Product Reviews

It's rare that a piece of software comes along that isn't easy to pigeonhole. Occasionally, software is not just hard to put into a category, it's hard even to describe what it does in fewer than 15 words. Six Degrees is one of these products.

As the name might suggest, Six Degrees is all about making connections. It uses your Entourage mail database as a source for the links it makes between files, allowing you to navigate between these connections and root out the exact file, email or contact you want.

Click on an email in Entourage, and Six Degrees presents you with a list of emails related to the one you've chosen. These can be emails in the same thread, ones with similar titles, or ones to or from the same person or group of people. This in itself is far quicker and more effective than the Search method that you can use in Entourage to find threads of mails.

But that's just one of Six Degrees' views. Click on the Person button in the Six Degrees browser, and it shows you all the people connected with that mail message, whether they are recipients or senders of any part of the email thread. Click on the File button, and it shows any attachments - both sent and received - related to the email. Find a mail that you're interested in, and you can drag it to the Focus field in the Six Degrees interface and see all the other mail, contacts and files associated with it.

The links effect
As well as working in Entourage, the associative powers of Six Degrees also work with the Finder. Highlight a document in your Documents folder, and Six Degrees checks to see if you've emailed anyone a copy of that document, and shows you who, when and where you sent it. It's all very simple, and yet very effective at the same time.

In fact, it's so useful that after a while you come to rely on it to manage a lot of information. Although Entourage makes a decent job of some of the links between people

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and emails, it doesn't deal with documents automatically, and it doesn't have a coherent view for managing multiperson email threads. Six Degrees provides this, and does an excellent job of it.
In use, your experience of Six Degrees will depend partly on the speed of your Mac. Creating and maintaining links between potentially thousands of emails, people and files is a processor-intensive business, and although it's possible to use it with G3-based machines, it limits the amount of email you can realistically manage. Using an iBook running at 500MHz, we found Six Degrees able to cope with around 1000 messages before beginning to slow too much. With 2000 messages to deal with, it noticeably slowed down many of Entourage's features. If you have tens of thousands of messages and want to manage them all, you'll definitely need a significantly faster processor.

Filter through
Fortunately, Six Degrees allows you to specify which email folders you actually want it to watch, so you can limit the number of messages you're asking the application to cope with at any one time. Given that there's no way to filter what Six Degrees shows on top of the normal view, this is almost certainly a good thing. If you've sent hundreds of messages to the same person and kept every one of them under watch, you probably wouldn't want to see all of them at once.

Six Degrees is one of the most innovative and useful pieces of software we've seen for quite some time. It's not perfect, though. In addition to the speed issues on G3-based Macs, there are some obvious features that are missing, such as the ability to highlight a file in the list and open up the enclosing folder, rather than the file itself.

But this is a first release, and Creo will undoubtedly be adding features to Six Degrees as time goes on. Hopefully, the company will manage to retain the simplicity of the product while adding functionality, as it is this simplicity that allows virtually anyone to get to grips with it within a relatively short space of time.

Degree of satisfaction
Overall, however, Six Degrees is a very worthwhile addition to the range of Mac OS X-only products. If you use Entourage, you are likely to find it extremely useful, and the introductory price of £79 looks like a sensible one. Even if you're not tempted to part with your cash, it's worth considering downloading the demo version from Creo's Web site and finding out for yourself exactly how this package can improve your use of Entourage.