I set up a Google Alert for Omea many years ago. Today I got a hit and clicked on the link expecting it to be an old page, just recently indexed. Nope, it is an internal JetBrains page that gives, among other things, the Omea Pro 3.0 release notes. It looks like a substantial re-write/update.

Check out http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence

I am an orphaned user of Nelson Email Organizer. Omea Pro was the only thing close (and much more) last time I checked. Unfortunately, the developed (JetBrains) first decided to abandone the product, then decided to open source, then went radio silent on when that would happen.

This is good, possibly very good news.

Dan

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.

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.

PIMFan,

Thank you for the extensive review of Omea Pro. It sounds very impressive. However, is there any reason to use it if you don't use Outlook? Can it do these wonderful things with other e-mail managers (e.g. Outlook Express) or can it be an e-mail client itself?

Thanks.

Steve Z.

A very extensive review indeed. You should be selling it. :)

I'll consider giving it a try.

Tom S.

I too have used Omea Pro for some time, but now use UR. (Mostly because UR is still being developed)

The biggest difference I see between the 2 products (at a very high level) is OP looks at the "data world" in real-time while UR is a data vault. Here are some examples to clarify this:

OP... You can point OP to look at certain directories on your hard drive. If you add a new file OP "sees" it and indexes it automatically

UR... You copy files into UR or link them to UR and they will be indexed. You choose what goes into UR.

OP... Outllok integration is seamless. It watches your pst file in "real time"

UR... You have to synch and update UR to Outlook.

I hope you get the picture.

Which is best is up to your needs. For me, I view UR as a great data vault. I copy important files, emails... into UR. Now they are indexed and backed-up!

When I was using OP, I used it to manage projects, workflow and data.


-jj

a few more differences between UR and Omea that I have found are:

Attributes/fields:
UR: lets you define all kinds of attributes and forms for your information - if, as JJ says, you use UR as a vault to store data, that can be very helpful, if not downright essential
Omea does not have this - it supports assigning categories and/or adding annotations to your items, but no attributes.

Rules:
Omea can set up rules to do all kinds of things - almost as powerful as Zoot's smart folders. As PIMfan said, you can have it watch all kinds of information - files, feeds, etc.
UR does not - as JJ said, everything must be "synched" manually.

Feeds:
Omea has great support for RSS feeds - f.i. using rules, you can then clip parts to keep permanently as items in your Workspace with other project related data.
UR does not

Would that one could combine the two into a single application and have the best of both worlds - and what a major mess of information overload that would probably lead to ! ;-)

Susanne

BTW: I'm a bit confused - all I could see on the web site were release notes for the Omea 2.3 version - is there actually a place where one can download that? Thanks!

Susanne wrote:

BTW: I'm a bit
confused - all I could see on the web site were release notes for the Omea 2.3 version - is
there actually a place where one can download that? Thanks!

Not v2.3 specifically as far as I know; I think the idea is that they'd jump from 2.2 to 3.0. The latest version (2.2) publicly available is here
http://www.jetbrains.com/downloads.html
but I assume you've seen that.

Cheers
Alexander

Thanks Alexander, I have the version 2.2 and was hoping for something newer.........

BTW: (this may be for another Topic) UR have opened Beta Testing for 3.5 (at least for existing users) - I am playing around with it now ;-)

I don't think I got an answer to my question regarding Omea Pro, so I'd like to ask it again. Does Omea have any value for someone who doesn't use Outlook, or is all the power in its coordination with Outlook?

Thanks!

Steve Z.

Stephen, I also would like an answer to this question.

I have no need for Outlook, but would appreciate hearing the experience of someone who has used Omea without using Outlook.

Is there someone -- anyone -- out there who can respond?

Thanks.

Daly

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I don't think I got an answer to my question regarding Omea Pro, so I'd like to ask it
again. Does Omea have any value for someone who doesn't use Outlook, or is all the power
in its coordination with Outlook?

Thanks!

Steve Z.

Hi Stephen (and Daly)

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Does Omea have any value for someone who doesn't use Outlook, or is all the power
in its coordination with Outlook?

I'm not sure anyone can answer that question; Omea Pro appears to be completely tied to Outlook only as far as email is concerned "You can work with email in Omea Pro IF you have one of the following versions of Microsoft Outlook™ installed on your PC" ( http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/features/moremail.html ) However, I have not tried it for myself to be certain.

