Review of Efficient PIM

My quest for an effective, long lasting and flexible PIM is probably going to be everlasting and a quest where I have to keep adjusting my objectives to what the market is able to offer. After all, if no one is going to use a product, except me, then no one is going to develop it.

An offering I’ve recently started to use is Efficient PIM. I’ve tested the portable version (ah, remember when all software was ‘portable’) and from opening the zip file, all went well. The package opens fast and cleanly, with an interface that is well structured, attractively designed and easily adjusted for colour scheme. It seems to be largely modelled on the screen look of Microsoft Outlook, which I’ve been using intensively for a few years at work (employer’s choice, not mine). Outlook offers a number of nice features which I find helpful, but it is, like most PIM-type packages, limited in a number of glaring ways.

I frequently drag between types of ‘folder’ in Outlook. For example, an e-mail that will require follow up by a certain day gets copied to that day in the calendar, with a reminder for action. I’d like to also copy it to tasks, to keep track of it in that interface too, but Outlook makes each copy a new instance, rather than a reflection of the single entry, so one ends up having to manage a number of items about the same thing, which gets confusing and so I don’t do this.

Efficient PIM doesn’t seem to have the capability to drag items between package elements in Outlook fashion; that is, to have an entry appear in a number of places, even as a copy, let alone an instance of the original entry.

The modules cover all the most used PIM areas: calendar, contacts, tasks, notes and some less often seen areas: passwords, with quite a good password generator, websites, which is rather basic. For instance, I’d like to be able to drag an address from the browser address bar into the website list screen and have it arrive with metadata such as time and date saved. As it is one has to cut and paste. Not a great problem, but why do I have to do the work that a computer should?

Each module appears to be thorough, robust and easy to use, which is great. But each largely stands alone, although contacts can be linked in to events, providing a handy cross linking of information.

I would like to see better cross linking between modules, so that the modules become views of the data, rather than the source of the data. So I could look enter an event, see it in tasks, if I checked that it was also a task, could link it to contacts, and see it against those contacts, as well as in the calendar.

I like to extend my PIM to projects, as well, and I’ve found that a good work around is to use the Contacts module for this. A project is entered as though it were a contact, and then I can join contacts to it, and pick it up as a ‘contact’ in events, etc. Very useful for tracking small projects.

A further refinement would be to improve the notes area to include hierarchical note organisation and enable tagging or categorisation of notes, or preferably both. But categorisation is useful not only for notes, but should extend to everything, as it does in Outlook. Although one cannot do much with Outlook categories. Hierarchical categories would be very helpful.

Notes should also be linked to every other module. So I could keep notes on contacts, events, tasks, projects (projects as a special type of contact would be good, as would be organisations to which contacts could be assigned), and view them either with the contact, event, task, etc, or in list of notes, and showing the links to other entries.

Efficient PIM is a useful and reasonably thorough package, although it has limitations, but limitations that most other packages have too.

On the plus side, it works well, is wide ranging across most PIM needs, and is implemented very smoothly and professionally.

My views of its limitations come from having been spoilt by a number of older packages that have great flexibility, linking between items and multiple view capability. A combination of the ancient Lotus Agenda (here's an article on Agenda), probably the pinnacle of PIMs, Ecco Pro, for its time, and in some ways still, a peak example of what a PIM could be, and Zoot, from Zoot Software, which has the flexible information storage capability that is essential in managing large amounts of information.