PIM Software

Way back 1996, when I started shifting to my IT career… I used no software for Personal Information Management. For email, I used Qualcomm’s Eudoraâ„¢ but this was for email alone. And the old pen and small notebook did the rest for my everyday planning. After sometime, I started using Microsoft Outlook®, since it integrates email, contacts, notes, task and the calendar very well.

Being concerned with company expenditures, I was at first against the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) since I viewed it as another company expense and the pen and paper, whiteboard and corkboard in the office works fine. But as my former partner Terence Teves was persistent in getting PDAs, I was convinced to give it a shot.

So I started with a Palm m100. And I was happy it would synchronize well with Microsoft Outlook®.

After using Palm® m100, I have used a Palm® xeIII, Palm® Zire™ 71 and now I am using a Palm® Treo™ 600. During those times, I have been jumping from Microsoft Outlook® to Palm® Desktop for my calendar, task and notes. I liked the power Microsoft Outlook® offers but seems to have trouble when it gets really filled up. And it was the email that fills up Microsoft Outlook® so much. And I have used the scanpst tool to fix the outlook.pst file many times in the past and there were times I had unrecoverable data. So those were the reasons I would go back to Palm® Desktop and use something else for my emails.

Since the late 1990’s, I would jump back and forth from Microsoft Outlook® to Qualcomm Eudoraâ„¢ and since last year, I was a Mozilla Thunderbird user. For the past year I was happy with Palm® Desktop and Mozilla Thunderbird combination totally departing Microsoft Outlook®, but recently my Mozilla Thunderbird has been very slow. After opening it up, it takes some time before I can display the email messages and it always gives this dialog box that it is still processing the folders. I guess this happens once it gets filled up too.

The new Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 looks very attractive and promising as I have seen the new interface on someone else’s computer, but buying Outlook is just another problem to face too. And in the past, I always had the same problem with Microsoft Outlook® that when the outlook.pst file gets so big, that is when problems come out. But then again, I think it happens to all email softwares when they get so filled up.

I guess the best solution is simply go through your emails, and do not archive them all. Delete all those sales emails from all these subscriptions, delete the mailing list emails that are already out-of-topic, and look for some nice way to archive the emails. I wish there was an easy one-click way to export all the emails in a nice way to different database formats for better archiving.

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One thought on “PIM Software

  1. You can still archive them all. Check out the PST Backup tool. A good practice would be to spread your data store into several .PST files so you won’t get one very big PST file. This adds the flexibility and ease of backing up your pst files 😉

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