Whatever Happened To PIMs? Clearing Your Desk and Mastering Your Domain Eric Grevstad
Wed 1/2/02 -- WordPerfect fans can still muster a quorum to vote against Microsoft Word and a few Lotus 1-2-3 users loyally continue to resist Excel. But another, once-thriving software category -- one you'd think would persist as more personal or individualistic than word processors or spreadsheets -- has almost vanished from the market. That's a shame, because your PC time is probably less productive than it could be with the right personal information manager (PIM).
Back in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days, PIMs -- applications that manage your appointment calendar, address book, to-do list, and miscellaneous notes or jottings -- were among the main reasons for getting a computer. Sidekick, a set of desk accessories that popped up at the press of a hot key, introduced the acronyms PIM and TSR (terminate and stay resident) to a generation. 1988's Lotus Agenda acquired a cult following of users who to this day swap instructions for downloading and installing its 720K DOS floppy disk images from Lotus' FTP site. Other diehards still cling to discontinued programs like Ecco Pro and PackRat.
Two forces have pushed PIMs off today's radar. One is the popularity of personal digital assistants (PDAs); handheld Palms, Handspring Visors, and Pocket PCs offer contact and task lists and calendars with beeping alarms at the tap of a stylus. (The Palm Desktop software that comes with Palm PDAs is a useful if minimal PC PIM.)
The other is the same juggernaut that's rolled over WordPerfect and 1-2-3: Microsoft Office, the PC-bundled, default-corporate-buy suite that's sucked the air out of the productivity software market. Office comes with Microsoft Outlook (also, but almost never, sold separately for $109), which combines basic personal information management -- i.e., an appointment calendar, contact list or address book, and tasks and notes areas -- with an e-mail client.
Office's Common Denominator
Outlook has many good points, but is also a favorite target of Microsoft-bashers' "merely good enough to get by on the brand name" taunts. The e-mail client is capable -- apart from its abysmal record of security holes and rank as the number-one target of virus and worm writers (Outlook 2002 and a recommended patch for Outlook 98 and 2000 close the worst of the virus doors via defaults that reduce e-mail attachment functionality).
The address book and appointment calendar aren't the most intuitive or attractive, but offer plenty of room to enter information about business contacts and a choice of daily, weekly, and monthly views of your schedule, including recurring appointments and reminder alarms. You can search for information in each Outlook module, though searching all of Outlook (to find, say, both Jane Doe's phone number and your meeting with her on February 6) involves a "advanced search" dialog box full of fields and variables.
Outlook teams with Microsoft's Exchange to move beyond PIM functionality into the related but enterprise-sized realm of groupware, letting workers share documents and send, accept, or decline invitations to meetings booked by scanning multiple users' schedules for free time slots. In this corporate cosmos, it competes with IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell's GroupWise. Salespeople rely on contact managers like Interact Commerce Corp.'s Act, which replace simple address books or contact lists with deep databases in a sort of bridge between PIMs and heavyweight CRM (customer relationship management) solutions.
But for most individual and small-office users, all this leaves a crack big enough to drive a truck through -- or at least for important dates or names to fall through, as information stacks up in scribbled slips of paper or Post-It notes stuck to monitors. Aren't there any better tools than Outlook to keep folks organized, on track, and on schedule?
There are -- several nifty, handy PIMs, and at least one somewhat pricey ($150) but radically simple and addictive productivity-doubler called Info Select.
