by Jeff Kirvin

As good as Pocket Outlook is, it's not good enough for everyone. Here's a look at two programs that do more.

It's a familiar story. A PDA comes to market with a PIM that falls just short of organizational perfection. Third party developers pick up the ball and run with it, and the market seems to settle on two roughly equal front runners. One of these super-PIMs is chock full o' features, can file your taxes, land the space shuttle, etc., but it also tends to be cluttered, overly complex. The other super-PIM is smooth, polished and looks incredible. It can't do everything the other PIM does, but it's still much better than the default, and much easier to use than the competition.

On the Palm, this little drama played out with iambic's Action Names Datebook versus Pimlico Software's DateBk4. Action Names Datebook was the slick, fast and elegant choice, with an unique user interface designed to integrate appointments, tasks and contacts as seamlessly as possible. DateBk4 was the powerhouse of the two, modeled after the stock Palm Datebook program and extending it to the Nth degree. Higher learning curve, but lots more power.

Either choice was a winner for most Palm users, and people tended to settle on a program not so much based on how much better it was than the built-in PIM apps -- both covered the basics and then some -- but which best fit the way they interacted with their PDA. DateBk4 had more power, and was more popular with the PDA version of Tim Allen's grunting car guys. Action Names Datebook was a cleaner, better integrated interface that struck a chord with the Franklin-Covey graduate, time-conscious professional, someone who didn't have time to tinker with their PDA, but wanted it to just do what they needed and stay out of the way.

Now we see the same face-off taking shape in the Pocket PC marketplace between two new super-PIMs that fill in the deficiencies of Pocket Outlook: WebIS's Pocket Informant:3 and Developer One's Agenda Fusion.

WebIS Pocket Informant 3	DeveloperOne Agenda Fusion

The comparisons are eerie. Agenda Fusion has taken the Action Names Datebook role of the slick, pretty, heavily integrated PIM, while Pocket Informant:3 carries on the DateBk4 tradition of doing everything, even if the developer has to shoehorn the features in. I've even heard tell that C.E. Steuart Dewar, the developer of DateBk4, was working on a Pocket PC PIM but shelved it. He allegedly cited that Pocket Informant:3 was everything his PIM would have been, so why write a redundant application?

Let's take a closer look at the dominant Pocket PC super-PIMs, and start off by asking the first question that anyone in the market for either should ask: why buy either one of them? What do they do that Pocket Outlook doesn't?

The first thing that jumped out at me was that both support alphanumeric priorities like A3, B2, etc. These will look familiar to former Franklin Covey folks, and I just got two emails last week from people asking how to do this on PalmOS. I haven't seen much on PalmOS that will do it, but both Pocket PC super-PIMs handle it nicely.

For those who have never used alphanumeric priorities, they work something like this. You have the entire alphabet to set priorities for stuff, and then for each letter, you can subpriortize by number. A9 would come before B1, for example, but well after A2. Just so you don't think this is an unneeded level of added complexity (who needs 260 or more different priorities, anyway?), let me explain how I use it.

One example of alphanumeric priorities is Pocket Informants Task Manager

First off, I only use letters A, B, C and D, and D only rarely. These correspond to the Covey & Merrill four quadrant system as outlined in the book First Things First. Draw a square and bisect it both ways, forming a four square grid. Label the left column Urgent and the right column Not Urgent. Label the top row Important and the bottom row Not Important. Now label each box with a letter, A and B on top and C and D on the bottom.

For each task, I evaluate which box it would fall into today. Yesterday doing the dishes would have fallen into C, as an urgent (time-sensitive) task, but not really all that important. Today, it's an A, urgent and important, because I know if I don't do them, my roommate will be in a bad mood, and I'd really like to avoid that (she can be really nasty when she's in a snit). This system also gives precedence to B tasks over C, focusing you on the stuff that's actually important to you, stuff that reflects your core values, over stuff that just "needs to be done". After I have all the tasks prioritized by letter, I number them according to relative priority. Doing the dishes may be an A, but only A3, compared to calling job agencies and trying to find a job, which is A1.

Both programs store these alphanumeric priorities in the description field of the task, so you can edit them in the desktop version of Outlook. You can even sort by them if you sort your tasks by description instead of due date. It's not as good as if Outlook supported true alphanumeric priorities, but it'll do. At least they aren't stored in some custom table that only the Pocket PC app knows about.

