Today's email products have changed little over the last decade, despite the significant increase in email usage. For a staff member of a "Virtual" Internet business, in particular, It is not unusual to respond to hundreds of emails a day. They will often find themselves answering the same questions they have responded to many times before and their email software offers little functionality to address this repetition.
It was this realization that spurred Xequte Software to develop Cruise Control, an email responding program built from the ground up to enhance the productivity of heavy email users. Functioning as a stand-alone email client or as an add-in for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Gmail, Cruise Control offers an optimized workflow, automatic guessing of the best response and quick access to commonly typed text.
Designed around the tenets of Email Productivity experts, a key function of Cruise Control is "Process All Messages" which displays each of your Inbox messages in turn and allows you to instantly reply, forward or archive them. If an action is not possible immediately, you can delay a message and it will return to your Inbox once it reaches its specified due date
Cruise Control saves you from "Email Déjà vu" by allowing you to easily save any text you have typed as a response template or text snippet. In this way you need only think of the best answer to a particular question once and it will be available for instant reuse in future messages. Cruise Control will even use Bayesian analysis to guess which response is relevant for each message based on your past replies.
Your stored responses are not limited to text, they can also include attachments, formatted rich text and embedded images and "Fields". Fields allow you to insert information that changes with each message, for example, the recipient's name (so you need never type "Dear Tom" again), the date, a download link for the product being discussed or even information retrieved from another program.
Whereas Responses are complete replies to a message, "Quick Text" are small snippets of text that you commonly type. The can be inserted into your messages with a single click, or even assigned to keyboard shortcuts or "auto-text". For instance, type "myweb" to insert a clickable link to your web page, "productimage"
At the heart of Cruise Control is a powerful Responding Window that provides all of the information you need to immediately dispatch a message. This includes the original message, complete with an integrated Attachment Viewer that displays common file formats without launching them. A search panel lists the complete history of the current contact and allows you to find other relevant messages. You also have immediate access to your responses and Quick Text snippets.
Cruise Control offers a powerful set of rules to assign message to different profiles. In this way you may choose to respond only to "Support" emails, for example. The reply address and signature will be changed, and irrelevant Responses and Quick Text will be hidden.
Other features include "Product Guessing"; if your company offers a selection of products, their names (and any nicknames) can be specified and Cruise Control will determine which are mentioned in each message. With this it will personalize your response and offer only relevant text snippets. Cruise Control also allows messages to be forwarded to common recipients or recipient groups with a single selection.
Finally Cruise Control just does some things the way that all email software should do, but frequently do not. For instance Microsoft Outlook cannot even recognize an email address and will always prompt you to confirm the spelling of any that it finds. Likewise it will invariably ask you to confirm the spelling of the name of the person you are replying to. Cruise Control does not make such elemental mistakes.
Further information, including evaluation copies, can be obtained from the Xequte web site at www.xequte.com or from sales@xequte.com. Cruise Control runs on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/
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About Xequte Software
Founded in 1998, Xequte Software creates multimedia and email software for Microsoft Windows.
Their leading products, MailList King, Smart Pix Manager and DVD PixPlay have received numerous top reviews and are some of the more popular products within their market space. Xequte has also developed custom solutions for such companies as Ofoto and Shutterfly.
