It’s hard to remember how I ever got along without an email address. Email is essential, but for business communication, it’s far from perfect. There’s simply too much crap, and no foolproof system for keeping track of and organizing important conversations.  If this is a problem for you, Zenbe has a set of applications that can help you stay organized.

Organization is an important part of staying productive, and Zenbe makes it easy to keep track of your email inbox, your schedule, and collaborative projects.  Let’s start with email-in addition to basic capabilities like “starring” important messages, you can also set up “rules” that tell ZenBe what to do with certain messages, based on criteria like who they are from or what they are about.  Zenbe also threads your email conversations like Gmail does, but unlike Gmail, you can turn this feature off and on at will.

Finally, ZenBe allows you to save, organize and archive attachments separately, without having to worry about searching for the appropriate message. They also have a search feature for your inbox, another feature shared with Gmail that I find absolutely indispensable.  On the right side of the inbox, you can set up tasks and to-do lists. Tasks with due dates are automatically loaded on your calender, and from there you can share them with other people, if necessary. You can also view and update your Twitter account from the right side of the screen, and easily pull up your address book.

To help make collaboration with other people easier and more fun, Zenbe has a feature called Shareflow available that has been compared to Google Wave. To be clear, they get high points for innovation despite the resemblance because, as the blog post I linked to shows, they were working on Shareflow before Wave made its debut.  Sometimes, great minds really do think alike!

With Shareflow, you can post comments for people to read later, or have live conversations with people who are in the “flow” at the same time as you are. You can also easily share pictures, documents and links. If you request it, you’ll get an email digest delivered to your inbox to alert you of any developments to your flow.

By taking conversations out of the inbox, Shareflow makes it easier to keep track of what’s going on. Plus, when you take on a new group member, there’s no need to spend a lot of time updating them on where you’re at-they can just read through the flow to find out themselves. In this way, Shareflow is similar to Convos-but the ability to update comments in real-time is a definite plus.

All in all, I really enjoyed Zenbe. The user interface is attractive and nicely laid out.  And Shareflow simply rocks! However, a lot of what you can do in Zenbe you can also accomplish in Gmail via features like multiple inboxes, Gmail tasks, etc. Of course, with Gmail you do have to deal with ads-but I’ve gotten pretty good at screening those out. I do like the way that files and attachments are more accessible with Zenbe and the way they can be archived separately. That could be a real-time saver!

For me, the determining factor is simply that Gmail is free and Zenbe costs money, with plans ranging from $5.99-$12.99 per user per month. If I had an office or a team of people to manage, Zenbe might be worth it since the plans include the Shareflow feature, but since I’m flying solo, I’ll probably stick with Gmail.

What do you think of Zenbe? Is it worth it to you?

Our Rating of Zenbe

Tags: Email

Categories:web