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Chaos Software’s Intellect - Why I Like it
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Posted by Steve
Mar 3, 2014 at 11:38 AM
Chaos Software’s Intellect Review
For many reasons, it’s time for me to share what tools I use for my daily work. Like many of you there is not one side of me that a PIM needs to be useful to help with. There is the work side, the personal side, and the general messing around side. So the tools I use generally need to work in all those sides (environments) as much as possible.
I’m a travel agency owner and a travel agent. I’ve done this since 1984. Some of the duties, or tasks, that I need to manage include:
Communicating with clients, suppliers, friends, and church.
Managing business, personal, and client tasks.
Managing client research and general information.
Managing databases of contacts for business, fraternity, church, and personal.
Managing schedules such as appointments and other related due dates.
Managing recurring tasks, appointments, meetings, due dates.
I’ve been through a few PIM’s over the years. I’ve liked all the ones I’ve used, each has its own forte that gives it that special use for the target market. Maybe target market is the wrong description – most good PIM’s seem to be a very small operation so the PIM has the developer’s personal stamp on it.
My favorite PIM is Above and Beyond (1soft.com), others have been; Lotus Organizer, iambic’s Agendus (http://www.iambic.com/), and some other’s more on a test basis.
Email has become the number one item that moved me to a new PIM around 2008. Supplier’s had moved to electronic documents, much of marketing was electronic, keeping up with client’s contact changing required integration with one dataset. Eudora was dying, my Palm OS was dying, so I had to do something. I rediscovered Chaos Software.
You can read the laundry list of features and benefits at Intellect (http://www.chaossoftware.com), plus they’ve posted some of the hidden features on their blog. What I like is:
Contacts are the hub from which everything else connects.
Tasks, emails, files, etc. are linked to contacts. This means I can display a contact and find all the emails, tasks, files, whatever related to the contact.
Contacts can be linked together. This means friends, business, groups, etc. are easy to find.
Backups are simple and pretty much text based so I’m not locked in to proprietary problems. Same for Email.
Clean, clear workspace for the day. Not a cluttered mess.
Field names are customizable. This means I can not only have my own field names for contact usage, but also multiple email addresses. This is important because when people change emails I can add the new, keep the old so old emails are still linked to the contact.
Export contacts for marketing.
Activity series; check out http://www.chaossoftware.com/university/ and view Intellect 505. Example; I book a trip and now I have a number of tasks that need to be done in the future. I have a series set up to do that.
Email merge marketing – just like the old mail merge letters only this one merges email. Personalize those messages but the other important feature is each email is sent separately.
Search is fast and can be done via a simple
.
Search can be done via the same
but can target tasks, contacts, etc. only.
Restore individual records from a backup. Example, mistakenly delete a contact – you can simply restore just that contact.
Backups are individual – meaning each time I backup, the contacts, tasks, etc are done contacts1, contacts2, etc so I’m not overwriting the previous sets.
Custom copy; in each “module” (meaning contacts or tasks, or projects, etc) you can have your own way of copying data fields to the clipboard. Example for me is I can right-click on a contact then copy the first, last, street address, phone, passport number, expiration date, and credit card data since I have that data in their own named fields.
I think the price they charge is more than reasonable for what they offer. For contact based software that isn’t bloated, I have not found anything better.
Tip; I know people who use it for projects. They use the same linked contact activity but replace the contact with the project name.
Next up; AskSam for client research.
Steve
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 3, 2014 at 05:51 PM
Steve wrote:
>I think the price they charge is more than reasonable for what they
>offer. For contact based software that isn’t bloated, I have not
>found anything better.
Steve - thanks for taking the trouble to write the review. I’ve been looking for something similar in the past as well, and this sounds promising.
Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 3, 2014 at 06:57 PM
Steve
Thank you for your very helpful post. Did you migrate your work to Intellect—or are you in evaluation mode?
I evaluated Time and Chaos about 6 or 7 years ago, and at the time I was concerned about migrating much of my work into a new tool that might prove to be a niche or dead-end application. So, I’ve tended to stay with Outlook, which is more “mainstream”. It also seems that the feature set for Outlook 2013 (which is my current work platform for contacts and work tasks) has a strong congruence with the feature set for Intellect. I also like that Outlook “plays well” with OneNote.
Did you look at Outlook—and if so was there anything in particular that steered you away from it.
If you are in process of migrating from one tool to another, how are you approaching it? Spend a week moving everything over and having done with the old platform—or a gradual, piecemeal process?
This is a relevant problem for me know and your advice is welcome.
Paul K.
Posted by Steve
Mar 5, 2014 at 11:25 AM
Paul Korm wrote:
Steve
>
>Thank you for your very helpful post. Did you migrate your work to
>Intellect—or are you in evaluation mode?
Not evaluating - own it. I bought a license in May 2008 and have used Intellect exclusively since. Not only for my tasks, emails, etc. but also has the database for my fraternity chapter (550+ members), business mailings (printing labels or mailmerge from Stamps.com), etc.
>Did you look at Outlook—and if so was there anything in particular
>that steered you away from it.
I did look at Outlook somewhere around the late 1990’s (seriously). At that time the hardware I could have (long story) wasn’t powerful enough for it. Also, I recall that the full-blown Outlook was geared for big business and no one else.
Around 2003 I could finally have my own hardware (prior to that the airline reservation system owned the hardware). I looked at Microsoft Office and Lotus Smartsuite. I went with Lotus Smartsuite because; a) I had the whole office (6 terminals) networked (token ring thank you very much) on WordPro (remember Ami Pro?). b) All of my marketing pieces templates were in WordPro. c) Microsoft license for my little office was $600+ d) Lotus Smartsuite (Included WordPro of course) was a $69 CD.
True, Smartsuite did not offer any Email program but Organizer played well with Eudora.
So, believe it or not, I have NEVER had MS Office installed on any computer.
>
>If you are in process of migrating from one tool to another, how are you
>approaching it? Spend a week moving everything over and having done
>with the old platform—or a gradual, piecemeal process?
What I migrated from was Palm desktop to Intellect. I’m talking of about 2000+ contacts, but not Email. Email storage at that time was importing from Eudora into AskSam.
The exporting and importing of contacts was not too hard.
>
>This is a relevant problem for me know and your advice is welcome.
>
I’ve never used Outlook so I’m not a good judge of which is better. I do know there is some kind of Outlook addon or something from Chaos Software. Check their website again under the products page and scroll down.
From what I know about Outlook, if it were me, I’d first think long and hard why I am considering changing Then I’d download the trial of Intellect and see if it addressed what I want. Shoot, if I needed a long time to decide or cut over the $60 license is cheap.
>Paul K.
Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 5, 2014 at 06:23 PM
Steve, thank you!