Everything you need to know about Vable Inbox

Your end users expect library and information people to add value to incoming messages. However, information people need to do this efficiently and Vable Inbox is the right tool for the job.

Professional, cohesive branding is crucial to raising the profile of the library and information service. Vable Inbox’s dual flexibility gives you different presentation options. Redirected emails are cleaned up and viewed in their original format, and extracted content can be included in a unique firm-branded newsletter. 

The team at Watson Farley & Williams highlighted the branding potential of their current awareness. They confirm that "the professional, fresh design of the email alerts has elevated the I&R team’s output. They have expanded and enhanced their current awareness capability".

Vable Inbox provides information managers with options. Current awareness aggregation platforms are designed to handle incoming content in many formats. From a technological point of view, RSS feeds are the most convenient way to add content. There are handy Chrome extensions to help you locate them on a website, but unfortunately not every website has an RSS feed.

Thankfully there are alternate ways of importing information. Email remains a consistent way of alerting people to new content on websites. It used to be a challenge to extract content from emails, but Vable Inbox makes it easy. It doesn’t matter if emails contain attachments, weblinks or just a single item of full text news, it can all be added directly to Vable’s InfoPro current awareness platform.

Vable Inbox was extensively reviewed by one of the independent researchers at Jinfo. According to Jinfo, Vable Inbox allows information workers to keep "hundreds of employees informed with content that is pertinent to them specifically while reducing the 'white noise', redundancy and content overload."

The presence of this type of email management platform also helps to highlight the valuable role of an information manager or librarian as someone within an organization who can analyse and redirect only the most authoritative and pertinent information

Another key value of this product is usage reporting. Simple insights, such as click rates, help information managers understand the reading actions of end-users. Knowing how end users are interacting with email content empowers information professionals to make data-driven decisions such as knowing which email subscriptions are worth their money.

Such feedback is, according to Jinfo, "invaluable".

The current awareness case study featuring Dinsmore demonstrates how Vable Inbox can inspire information confidence and remove any fear of missing out. Tim Hennies, Library Director at Dinsmore, said that, 

Vable is a great tool for emailed content aggregation and a fantastic solution for the way Dinsmore delivers this particular type of client litigation alert.

Updates from key publishers are emailed into Vable Inbox and the content extracted. Once it is in the Vable platform, a simple company search is applied across the sources and set to run on a daily basis. If the attorneys don't receive a Vable alert in the morning, there has been no litigation activity and they don’t need to scan through any other information.

Business cases provide the real detail behind your library and information department strategy. As such, they are probably the hardest document to write because you are directly targeting your organisation’s C-Suite. Making a case for new resources is a challenge because your organization’s senior business and finance teams want to know how such an investment will benefit the organisation.

Business planning and business cases require written preparation and a substantial investment of time by the library and information manager.  The team at Vable appreciate that you might welcome assistance with this initial process. The document we have put together has been created with a full Vable implementation in mind. It includes a project overview, who is taking responsibility for what, how the project will strategically align with your organization, as well as a Cost Benefit Analysis.

Although Vable Inbox is a standalone product which helps make the most of your email subscriptions, it can be used in conjunction with Vable InfoPro and MyVable. Once you have set up your Vable Inbox rules to extract content, that content will become articles within the platform. This is private to your organisation so that no one else can access your content.

Unless a license restriction has been applied to a Vable Inbox rule, all content extracted from emails becomes searchable. For your convenience, you do not need to specifically select the email rule as a filter to include it in your searches and Topics. However, should you wish to narrow your results to include content from specific email rules, you can do so by applying the rules as filters.

MyVable is an invaluable add-on which enables end users to discover and subscribe to forwarded emails and other current awareness resources curated and managed by their knowledge and information experts. With this feature, Vable offers a more efficient and personalized approach to consuming content, tailoring the user experience to fit the needs of each individual.

News monitoring and aggregation platforms like Vable are central to the dissemination of targeted external information which contributes directly to the success and growth of your business. Vable encourages and enables collaboration across organisations. Your information specialists can identify and include the most valuable industry news sources, then curate current awareness content.

Newsletters and alerts generated by current awareness systems ensure that your library and information service branding is automatically presented every time you send an email. Even fully automated alerts are specific to your template requirements. We recognise its importance because it is one of the first questions the Vable team will ask you when you sign up for a free trial, “what branding do you want your newsletters to contain?”

One library and information professional explains the importance of branding; "alerts are branded and sent out from the library, so we regularly appear in the lawyers’ inboxes". These alerts drive engagement because they sometimes reply to the alert asking for something similar to be set up - on a slightly different topic or geographic scope.

You should always brand your product and services. The alert you are sending to internal or external users is not just about adding colors and a logo. You are delivering aggregated content originally created by third-party publishers, but you are making it your own by expert annotation, editing and content selection - let people know that you evaluated the content, made selections, and are monitoring it to build trust in your efficient and effective delivery.