OfficeTalk development in progress

I thought the blog site would be a good forum to keep existing OfficeTalk customers up to date with OfficeTalk developments taking place at Softalk. It would be fair to say that OfficeTalk has suffered from a few years of neglect, but now that we're back in control of the product direction, we're hoping to reverse that trend and breath new life into it over the next few months and years.

Our plan is to release two new versions over the next few months. The first one, version 4.5 is planned for the end of November. The next version, 4.6, is planned for the first half of 2006.

Version 4.5 will fix a few of the more irritating bugs (particularly surrounding email) that customers have reported and will also give OfficeTalk a much needed facelift. The facelift is a result of a study performed on new potential customers, whose first impression of the product was that it looked dated and as a result made them lose confidence in it. Some screen shots of what the new version looks like are shown below.

Calendar mode


Contact mode


Mail mode


Project mode

We've swapped the old top mode bar for the newer more familiar Office XP/Outlook shortcut bar, such that mode specific toolbars now default to the top of the screen. This toolbar can be dragged to wherever you like. It can even float. The blue theme and other colors are optional and you can change them in the profile. Let us know what you think. Feedback to this blog. We've nearly completed the facelift and we're about to tackle email related bugs, where OfficeTalk sometimes struggles to decode certain messages and in other cases crashes. If you've got some really annoying bugs that you really want to see fixed in 4.5, feedback the details to this blog and we'll see what we can do.

Version 4.6 will address many more of the issues that you have reported in your feedback to us.

We've also been busy training our support staff to handle OfficeTalk support. We're nearly there and hope to be able to offer support contracts very soon. We'll let you know as soon as we're ready.

Comments

[Graham]

I dont know whether these have been brought up in relation to email.

1. When restoring deleted emails for certain users the emails do not appear back in mail folder but are removed from the deleted folder.

2. When a large email is returned due to a non-delivery error this tends to crash the system when the message is clicked on. Then trying to delete the email will also crash the system. I don't know whether it actually crashes but just takes a very long time to delete.

[Stuart Bruce]

Graham, for your second point we've had that problem (when sending very large photo files). I don't think it crashes but it does take a VERY long time. You might want to use the feature that stops OfficeTalk storing copies of sent attachments in its database. I think from memory that's what worked for us.

[Stuart Bruce]

The problem that I have with email is sometimes getting duplicate messages and that sometimes you need to hit F5 to refresh before you can delete messages.

[Philip Hall]

When e-mails are generated using a template (I assume html), the spell check feature, when replacing mispelled words, prefixes the word with an extra letter. Is a cure for this planned?

[Florian]

Same problem as Stuart, very often emails are not deletable or moveable without refreshing the screen (F5) first. Also, when replying to emails, the font seems to default to Times New Roman, rather than adopt the same font as the original email.

Facelift looks stunning - well overdue - THANKS!

[keith]

One problem we have (and on customer sites) is that OT will crash if we try to delete an email at the start of day. Once OT is restarted deletion works normally. It is only the first deletion that causes problems on a regular basis.

[Ian Pressman]

When two different users edit the same document for a contact OfficeTalk does not warn the user that the document is already being edited by another user.

So what happens is that user 1 saves their changes but when user 2 saves theirs, it overwrites user 1 data and user 1 data gets lost.

All users are Xp on Word 2003

[Alex Walker]

It would be very useful to have a list of issues raised by users of OfficeTalk so that we can see what has been raised and what hasn't. I am happy to share my list with other users.

[robert]

3 suggestions for improvement
1. To ba able to add an email address to the Junk mail list straight from the Mail function. At present one has to write ir down on a piece of paper than enter the Jonk mail list and Add it by typing the address. There must be a better way

2.A Custom Fields placed in a Window on the screen, say in the Mail module, one cannot sort the records in alphabetical order of that Custom Field. It does put it in some kind of order but not alphabetical.

3. A report writer than can be customized would be nice

[Graham]

Does anybody have problems with their spell checker not functioning ? We get an "error reading dictoniary index"

[John Prior]

Are there any intentions to include a rules bases Email filtering system in Office Talk to stop SPAM-mail.

[Karen Marshall]

Something that I would find useful on OfficeTalk is the ability to enter an ongoing task. Some tasks that I need to do regularly but would still like in my task list and be reminded to do, weekly for example.

[Jim Holliday]

As stated earlier we have great problems sending large jpg files. I now use outlook for this, but would much prefer to use OT and keep everything together. I do not have any problems with small thumbnails etc. Also in calendar mode would it be a possibility of changing the colours of different appointments? i.e. different types of appointments on different colour backgrounds.

Next version screen shots look great...

[Paul Cheshire]

Is there a list of fixes/enhancements planned for Office Talk available?
For email-
Different 'signature' for internal/external emailing.
Easier systems for spam, out of office/holiday response.
An archiving of email was planned by Sareen, will this be continued?
We have a 13Gb OT database at present mainly due to users now keeping all email/attachments.
Have any tools be planned/available for extracting data from OT (Sareen has some available) i.e. contacts , documents, email/attachments?

[Andrew Third]

Looking forward to the revamp which looks good. On Email problems -our check names function doesn't work except when we disable the internet mail service - not very useful. Also we recently deleted an internet mail service. All the contacts designated for that service moved to the alternative service automatically but don't actually work until we go back into their contact properties and confirm the new service. Anybody had these problems or suggest any solutions? Thanks

[Margaret]

We like to put categories on emails relating to projects relating to costs. That is fine but we cannot then sort or filter by the category column. It would be helpful to add this function, also the ability to filter by read/ unread mail.

[Mike Spencer]

Hi, I can't wait to get my hands on the latest version of Office Talk. I use my laptop in an out of the office and have a lot of trouble sending mail when off-line. At work we use smtp.btconnect.com but on the road I have to use smtp.ntlworld.com or the mail.o2.co.uk smtp. I do hope this can be resolved? All works fine when connected to the office network in on line mode.

Another issue I have is that it would seem to be impossible to embed jpeg pics into hhtml message. When sent they appear the other end with a small red cross in a box. Sareen have told me that it is impossible to embed pics in the way I am trying. I have to attache them instead.

There seems to be an issue surrounding off-line and on-line editing and adding of e-mail addresses. New addresses created in one mode don't work in the other.

Finally, any idea what the upgrade costs are going to be?

Thanks.

Mike Spencer.

[Amnon Feiner]

Regarding workgroup mail, I run the lates version and find it quite bugged, especially when connecting Linux mail clients. Messages stay in the inbox and re-appear as not read, same goes for other folders. Seems to somewhat work well only with MSFT mail clients.

[Peter Toon]

Has anyone anyone solved the problem of having more than one mail service? I'm told there is a way around the problem, but understandably Sareen are reluctant to help on this one. Also is there any news on when support is being taken over by Softalk?

[Alex Walker]

Lost notes when moving appointment to another date/time slot in Calendar mode. Has anyone else had this problem, or is it just me?

[Florian]

Peter, we use a couple of mail services. One to collect mail directly from our ISP and another to collect mail from a server of an anti-spam company we subscribe to. They both work parallel without problems - not sure which problem you're referring to?