“A New Way To Work” - all of us in the IBM mail space have heard the phrase and seen presentations but does it actually mean anything to me - a set in her ways mail and calendar user who just wants mail to work and be fast?

In the past few months I have been using Verse On Premise in its beta form as well as the beta versions of Verse for iOS.  I had previously played around with Verse in the cloud but since my 20 year old mail file is on our Domino servers, the majority of my mail and searching activity was done via Notes and Traveler.  iNotes was never a client of choice for me.  I don’t archive mail very often (alright never) and so there’s a lot of history there.

So what have I found? I absolutely love Verse.  It’s fast and the layout is clean but as promised there are features that are so ridiculously useful** they have literally changed how I work for example

1. Flagging for “needs action”  via a single click which then lets me set an action date for today, tomorrow, a week or other
2. At the same time I can add a  personal note to the  message that travels with it,  and is visible when reading it in Verse.
3. I can then remove the  message from my inbox by clicking on it.
4. Viewing just those messages that need action which are automatically categorised by “today”, “tomorrow” etc.
5. All of that, the action, the date, even the private notes transfer to Verse for iOS on my phone and iPad.

Add to all of this is the fact that it’s my same mail file on my same Domino servers. I could and can still open using the Notes client, using iNotes, even using Outlook if I want.  There are lots of things to enjoy about Verse and everyone works differently, but this is one group of features that live up to the hype of having tricked me without noticing into a new way of working 🙂

** no screenshots in here as it’s advanced beta still under NDA but the features have been shown publicly and hopefully will be in final product