The Spoke Toolbars - FAQ

A.Spoke Outlook Toolbar offers extended functionality within Outlook, automatically gathering and maintaining Contact information in your personal Spoke Contacts for people you know. Spoke Contacts includes features that help you cultivate and leverage your personal and professional relationships.

• Many users report that their Spoke Contacts has become their best source of Contact information--with no manual effort on their part
• Spoke Contacts can alert you to contact people and maintain your network of good relationships
• Sales users often discover they already know people at a target company

Other benefits of the Spoke toolbars include:

• Increase Spoke's ability to understand your network and help you use it effectively to gain referrals and information
• Use "Instant Contact" to create Outlook Contacts from email signatures, keeping your Contacts up to date

In short, without the Spoke Toolbars, you are not harnessing the full power of your relationship network, and you are not using Spoke effectively.

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A. Spoke does not disclose contact information such as relationships, email addresses or phone numbers. This applies both to contact information for you, and contact information you have for other people. The information Spoke uses to validate your business contacts is only name, title, and company. Direct e-mail addresses are used internally for validation purposes but are not exposed to other Spoke members.

Spoke does provide a mechanism for people to send requests asking for contact information. If you receive a request, you decide whether to divulge the contact information. With Spoke, you maintain complete control of who gets your data, just like in the physical world.

To confirm this, just search for some person you'd like to reach. Spoke does not provide his personal Contact information. Instead, Spoke provides a way for you to request his Contact information from your network. The same is true when other people search for you or someone you know. Your relationship with your contacts is never visible to other Spoke members.

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A. Spoke works with your Microsoft Outlook to index email headers and signatures to find Contact information. Spoke is highly configurable, so you can choose which email to index and how much information to gather. Spoke writes the data to your private Spoke Contacts using secure HTTPS communication.

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A. Spoke Toolbar for Outlook includes Instant Contact, which searches for email "signatures" as you read your email. When Instant Contact finds a signature, it raises a subtle alert asking you whether to create a new Contact. If so, Instant Contact parses the signature and helps you create a new Contact or merge with an existing Contact.

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