My first post here. I discovered outliners.com recently and have been devouring the archives. A great resource.

Like many here, I'm sure, I came upon outliners.com because I needed help in managing information. Not outlining as such. For my needs, Treepad does that job quite well.

But the archives here show that many, like me, are still searching for the other kind of information manager. The information "dump", if you will, or perhaps you might call it the data "librarian" - somewhere where you can throw all kinds of data in a haphazard fashion, and feel sure you can find it again very quickly, regardless of the quantity of data.

I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who is astonished that, in an age where information overload is commonplace, that this category of software is so poorly developed. A great prize awaits the person/company who cracks it.

It seems at the moment we are all making do with second best. My own solution, at the moment, is my email client - Bloomba (http://www.statalabs.com which has the sole benefit of indexing everything (including text-based attachments) that arrives in the inbox. I can search five years' worth of emails in seconds. Since, these days, the majority of information seems to arrive by email, Bloomba is a partial solution. Unfortunately, in all other respects, my previous email client (Becky) blows Bloomba out of the water. Bloomba lacks many features, and has many frustrations. But retrieving information is what it's about, in the end, so Bloomba it is.

But if the information I need is not in my email, I'm in trouble. So thanks to what I have read in this forum, I'm going to trial Zoot, which appears to be the only program focussed on entering and retrieving data as quickly as possible. Hopefully it will answer my needs.

This long-winded note leads to a simple question. Why is there not an abundance of programs geared towards this need? Surely every second business executive, bombarded with data on a daily basis, would give anything to have a reliable program to act as data librarian?

JohnK

James Fallows recently wrote in the Atlantic that the main division among information management programs is between the programs that place information in a carefully organized space and the programs that let you quickly retrieve inforamiot no matter how you put it in. I'm a little confused by your question because Zoot belongs to the first group.

If a second group program is what you want, it requires a powerful find tool. Programs that fit in this category include, from most expensive to least: AskSam, InfoSelect, InfoRecall, and NoteLens.

srdiamond

Stephen,

I'm not surprised you were confused by my post - I'm confused by this whole area.

I honed in on Zoot because I gained the impression from posts here that, while it is an information "organizer", it is also the best information manager for those who just wanted to dump information into a program and then find it easily again. But as I said in my original post, I have yet to trial it.

I have recently tried Notelens, which on the face of it is ideal, but in practice I found it crashed continuously when importing my data. Maybe I was just unlucky.

It may well be the case that something like AskSam is the solution. Perhaps truly quick, robust and intelligent hard-disk indexing (as promised in Longhorn?) will one day take care of our information retrieval needs.

JohnK

Well, there are such programs--data mining programs. Some work reasonably well, but they are quite costly.

[ Why is there not an abundance of programs geared towards this need? Surely every second business executive, bombarded with data on a daily basis, would give anything to have a reliable program to act as data librarian? ]

In fact there is (such an abundance of programs); do a google search on Knowledge Management and you can spend six months just checking links. Most programs are aimed at larger enterprises, though, so they are not well suited (or affordable) for most individual professionals.

Probably the best known application, suitable for individual users as well, is EnFish ( http://www.enfish.com/ ). Not surprisingly, it is completely useless to me because it can't handle Greek.

alx

An older free version of Enfish Find is still available on the web, though not from the company's official website
http://tucows.mundofree.com/files4/Onespins.exe

Another such program is Lookout, designed to complement Outlook; apparently the company has now been acquired by Microsoft
http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/

If it's only e-mail you want to index, Nelson e-mail Organizer is also suitable (again, working next to Outlook)
http://www.emailorganizer.com/

Many thanks for the many and varied responses to my original post. It may have been a hazy and confused request for help, but it provoked a fascinating discussion.

On reflection, it may well be the case that using a disk searching product may be a more efficient approach for me than trying to import all my various lumps of data into a program. And Stephen is right: Microsoft's long-term plans for search components in their products (witness their purchase of LookOut) makes it a risky game for other players.

Indeed, I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that my original post might well have been off-topic for this group! But thanks for all the friendly responses in any case. I'll report back if I find any product not mentioned above that seems particularly beneficial.

JohnK

As it's been mentioned in this thread...recently Microsoft bought LookOut, the indexing add-on for Outlook. They have now released it for free download, which is something of a surprise:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09b835ee-16e5-4961-91b8-2200ba31ea37&displaylang=en