Another feature both Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant:3 have in common is timed task alarms. One of the most annoying limitations of the Pocket PC, mostly because it seems so arbitrary, is that although Outlook on the desktop allows you to set an alarm on a task for any time, Pocket Outlook only supports task alarms at 8am. When I first saw this, I couldn't believe it. What if you work nights and don't get home until 8am? What if you need to be reminded to pick your kid up from school? There were so manypossible conditions where 8am wouldn't work, I just couldn't believe Microsoft gave people no other option. I know Microsoft is primarily focused on the enterprise market, but even among office workers, not everyone works 8-5. With Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant:3, you can now set task alarms to go off at any time. Just as with the PalmOS PIMs, it seems some of the best features are those that just fix what the defaults should have been in the first place.

The Notes program on the Pocket PC is great for jotting down quick, well, notes, but it has one fatal flaw as far as I'm concerned. Once I've entered a note and left the Notes application, I rarely ever see the note again, which greatly reduces its usefulness to me. Both Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant:3 have a way around this: alarm notes.

Alarm notes work pretty much like regular notes, but you can also set them with alarms that bring them back to your attention later. This works a lot like the popular Palm and Pocket PC application BugMe!, except that's it's integrated right into your PIM.

Pocket Informant 3: Alarm Notes View	Agenda Fusion: Alarm Note

One of the most obvious features of just about all super-PIMs, regardless of platform, is the integration of tasks and appointments, something neither platform really does well on their own. (Yes, the Today screen on the Pocket PC lists both, but you only get a summary of your tasks, forcing to you open the Tasks application to see what you actually have to do.) Both Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant:3 group appointments and tasks together on just about every screen, allowing you see all of the day's commitments in one place.

Both programs provide a text-based weekview, allowing you to quickly scan the week ahead. This gives you an overview of task and appointment detail that Pocket Outlook doesn't provide. I'm actually of two minds about this. I can certainly see how this might be useful to folks that only have one or two appointments scheduled each day, but I tend to have eight or nine, structuring everything I do around alarmed "appointments with myself" (these are often tasks converted into appointments that morning in order to block out time). This allows me to use my PDA as a little portable personal trainer, guiding me through my day and keeping me focused. With that in mind, the three or four lines of text you get for each day in the text weekview doesn't show me anything relevant, and certainly doesn't get down to listing my tasks for a particular day. I find the graphic week view of Pocket Outlook more useful to me, because it allows me to see those few blocks of unallocated time where I can schedule new appointments. I wish either of the Pocket PC super-PIMs at least provided a way to quickly jump to this view in Pocket Outlook but neither of them do.

Pocket Informant 3: Weeks View	Agenda Fusion: Weeks View

Both PIMs also do a great job with contact integration, with a little help from Microsoft. Both support Pocket Outlook plugins, so both seem to rely on Microsoft's free powertoy Power Contacts to add the ability to create a new task or appointment directly from a contact record. Still, both apps provide contacts as just another view in the PIM, show a nice detail window above the list so you can get pertinent details without actually opening the record, and allow you to sort your contact list by first name, last name, company or the Outlook "file as" setting.

Pocket Informant 3: Contacts View	Agenda Fusion: Contacts View

Both PIMs also support linking between records, so you can link a contact record to an appointment, and pop up that person's contact information if you need to call and ask for directions to the meeting (this happens to me a lot).

Both programs make heavy use of the New menu on most Pocket PC applications, including the Today screen. Each adds four items to your New menu which allow you to create new alarm notes, appointments, tasks and contacts from anywhere in your Pocket PC, using their forms and special features. This is actually the way well-behaved, well-integrated Pocket PC apps are supposed to work (Pocket Mindmap, my current favorite Pocket PC outliner, also adds an entry to the New menu). This is a great time saver, and I'm amazed more people don't know about it. Once you know it's there, the New menu makes it much faster to create a new task, say, than it would be on PalmOS.

Both PIMs fully support journaling, the "right hand page" daily record of events stuff for you Franklin planner folks. This is more powerful in Pocket Informant:3, which allows you to kick off a journal entry from any record's pop-up menu, while Agenda Fusion is limited to a more free-form "time, date and note" journal. What the heck, though, it's still easier than doing it in Pocket Word.

As I mentioned above, both applications allow you to convert tasks to appointments to tasks. This is a great feature, something I really loved about DateBk4 on PalmOS. One of the big problems I have with my tasklist -- and this dates back to when I first started using PDAs back in 1997 -- is that I tend to consistently "bite off more than I can chew." I assign myself more tasks that I can realistically do in one day, no matter how efficient I try to be. With this feature, at the beginning of the day, when I'm looking over my schedule, I can take the big tasks, the A and B priorities, and covert them to appointments. I fit them around my "real" appointments and thus ensure that I will have enough time to get the really important stuff done for the day. And of course, when reality inevitably intervenes with my tidy little schedule, I can convert the stuff I didn't get around to after all back into tasks for the next day.

