From: Tony Kan (tony.kan_at_clear.net.nz)
Date: Thu Jun 24 2004 - 14:44:02 PDT
Hi Jon
Really interesting comments. I practically live in MoreInfo but I have
always been interested in finding better methods of organising myself and
drifted through a lot of PIMs along the way. Just some comments below
because contact management and project management figure prominently in my
work as well. I briefly tried AN but thought that too much of the info was
being stored in its own proprietary files.
[snip]
History window in the Names. I used that single feature more than any other.
It was my "home" on my Newton, if you will, and neither of the other
products offered it, so, since AN4.0 was too buggy, and the new features it
offered were the most buggy, I decided to stick with AN 3.
TJK: MI has a button at the bottom of its Names called "show". Once
tapped, it presents three choices: card, show all and logbook. Logbook is
where contact history is contained. As long as you link activities and
notes to the contact, all activity history appears here. Double tapping any
item opens it. You can adjust the time horizon to include as much history
and also upcoming events, todos, calls and other activities as you want.
Unlike you I'm only just discovering how powerful this is and I find myself
spending more and more [no pun intended] in this window. Furthermore, in
the names app on tapping the MI button, there is a form called "log" which
is useful for recording an activity after it has happened.
Back on the PC, Lookout and Notes2Notes get my information onto the desktop
and then another PIM, Enfish Professional 6 takes over from there. EP
indexes the hard drive and has viewers for most popular file formats (MS
Office, rtf, pdf, html, MS Outlook contacts and notes). It supports boolean
searches and returns its search results in rank order of relevance. I can
type in the name of my client and anything written with his/her name in it
comes up in a split second. This is my "logbook" screen on the PC.
EP6 allows you to create a "portal" with all the project/contact's key
information so that a search doesn't have to be carried out everytime you
want to start managing a particular project or client relationship.
I came across it in a book called The Personal Efficiency Program I think it
cost me US$5-10 (the book that is!). They talked about how this program
could let you dump stuff on your PC and not worry about where because it
retrieved your information so quickly. The program came out a couple of
years ago and got a recent patch update last year. I got it on special at
US$45 but the list price is more than that. It got a bad rap because there
were reports of instability when it first came out, probably because it
taxed the resources of most PCs at that time. Now, with CPU speeds over
500Mhz and onboard RAM around 256Mb being common I've found it to be stable
and very useful.
As an aside: Lookout seems to choke when the number of names got over 600
and I noticed that the Outlook database got corrupted with various contacts
having their details scattered more or less randomly amongst other contacts.
Although I synch both ways, the problem never presented on the Newt. So I
have adopted a regime of updating the Newt and then transferring a clean
database to Outlook by way of Lookout each time by first removing all
contacts before the synch. I had noticed other listers had mentioned
reliability problems with Lookout but until now and after nearly 2.5 years
of use, its happened to me but I'm not sure if the symptoms presented are
the same as for others.
[snip]
I think that I concluded that if your life involved projects with several
people, and you needed to
integrate info from several apps, that MI was your best bet, but if you were
a project person needing powerful to do features, then DateMan should be
your choice, but this was years ago, 1997 or 1998...
[snip]
TJK: Here's a trick for project managers: One can treat a project as a
contact and link it to the client. Then all activity relating to that
project can be linked together and the logbook becomes a way of monitoring
historical and upcoming activity.
I looked at Blueprint but a lack of MS Project compatibility put paid to
that. Unfortunately the need to share information with clients and other
service providers makes project management more convenient on the desktop.
Project tracking and updating means that I have to review the project in the
Newton frequently to keep the upcoming schedule up to date. I wish there
was a way of automating that process.
I thought about synchronising Outlook with MS Project but when I looked into
it the tool called Project Central needed MS SQL 2000 Server; which seemed a
little OTT for me.
Anyway, HTH somebody
Cheers
Tony Kan
Christchurch
New Zealand
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