[Design] Some thoughts on PIMs

[hartr at interweft.com.au]

Hi

This is a very exciting project. Some ideas...

1) There need to be strong linkages to PDAs. Possibly the best way to do
   this (due to the vast range of PDAs and rapid changes in technology)
   is to have a well documented interface for the various types of
   information to which external programmers can write.

   In the initial release there should be at least a sample
   implementation of this (?Palm) that would make it easier for people
   to write new versions.

   Maybe there should be a cut down version of the PIM that runs on
   PDAs...

2) Back in the 1980s I used a PIM called Packrat (by Polaris) on Windows
   3. This allowed

   a) linking individuals in one's address book into meetings (giving
      rapid access to all the info stored).
   b) linking documents into an individual's address book entry
      - so that you could rapidly access documents that were important
        in dealing with that individual
   c) a basic project management tool. This was not aimed to provide a
      full engineering project manager, but a more sophisticated
      functionality than is provided by 'to do' lists. Using this, one
      could link individuals to tasks, assign 'to dos' to individuals
      etc and 'map' a project (basic gantt charts.
   b) one interesting feature is that it would also dial the phone for
      you, if you had a modem hooked in parallele with your desk phone

   I hope that some of these ideas can be incorporated


-- 
Robert Hart					 hartr@interweft.com.au
Strategic IT & open source consulting                +61 (0)438 385 533
Brisbane, Australia			    http://www.interweft.com.au