Nevertheless, I would argue that even if you don't use Outlook as your main e-mail application, you may still have it installed as part of MS Office and use it in parallel by (a) not deleting messages from the server and (b) BCCing any important messages you send to yourself. I have done this in the past when I dealt with mass personalised e-mails through an application that only worked with Outlook. I then used Outlook only to send the messages, and received them back in my main e-mail program (The Bat!).

In other respects, Omea Pro works directly with the file system and stuff like RSS feeds. For bookmark management, it supports most popular browsers. For instant messaging, it only works with Miranda and ICQ.

So I guess that it depends on how much e-mail is part of your workflow (it is certainly a great part of mine) to not worry about maintaining it in a separate system.

alx

I keep going back to the Omea Pro site to try and find any info on the new 3.0 release. They still keep the 3.0 release notes well hidden. Here is the link to the latest. http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/OMEA/Omea+Grenache+Release+Notes
Unfortunately the latest hasnt been updated since March 24th. Oh the tease.

Does anyone have any other info on this potential super organizer info system extraordinaire?



PIMfan wrote:

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.

This ongoing discussion re OmeaPro has shown two things: a) There's a product out there that has the potential of being the holy grail of PIMs (almost what Chandler was to be before it died, and which has shown it can work, and (b) the company that makes it somehow lacks the vision to realize what they are sitting on, so it has been left on the wayside, although it has found a champion in the employee ranks who works on it.

Everyone of us who has dreamed of the kind of functionality that PIMfan attributes to OmeaPro should write the company, and tell them what they appear to have been unaware of -- that they have a product with incredible potential.

I like UR for some things; for clipping I find Evernote now does the most accurate job a few percentage points ahead of UR and Surfulater.

Working with writing projects and my own ADHD I need a product that gives me a really handy dashboard or central place for everything.

I have even been trialing the latest version of the Brain again, but I find the constant movement of the arms too distracting after a while, and my monkey mind gets caught up on what arms I am *not* seeing (crazy, I know). But the Brain does bring all kinds of docs together in one place.

I have given IDEA the most serious trial yet -- and there is a lot that I like, but I need the pro version -- and frankly, I am not willing to pay out $165 for a product that hasn't apparently been developed for two or three years. I left a msg on the forum asking about that question.

IDEA is a very simple and elegant product once you understand it. I set up about 10 records (projects or gateways to workspaces) in half an hour. A record is a gateway to a workspace because once a records is selected in the lower right quad, all docs, applications, whatever, associated with it appears in the upper rt quad.

IDEA is a product that ought not be allowed to die.

Because what IDEA and OmeaPro offer besides different features, is one important difference between UR, MI, and other similar products -- that is that there is no need to pull in information. It works with what is there. Why did we get fascinated with programs that pull in info in the first place, except to have a way of organizing it and having it together when we needed it. Web clipping, we did it also to have an easy way of clipping from the web and filing what we clipped. Much of what I have in Evernote right now is not web-based, and could be a word processing file linked easily to any number of projects in OmeaPro or Idea.

I have begun wondering seriously whether I can make my own solution. Working with FreeMind and MindGenius (simply to be able to compare the value added of a very expensive program with a very adequate program that is free), I believe I can come up with something that is quite satisfactory, that will also allow a way to planning that none of the other programs discussed offer.

For outlining where I need it, if all of this moves ahead, I will probably use either MI or ndxCards on a stick.

I am doing a lot of quick and dirty writing based essentially on daily news items, op ed pieces, etc., and I find NoteZilla pro product with all of its memo boards, etc., as well as the best quick note making, drafting, writing combination I have seen so far for non academic stuff is ideal.

There's one academic project I am using IdeaMason for, and at the end of the project will have a better perspective of IM. Yet, a lot of the preliminary work on that is best suited to IDEA, and perhaps to OmeaPro, which I will again look at.

I could probably stand to live with Outlook, but I am not sure I want to pay for it either.

However, for free, the program Thunderbird, which I have always used, though mostly I used Gmail now, will allow several hundred different plug-ins, some of which are really interesting and worthwhile. One of them allows me to click on an email url, and instead of being carried to a browser, see the url page within Tbird which opens a new tab. I have always found going back and forth between the email cl and browser a major pita.

Anyhow, back to OmeaPro and IDEA -- would be great to hear from their developers what the plans are. Both programs have incredible potential.

Daly