[Design] Design precedent: Ecco Professional

[Brian Siano]

I sent a note about this to Mitch Kapor yesterday, after seeing the
Slashdot article, but I figured sending a note here might be of
interest.

I'm not a programmer, but I am a serious end-user of PIMs in
administrative settings. This has usually meant that I use my boss's PIM
program to manage his schedule and calendar, and whenever I was able to,
I tried to use it to manage other things-- files, projects, whatever.

By and large, I've been extremely disappointed by PIM programs. Very few
seem to have been designed by people who've actually had to use them in
a _real_ office environment-- not those fantasy "paperless offices," but
real ones, where Pendaflex files have to be inventoried and tracked, and
established systems don't change overnight when someone brings out a new
product. One needs a customizable PIM-- and however powerful products
like Outlook are, one needs to a programmer in order to design it or
change it for new projects. And most of us administrative people aren't
programmers.

But there was _one_ PIM program that really worked in nearly all of this
areas; It was Ecco Professional, and before the company that owned it
(Netmanage) ran it into the ground, it really was the greatest PIM ever
created. It hasn't been supported in five years, and it _still_ beats
Outlook in nearly every way that counts. It had a calendar, a phonebook,
and outliner, and by combining these features you could create project
managers, databases and just about anything you needed to manage an
office. To be honest, if Mitch and his people were to simply update Ecco
to reflect the last five years of business enhancements, it'd be the
greatest PIM ever.

Describing its core structure is a little difficult without graphics,
but I'll try. (Maybe I'll do a page on my website about it.) Imagine,
for the moment, that you have a spreadsheet in front of you. The first
column is an outline, with items, sub-items, sub-sub items, and the
like. So you get that kind of organization; you can list a project, with
sub-projects and tasks as sub-items.

Each of the other columns represents a particular data field (called a
"folder" in Ecco parlance). So, for each item in the first column, there
are different values in the columns. The columns/data fields can be
text, dates, numbers, checkmark, pop-up lists, and the like, and are
easily created by the user.

Obviously, there were standard data fields for Ecco's uses. The
"Appointments" field contained appointment data-- date, time,
recurrence, duration, whatever. Under the Phonebook, there were data
fields for Salutation, Company, Address, city, Zip, Email, Phone, Fax,
etc. I could create as many as I wished: I could even keep multiple
Appointment data fields to track multiple calendars if I wanted.

The neat thing about this arrangement was that I could relate anything
to nearly anything else. For example, I could create a data field for a
particular project-- and merely by going to an Appointment item and
assigning it to the project's data field, it'd be filed there. Simply by
clicking on the project's data field/folder, I could bring up a list of
every item in my Ecco database under that project. (The closest Outlook
can come to this is its pitiful, awkward, and sluggish "Category"
feature.)

There's a lot more to Ecco's structure. All of the data fields/folders
could be listed at the side of the screen for easy access-- and they
could also be arranged in a hierarchical fashion, for ease of use. The
views were easily redesigned and rearranged-- none of this form-design
stuff Outlook imposes on us. And the data fields had an "auto-assign"
feature-- for example, if I had a data field called "Flashman," and the
text of an item contrained the word "Flashman," or "Elspeth," I could
have the program auto-assign a value for that item in the "Flashman"
data field.

This single program worked well as a calendar, time-management system,
resource-tracker, mailing-list manager, contact manager, project
manager, phone-message manager, annotation system, and just about
anything else I could think of. Yes, it could exchange data with the
Palm Pilot, and yes, it could work with the email systems of the day.
(Its use of the Web was limited, but this was five years ago.) It was
also networkable, so my boss and I had access to the same files, without
the need for special server technology.

I'd strongly suggest that, if you're looking at user-interface issues
with this PIM, ECCO's design be taken as a kind of gold standard. If
anyone's interested, I'd be happy to provide screenshots or suggestions.