I have decided to do a series of posts about my pending Verizon Fios install for both my own tracking, and for others to use for reference. If you are interested, read more after the break. I’m cutting this to spare space for those who don’t care.
Day: February 19, 2009
Zapproved Outlook Add-In Turns Emails into Smart Proposals
Windows only: Previously reviewed approval/consensus-helper Zapproved is out with an Outlook 2007 plug-in that turns your standard email drafts into approval requests through the Zapproved system.
As noted before, Zapproved offers a free account that lets you send up to five proposals per month to multiple recipients for approval. They can be as simple as asking your boss for the go-ahead to expense a chair, or team-wide approval of a logo, and the status of each proposal can be tracked at the Zapproved site.
Once you’ve got your account, grab the Outlook add-in and install it. If you don’t have the .NET 3.5 SP 1 Framework installed, it might be a good chunk of minutes (and one restart) until you’re good to go. The add-on also works only for Outlook 2007 at the moment, but the Zapproved team is working on a 2003-compatible edition.
Once you’re up and running, your new email composing windows get a Zapproved button in the upper-left (which can be moved or shrunk). Click the icon to turn a standard email into a Zapproved approval request instead, and you might just save yourself a lot of cross-message confusion. Zapproved takes the text of the email you’re writing and translates it to its system—see the cross-over chart at right for details. Two tiny buttons let you set due dates or project tags on a Zapproved message, and you can save a proposal as a draft for later review.
Zapproved’s Outlook Add-in is free, and requires a Zapproved account. If you’re interested in a premium Zapproved account without restrictions—and soon to host a dedicated iPhone app—enter the coupon code LIFEHACKER while signing up, and you’ll get a decent discount; a $12/month Premium account, for instance, goes down to $6/month.