Ezidoesit Enterprise

Email has made communicating with clients and friends a whole lot easier but if you are receiving screeds of messages every day it can become a major productivity killer.

A little-known program called Ezidoesit, from Kiwi software developer Starsoft Limited, aims to increase your productivity by making managing emails easier. The company claims on its Ezidoesit website (ezidoesit.com) that the program will save you an hour a day if you use its calendar, task prioritising and email organising functions to their full extent.

At PC World we tested the full-function Ezidoesit Enterprise version of the software with Microsoft Outlook 2003. Ezidoesit is also available in toned-down Professional, Standard or Lite versions (Ezidoesit Lite is on this month’s PC World DVD) and works with Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010.

During our testing we found Ezidoesit’s EziAnswer and task scheduling features particularly useful. EziAnswer allows you to right click on important emails throughout the day, nominating EziAnswer to record them so it can send a reminder to you at a time of your choice. At your chosen time, EziAnswer sends a message listing those emails that need to be answered by close of business.

Perhaps the most powerful feature of Ezidoesit is its task scheduling. This lets you nominate any email as an Ezidoesit Task, allowing you to schedule a start time, duration, deadline and reminders. Ezidoesit Tasks automatically enter themselves into the Outlook calendar and each can be given a priority, ranging from critical to low. Any higher priority task will take precedence over a lower priority task when displaying in the calendar. The task scheduler also allows you to set reminders for selected tasks, using your own personal audio files if you wish, and each task will schedule itself around your nominated lunch break, start time and home time.

The number of critical, high, medium and low priority tasks you have set can be displayed using the small Ezidoesit Elevator window, allowing you to make sure you have dealt with all critical tasks before moving on to less important ones. A number of graphical displays can be used to break down the priority of the tasks you have scheduled and how much free time you have left. The Enterprise version also includes a facility for email archiving, allowing you to backup your emails to a nominated folder on your PC or to an Ezidoesit email Archive Microsoft SQL server.

Unfortunately we encountered a couple of small bugs during testing, including problems closing or interacting with some overlapping windows while Ezidoesit was functioning. Ezidoesit uses separate windows to display most of its information and it appears many of these windows take precedence over others when open. That means interacting with one often requires you to close another and it often comes down to guesswork to determine which needs to be closed to make the desired window active.