This is a short tutorial on how to use Ofuz’s drop box feature to get sent email messages attached directly to your Ofuz contacts.

Once set up, when working on a lead, prospect or even a client, you will have all your associated notes and emails in one central  location.

Previously, to add a note in Ofuz you needed to type it in or copy and paste text. To make this simpler for email messages that you send and want to keep in Ofuz, we’ve implemented a drop box.

A drop box is a special email address that’s generated only for you. You can then use that email address in all of your email messages as a CC or BCC to keep a copy of your emails in Ofuz.

Ofuz will automatically detect to whom you are sending the message and then attach your email to that contact.

If that contact doesn’t exist it will be created and the email message attached to it.

This makes life much simpler – as we are working a lot with emails, it’s convenient to be able to create new contacts or organize your email messages without having to open another application.

You can find the Add Note drop box in Settings → add note drop box.

http://www.ofuz.net/drop_box_note.php

Email address to add notes in offuz

Ofuz drop boxes are like normal email addresses.

In the example below, I use my drop box to add a message I sent to Abhik via Ofuz.

As seen above, I’ve added the add note drop box as a BCC. Doing so will add a copy of the email as a Note on Abhik’s contact page in Ofuz.

Add the BCC to new emails and the emails you reply to, and you will be able to keep a pretty accurate copy of your conversations.

If the contact doesn’t exist in Ofuz, it will be created and then your email will also be added as a Note.

This is a feature that I use a lot because it enables me to find past conversations and information in a Contact-centric manner.

I didn’t want to have to add a drop box for each email I wrote, so I used a feature of my email software that will automatically add the add-note drop box email address as a BCC to all the emails I send.

To enable this in Mozilla Thunderbird, go in Edit -> Accounts -> Copies & Folders  then check the box “Bcc these email addresses” and enter your add note drop box.

This setting  will add a copy of all the messages sent and attached it to the  contacts in Ofuz.

Some email software like Gmail will also allow you to add a copy of all the email you receive.

In Gmail, go to Settings -> Forwarding / POP3/IMAP, and then in “Forward a copy of incoming email to”, enter your add note drop box.

You can also adjust this with filters and only add specific email messages to Ofuz.

That’s all on this feature.

To summarize, the add-note drop box can be found in your Ofuz settings in the Note Drop box tab.

It can then be used when you send emails to keep a copy of that email in Ofuz.

We have added a new notation in project discussions to address a specific participant. It looks like this: @firstname. It’s like a ping or a nudge.

You see, Ofuz has an approach to project management that’s very much oriented around discussions.

For us, managing a project is primarily about communication and secondly about metrics. Most of the project management software I’ve personally used in the past were mainly metrics oriented: hour per hour estimates, hourly rates, time line Gantt charts… Those are very cool features but most of the time they get in the way of doing the real work, which is communication.

So in Ofuz, projects are firstly a discussion with everybody involved in the project and secondly about metrics (yes, we have them, but it will be the topic of a future blog post)

In Ofuz, the project tasks have a flow of discussion; to make sure we do not miss anything it’s integrated with emails. So each new comment in a Tasks discussion sends an email to all of the project’s participants. The discussion can then continue with emails – if one of the participant does a Reply All, that email response will also be added to the Tasks discussion.

The result are very well documented tasks, with all the details, progress, and changes that are happening. Yet, it can also be overwhelming.

If you want to get the attention of a particular participant, you can address the discussion note to him.

Thus, we created a special notation. For twitter users it will look familiar: it’s @firstname or @lastname.

If you nudge a participant, s/he will receive a special email alert that is different than the regular tasks discussion alert.

It starts with: {Ofuz:Nudge}

The participant will receive it even if they have the email alert discussion turned off.

Inspired by the twitter notation, we felt that the “nudge” enables quick internal dialogue within a project discussion, limiting the message overload.

That’s all for today…

Let us know what you think.  Are you using the feature the same way we do ?

Most email marketing solutions today are limited to anonymous lists of emails to whom you blast general newsletters.

For your email marketing strategy to be efficient, it’s important to send the right message to the right person. The best way to do this is to organize your contacts by category, and then send personalized emails to each of those categories.

In Ofuz we call these categories Tags. They can be used as a category or list and are very flexible, and you can apply as many tags as you want with a contact.

Click on a contact’s name (below, see an example of a contact with Tags):

Now click on the Edit tags or Add tags link, and it will change to:

Here you can remove tags or add new ones. For example, I am adding the tag “new product info” to this contact to send him information and news about our products.

Once you have attached different tags to your contacts you can send a personalized email message to all of the contacts with a specific tag.

Ofuz email sending capabilities are simple but quite powerful. You can send personalized messages by first name and last name to as many contacts as you want, and create and reuse email templates in HTML with rich text formating. A cool feature unique to Ofuz is that you can send Facebook notifications for Facebook friends without email addresses.

To send a message to multiple contacts, go in the Contacts tab and click on a tag that contains the contact you want to send a message to.

Then click in the white part of a contact line. See the screen shot:

Select a contact

It will highlight the contact line in yellow and open a menu of options. Click the same way on all the contacts you want to send the message to.

If you want to select all of your contacts, click on the select all link.

Then click on the send message button and it will open the message composer.

Create an email message or customize an email template

You can see in this example the [firstname] placeholder that will be merged with each contact’s first name.

On the top right you have a drop down that may be empty at first; it’s all the messages you have saved as templates.

You can manage your email templates in Account Settings → Email Templates.

Just below the template list you have another drop down with a list of “fields”. Select one of them and it will add a special code in your email message that will be replaced by the contact equivalent.

For example, add first name and it will add this weird [firstname] code. Place it anywhere you want, and when you send your message it will replace that code with your contact’s First Name.

If you are not ready to send the message yet you can save it as a draft and come back later to finish it.

If it’s an important message that you plan to send to a lot of users, it’s better to first test it. To do that, save the message as draft, go into Contacts and select yourself, and then send the message to your self.

Once you are satisfied with the result, send the message to your appropriate list.