-initiative starts with hypothesis, outcome expectations, and inputs from customers. “Once a request has been made by user, we get to the core of concept, understand what we are really trying to solve, and subsequently make product changes,” says Mitchell. The experimentation also results in the fat of features being trimmed: “there’s a tendency towards bloat, which makes pursuing simplification all the more important,” Mitchell added.

A tremendous zeal to innovate faster than competitors, and offer excellent customer support throughout the client partnership is what that invigorates ActiveInbox to stay distinguished. The company is embarked on a mission to bridge the gap between email and the other project management tools. This initiative will continue to add value to the company’s culture, which constantly endeavoured to ensure high level of satisfaction among clients.