A First Glance at Creo Sixdegrees

I always love installing new software. Often I do it just because I want to try out something new. Today's target was Creo Six Degrees. I have been intrigued by it since I saw an ad for it in Wired Magazine about half a year back. Bottom line: Six Degrees promises to keep track of your information. Ever wonder who you sent that file to? When did you do it? What more did you say? Want to find that lost e-mail from Peter? Six Degrees promises to answer them all! (That is; if you are using Microsoft Outlook.)

I wanted to try Six Degrees because I all too often see myself sifting through virtual piles of e-mail searching for "this email from X containing piece of information Y" or "this file that I sent Z". I recieve a fair amount of e-mail, not extreme amounts, but still, more than enough to make it hard to keep track.

Download and Installation
Six Degrees is not free, but it offers a 30-day full-featured trial version, which is what I went for. It downloads at about 14MB, which is not all too bad in my opinion. Download speed at about 45kB/s was somewhat slow, but in the end not too bad. Installation was easy. Click-and-install as you can do in Windows only. :)

During installation you have to open Microsoft Outlook, and you will be able to select which folders you would like to have Six Degrees index. The more mail you have the better (ok, it will take more time to index, but still), so I added some old archive PSTs to Outlook before indexing, having a years worth of e-mail indexed proved to be useful.

I recommend rebooting, but it is not necessary.

General use
After you have indexed your e-mail you are ready to go. Your main tools will be the small Six Degrees icon in the SysTray and an optional Legend (which can be made transparent) somewhere on your desktop. Both tools are useful. Although I never like too much software on my desktop (having a 1024x768 notebook my desktop is a scarce resource), I really like the legend. Select a file in explorer and it will show you how many people, e-mail messages and other files that are related to it. Select an e-mail message and it will count related e-mail, people and files. To display a category of related items just click at the colored icon.

When you click the colored icon in the Legend the Six Degrees main window will open and you can go on to read the message, open the file (and maybe the contact -- but I have had some problems getting that to work properly). My first impression is that the main window had very few features. There are almost no icons, no menus or anything to do except to focus on the items that are displayed. Select an item and press Ctrl+M to put focus on that item.

So, does it find relevant information. YES. It finds accurate information, and is very good at doing this. Especially effective is the e-mail/people part, but also the file-system part of the application is working well. Finding out who has received a file as an attachment etc. is indeed a breeze. I am not entirely sure how accurate it is, but I believe accuracy is decent.

Weaknesses
The main weakness is the lack of 'advanced features'. I would love to be able to do multiple searches to narrow down the resultset, as well as to better filter out false positives which tere are some of at times. Not too many, but still there is room for improvements.

Six Degrees comes with a build-in web-portal that is built around Tomcat. The portal is a nice idea, but still rather useless as it is not connected well enough to the main application. It is also a big question-mark security-wise allowing external users (that is, non-localhost hosts) access to the webserver. Time to put up that Windows XP firewall.

Using Outlook 2000 the integration with Contacts is just too poor. It complains that it does not find an e-mail address associated whenever I click a contact. Improvements here please.

Conclusions
It might be kind of too quick to reach a conclusion after an hour, but so far I have found the application to be very useful, and with some further work I believe it will be brilliant. With a pricetag of €69 I am still unsure if I am going to purchase, but again, I might. :) (But why does the download version cost the same as the boxed-version? Silly...)

Posted by ludvig at July 11, 2003 08:16 PM | TrackBack