Software That Keeps Colleagues on the Same Calendar Page

If you want 1999 to go smoother, consider getting software that helps the people in your company keep better track of their time, their business contacts and the bits and pieces of information they need to get their jobs done.

Many products can help with these tasks; one of the easiest to use is Lotus Organizer (Windows, $79).

Organizer, a “personal information manager,” helps you keep track of your contacts and your calendar. And the newest version, 5.0, uses the Internet to make it easier for colleagues and co-workers to schedule meetings at convenient times.

Organizer is like one of those notebooks people carry that are filled with their contacts and schedules--only instead of using a pencil and paper, you use your computer to update and maintain the data.

The contact management section of the program looks a lot like a paper organizer, but in this case it’s much easier to manage and make changes. New in this version are extra fields to enter all the miscellaneous information we collect these days. It’s no longer enough to just have a place to enter in a person’s phone number. Now you need their fax number, pager number and mobile number, not to mention their office and home numbers.

Organizer is not as robust as ACT or Goldmine when it comes to managing customers or other contacts, but it does have a place to enter notes about phone calls and other contacts. There is also a way to keep track of people’s personal information, such as nicknames, birthdays, anniversaries and the names of their spouses and children.

The program has a planning area that gives you an overview of your schedule or lets you see special schedules to help coordinate training, vacations, trade shows and other events. There is also a “to do” list, a note pad and a place to record information about phone calls with anyone in your contact list.

Thanks to the Internet, you can also use Organizer to schedule meetings with others. The program supports the “iCalendar” Internet scheduling standard, which means you can use it to invite people to meetings via e-mail.

Of course you don’t need special scheduling software to use e-mail to invite someone to a meeting, but with Organizer you can automate the process. The program will send a message to one or more people; they can then accept the invitation, decline, delegate or attempt to reschedule the meeting without your having to play phone tag. When everyone’s copies of Organizer finally agree on a convenient time, the software schedules the event in everyone’s calendar.

Organizer does this scheduling magic by directly sending the message through your e-mail program, assuming you have a compatible program such as Eudora, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. Though it is able to use your e-mail program to coordinate meetings, Outlook’s address book is not tied directly to your e-mail program’s address book. I find this to be the only major drawback to the program.

Outlook and Lotus’ own Notes program integrate e-mail with the address book function so you can easily add a person who sends you e-mail to your address book.

Organizer, like most personal information management software, is a structured program, which means that data go into specific fields, such as a name or address field. Micro Logic (https://www.miclog.com), however, offers a different type of personal information manager that doesn’t require you to put your data into structured fields.

Info Select Version 5 is aptly billed as “the adaptable personal information manager” because it gives you an enormous amount of flexibility. Although it can be used for structured information, it can also be used to enter bits and pieces of data in an unstructured way.

Info Select takes some getting used to because it doesn’t follow the same rules as most other information management systems. Its look and feel are more like a stack of 3-by-5 cards than an organized address book. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll find yourself using it for just about anything you need to keep track of, including people, objects, meetings and random pieces of information.

The program does let you maintain a calendar and is able to handle structured information.

Lawrence J. Magid can be reached via e-mail at larry.magid@latimes.com.