Another feature I missed from DatekBk4 is templates. If you have tasks or appointments that tend to recur, but not on anything like a regular schedule, you can save them as templates. This allows you to create new items from the template later with pre-selected settings. This is great for department meetings with the same attendees, doctor's appointments, travel arrangements, etc.

For all the similarities between the two, there are also significant differences. Some of the extra features vary, and even the ones in common seem to be implemented differently. For example, when sorting tasks by priority, Agenda Fusion sorts by alphanumeric priority first, then by Outlook's "high, medium and low" priorities. Pocket Informant sorts by Outlook's priorities first, then alphanumeric, allowing you to have a C2 priority with an exclamation point listed before an A1. To some, this is annoying. To others, it's added flexibility.

Let's take a look at some of the unique features of each PIM:

Pocket Informant Only Features

• A detail window for tasks. This is similar to the detail window both applications have for contacts, allowing you to see the priority, due date and note for the selected task without actually opening it.
  
  
• Pocket Informant:3 allows you to encrypt/decrypt records selectively. While this doesn't translate well to the desktop Outlook, it does give you that extra security for really private records.
  
  
• Pocket Informant:3 has a Show Conflicts feature, accessed through the tap-and-hold context menu for appointments. This pops up a list of all the other appointments that overlap the same block of time.
  
  
• Pocket Informant handles recurring events/tasks internally, rather than relying on Pocket Outlook. This makes it quicker than Agenda Fusion at setting up recurring appointments, which requires two separate forms.
  
  
• Pocket Informant's unique tabbed contact creation screen groups information into logically organized screens. This is much faster than Pocket Outlook when you're trying to enter a lot of information quickly.
  
  
• Individual icons are assignable to objects, like in the PalmOS super-PIMs.
  
  
• Pocket Informant has a drag and drop task priority manager. This is really cool. It shows all your tasks in a hierarchical tree view, sorted by the letter of the priority. You can drag items from one letter to another, and rearrange them within each letter. When you tap OK, Pocket Informant will automatically renumber each of your tasks in accordance with what you just set. Much faster than doing it yourself manually.
  
  
• Durations for events are listed in the Agenda view. It's not a big feature, but it saves you from doing the math yourself.
  
  
• Pocket Informant supports XML import/export, in case you need to access your PIM information some other way.

Agenda Fusion Only Features

• Agenda Fusion can use your current Today theme for the Agenda view. This isn't quite as cool as Dashboard's integration into the Today screen proper, but it does make Agenda Fusion a pretty comfortable "default" application. Definitely map this to a hard button.
  
  
• Agenda Fusion supports ClearType in all views. This gives it a readability leg-up on Pocket Informant and Dashboard, assuming you have a Pocket PC other than the iPaq.
  
  
• Agenda Fusion has a much cleaner, better thought-out user interface. This is an important consideration for a PIM, and one of the key things that kept me going back to Action Names Datebook on PalmOS, even though I preferred DateBk4's power. It's hard enough keeping all your information straight without having to deal with a cluttered "window" to it.

Agenda Fusion shows time bars in the Week view, a holdover from Developer One's Agenda Today program. While not quite as informative as Pocket Outlook's graphical week view, these do give you a sort of thumbnail view of your day, allowing you to see roughly when you're still available.

As I said at the start, the differences seem to stem from design philosophy, and the similarities to the dominant PalmOS PIMs are striking. Agenda Fusion, like Action Names Datebook on PalmOS, seems to be slicker, more polished, better looking. Features like ClearType on every screen and the ability to use Today themes on Pocket PC 2002 devices seem aimed at making Agenda Fusion as pleasant as possible to use. Pocket Informant:3, like DateBk4 on PalmOS, is more utilitarian, more feature-packed, and more customizable. It lets you do what you want, how you want, as long as you're willing to put the thought into how to do that.

Despite the unusual length of this column, both of these applications are so rich in features that I'm sure I overlooked something, perhaps lots of somethings. That said, I think this illustrates what these programs can do, namely organize you to within an inch of your life.

Both of these programs are winners, and if you find Pocket Outlook too limiting for your taste, I highly recommend trying them both out and seeing which works better for you. One or the other will likely be the PIM of your dreams.

Update: Since this review was written, Pocket Informant has been updated to support ClearType as well.

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Jeff Kirvin is a mobile computing consultant and writer. In addition to his work with MobileBiz Solutions, he also runs his Web site WritingOnYourPalm.net. Jeff can be reached at jeff@writingonyourpalm.net