There’s More Than Outlook Out There
Have you ever forgotten an important meeting? Or did you arrived at home and - doh! - forgot to get the milk? Then you should think about your own Personal Information Manager (PIM).
3 must have features of a modern PIM: 1. Enable you to easily manage your appointments, emails, contacts, tasks and notes 2. Allow you to work together in a team and share information 3. You should be able to work offline and sync all changed data when you’re online again.
For most users the high price of Outlook and the quite difficult setup of an Exchange server is the main reason not to take it. There are good alternatives to MS Outlook available, you just need to know what you have to look for. This is what a good PIM should have:
The most important task a PIM should do, is to manage your data. It needs to organize your appointments, store all your contacts and give you the possibility to create tasks. Look on your monitor. Do you see any Post-Its? Then take them away. A modern PIM should have notes, too. Last but not least, you need an email client to stay connected with all other people outside.
A good PIM should let share you your information. Imagine you need to set up a team meeting. Wouldn’t it be cool, when you can take a look on all others users and check when they all together have time for the meeting? This is what a good PIM should allow you to do. Of course there should be an option to classify items as “private” which only you can see.
A good PIM should sync all information between all users or computers. The data should be stored locally on every users computer and therefore could be accessed even when there’s no connectivity to the network. The result is, that you don’t need to stop your work. You can just continue and the program will sync the new or changed data with all other clients when the network is available again. This is how it should be.























