Product Reviews

Despite the bundling of Mail, Address Book and iCal with Mac OS X 10.2, Entourage remains the king of personal time management packages on the Mac. But that doesn't mean it's without fault, and for anyone who deals with numerous emails on a daily basis, it can be daunting trying to keep track of discussions, threads and projects.

This is where Six Degrees 1.5 from Creo comes in. The software works with Entourage X to give users a better view of how contacts, emails and files are associated. The idea is that you should be able to access the information that Entourage stores in its databases in a more free-form and useful way, and in the process manage your projects more effectively.

Six Degrees' interface is simple, consisting of a few buttons and a listing area underneath. The three main buttons represent contacts, email and files, which are the principal building blocks that the program allows you to work with.

The way that Six Degrees works is straightforward, subtle and highly effective. Highlight a message in Entourage, and Six Degrees shows you three things: all similar messages, usually in the same thread; related contacts; and any related files, such as email attachments.

The program instantly allows you to find files, contacts and emails by their relationships, rather than relying on your own imprecise memory. For example, if you're working on a project with a team of people, once you have found one of the individuals or emails associated with that project, you can simply highlight it, and then easily find every person, email and file related to it. Drag one of the found contacts or emails to the Focus bar at the top of the Six Degrees window, and that becomes the main 'focus' for finding information.

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The first version of Six Degrees had one significant problem: it was too slow on G3-based systems. We're pleased to report that version 1.5 has been greatly improved in this area, allowing the product to be used on slower machines and enabling newer machines to handle much larger numbers of emails and contacts.

Time team

Other new features in this update are the ability to filter searches by timeframe, leading to a more precise search of common terms; a button for sending mail directly from the main Six Degrees screen; and the ability to easily reveal the location of a file once you've found it. All of these are welcome tweaks, and Creo has managed to achieve them without cluttering the simple interface. And, thankfully, Creo has eschewed the trend of charging users for every upgrade, version 1.5 is free for users of version 1.0.

Once you start to use it, Six Degrees is an extremely simple and effective way of working. There's no doubt that it makes working with large amounts of email, and with projects where email is the main medium of communication, easier, quicker and more productive. It's also integrated with OS X's Finder, so that highlighting a file in the Finder will give you any files that are in the same folder, or contacts to which that file has been sent.

There are limits to this, though: file association largely works through a simple matching of the folder that a file is housed in, or through similarly named files that have been sent using Entourage. At present, this means that you can't use Six Degrees as a replacement for the Finder's Find File command.

The other significant limitation with Six Degrees is that it works only with Entourage, not with rival packages, such as Apple's Mail and Address Book. This is something that Creo should rectify - the number of users of Address Book and Mail may in the future exceed that of Entourage, as they are bundled with OS X 10.2.

If you own Entourage then Six Degrees is certainly worth a look. It's one of those programs that benefits from being tried, and thankfully Creo has made available a fully functional time-limited demo, which can be downloaded from its Web site. If you use Entourage, you may find that Six Degrees 1.5 transforms it from a useful tool to the centre of your project management.