Omea Pro 3 - to be released

Posted by PIMfan
Feb 29, 2008 at 06:03 PM

I’ll chime in on this one. I use Ultra Recall, EverNote, previously tried Zoot and am yet another Ecco devotee. But for all my CRIMPing tendencies, I would dump all the tools I currently use for a stable release of Omea Pro.

What makes it so compelling? No other tool I’ve ever used has provided the level of integration with MS Outlook that Omea Pro does. I work in a corporate environment and am forced to use Outlook whether I like it or not. Therefore, much of the tasking and work that I do comes from:

a) An email request to do something
b) An Outlook task assigned to me
c) A phone call conversation that results in a request to work on something
d) An action item from a meeting I attended

Omea cleanly integrates all of the sources of information into one spot and allows you to easily link and relate items.

In addition, I perform technical reseach on subjects related to tasking I receive. So I need to collect web clippings, read newgroups, generate notes from what I learn, and produce documentation/reports on technical issues. I store documents on my computer in addition to gathering from external sources. What Omea lets me do is to create a “workspace” that I will collect ALL information related to a particular subject. I can create categorization rules and then use them to automatically assign items to the appropriate workspace based upon a wide variety of keywords or conditions. Omea also allows me to automatically create virtual links between items in my workspace. Other tools I’ve used have all had some of the abilities of Omea Pro, but none of them leverages MS Outlook like Omea. Both Zoot and UR can “connect” with MS Outlook, but when you use Omea, the integration is the cleanest I’ve seen. The videos on the JetBrains website give a good sense of how one works in the Omea environment.

A sample scenario for me:
An email arrives in my Outlook mailbox and if I’ve created a rule to assign the message to a category in my project workspace, it instantly appears in my workspace. No need to run a “synch” job, no “select the message and click the send to other app button” type activity needed. Once the message arrives, I read it in my workspace, and I can simply drag it to the task bar to create a task from the email. Say I then need to do some research on the subject of the email. I then open a browser and do some google work to get information. As I do so, I’m adding the URL’s of the websites with useful information to my workspace. In addition, I’m clipping some of the web content and placing into the workspace also. As I do so, I’m also linking the URLs and clippings to the task I created. Say I then start generating a Word document reporting on what I’ve found. The Word doc is also in the workspace, and I associate it also to the original task. Then perhaps I schedule a meeting to review the work I’ve done with a co-worker. I schedule the meeting using Outlook, and since the subject of the meeting is “Project 1 review”, Omea instantly assigns it to my workspace for Project 1. Because Omea leverages Outlook, the task I created in Omea for my project is available on my Windows Mobile device, and I can take all my notes and work done to date with me to my meetings.

Again, do other apps hook into Outlook and do the web clippy/link collector stuff? Sure. But I really like the Omea interface, the workspace concept, and the fact that when I work with Outlook data in Omea, I don’t feel like I’m working in a different app. An Outlook task viewed in Omea LOOKS like an Outlook task - just on steriods…

If it’s so great, what’s the problem? The biggest issue is the oft-discussed lack of support for Omea by the JetBrains upper management. Omea Pro is an INCREDIBLE tool, but the company management has never properly promoted or marketed it. Omea did require some continued development to address some issues (it could be a CPU hog, and had a number of problems). While JetBrains also make code development tools, Omea caters to a different (and wider) audience than development tools. But they seemed to not understand how to establish Omea in the PIM world. Due to these production positioning deficiencies, sales were apparently not what JetBrians envisioned, so they decided to stop “official” development and instead release it as open source. Except…..it never happened and Omea languished quietly in a dark corner of JetBrains for over a year. Michael Gerasimov has been spending his own time working on getting it converted to the latest version of the .NET frameworks, but no official company effort is being applied to it. As Dan noted, it appears that there has been some recent work done on the update, which is quite encouraging.

My experience on this board is that all of us have tools that meet our needs to organize and gather our work and information. In my personal situation, Omea Pro does this to a level I’ve never been able to achieve with any other app. I lament the fact that I cannot justify my data to an app that is not supported, but if it truly is upgraded and open sourced, I will drop everything else for it.

As an Omea Pro fan, I sometimes feel like the guy who gets dumped by his hot girlfriend and never gets over her, spending his time thinking about what “could have been”, and always comparing every other experience to her. Pretty sad.

That concludes my dissertation. Thanks, I feel a lot better having brain dumped on this…...

PIMfan

Tom S. wrote:
>Dan,
> >I took a look. I’ve seen the program before. But I’m having a little bit of a hard
>time determining what makes it unique. Can you tell me what sets it apart from
>something like Zoot or Ultrarecall?
> >Thanks,
>Tom S.