Top 5 Requirement for Information organizer

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Posted by Kenneth Rhee
Sep 6, 2006 at 04:16 PM

As I was reading some of others’ comments, I started to wonder what I might consider as essential in my information manager and came up with top 5.

1. Data Storage—safety and integrity. What good is it if I lose my information.(of course the program should be crash proof as well).
2. Organization—needs to organize my information so that I can retrieve it quickly and visually examine them.
3. Powerful Search—on those occasions where I can’t remember where I organized my information
4. Exchange Capability—able to import/export information to share with others, print, etc.
5. Quick Note-taking—should be able to enter texts and organize them quickly

Of course, there are other features, but to me if the program doesn’t meet the above needs, all the extra features become frivolous for me.

Ken

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 6, 2006 at 08:34 PM

Ken,

This is always a fund topic. It is pretty hard to argue with your top five requirements and I don’t intend to do so. I would add a few items that are also worth considering:

1. Data relationships. This may be implied in your “Organization” requirement, but I think it is worth mentioning as a separate requirement. If building powerful relationships among data is important to you, then certain specific features become more important. These might include:
a. easy and fast hyperlinking (wiki-style)
b. cloning
c. keywording as independent meta data

2. Basic (but essential) editing functions. Again, you may be implying this in your “Note Taking” requirement. For me it is very important that the main editor for composing new thoughts and ideas (as opposed to clipping them for elsewhere) is essential. I am a rabid re-writer and I get frustrated by editors that don’t have extended selection of text. Of course, it is nice to be able to have the formatting options of a full-blown word-processor, such as the ability to create tables, bulleted lists, and numbered lists. I’ve found, unfortunately, that most programs that have all the word-processor formatting functions do so at the expense of their editing capabilities.

3. Flexibility. That is, the ability to store and retrieve many types of information. Can you drop a PDF into the database or only link to it? Does it take OLE objects such as a spreadsheet?

4. Reporting. Can you print useful reports of your data? This is an often overlooked feature of many PIMs, which allow you to print individual articles, and even groups of articles. But, even if they provide powerful meta data capability, they often don’t allow you to print reports of selected pieces of this information.

The failure of so many PIMs in one or more of these areas is why I’m still looking for the holy grail of PIMs.

Steve Z.

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