Lotus makes it easy to get organized
by Alan Zisman
(c) 1995. First
published in Our Computer Player, May 1995
On the road, from home to office, to appointments...
always on the run?
Carry a portable computer with you at all times? Lotus has a tool to
help
you keep your life in order.
Organizer, recently enhanced with version 2.0, keeps
the loose-leaf
Day-Timer interface that made the original version popular. An
easy-to-use
personal-information-manager, it comes ready to use, with sections for
dates and ongoing events, phone numbers and addresses, a to-do list, a
planner, and so forth.
It's easy to add information, or even to create your
own sections. You
navigate through the information by clicking on tabs sticking out from
the edges of the pages, or clicking on the dog-ear at the corner of a
page
to turn the page.
The modules share information, letting the calendar be
used as a scheduler.
And a new feature makes it easy to keep a pair of calendars in synch,
sharing
information between, say, your desktop and your notebook.
In fact, merging information is a strong new focus for
this version.
Like other products from Lotus, there's an addition to the needs of
workgroups--
teams of people working on the same project. As Lotus Notes has become
the groupware standard, Lotus has enhanced its other products to work
well
with Notes.
If you use Notes or Lotus cc:Mail, Organizer can be
used for group scheduling.
Multiple users can share a single calendar, with a variety of access
rights.
These programs can work together to send out invitations, monitor
responses,
and even allocate rooms and equipment.
Other enhancements beef up the to-do list. You can now
view lists in
a variety of ways-- by date or priority, by category or by status. You
can attach alarms to events or create recurring events. And with the
anchor
tools, you can connect names in the address book to to-do tasks.
The calendar lets you view your time in a variety of
ways-- two days
at a time, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or by year. You can (as in real
life), set conflicting or overlapping appointments, and if desired, the
program will point out conflicts in red.
With the addition of multiple addresses for each
entry, and a Calls
section to track incoming and outgoing calls, the program has added
some
basic contact-management functions.
Inevitably, added features result in more hardware
demands. While the
original version took up under 3 megs of drive space, this one wants
about
10 megs. It's a somewhat slow performer, and its easy to use interface
relies on a lot of mouse clicking. Warp users will be pleased to see an
OS2 Scheduling Agent.
With added features integrated in a way that doesn't
compromise the
program's ease-of-use, Lotus Organizer could prove useful to many
users.
Its new workgroup functionality will be especially welcomed by anyone
connecting
to others via Lotus Notes.