Product Reviews

PIMs - Personal Information Managers - were once the next big thing in business software. You could choose between IBM Current (later Commence), Lotus Organiser (later, ironically, owned by IBM) and PackRat, among others. Then along came Microsoft Outlook, and although it doesn't fulfil everybody's needs it does add a half-decent email client to the traditional PIM functions. Plus, it comes free with Office, so it understandably became the standard and all but killed the category.

One of the products that has survived is FranklinCovey's Franklin Planner Software. Now on version 8, it's part of a family of planning solutions based on FranklinCovey's paper-based time-management system. Originally based around a Filofax-style paper binder, the system - called What Matters Most - engenders lifetime devotion and an evangelical zeal in its users. But the planner is big and bulky and it lacks the ability to search, cut and paste, and do all the things a PIM does so well.

So FranklinCovey has two electronic planning solutions: Franklin Planner Software (FPS) and Franklin Planner for Outlook (FPO). They duplicate and add to the functionality of the paper planner and synchronise with your Palm or Pocket PC device. FPS is a standalone application, while FPO is a series of extensions to Outlook, and it's the latest version of the standalone format that's under review here.

The good news for Franklin Planner users is that FPS is very much like the paper planner. The good news for Outlook users is that it's not completely unlike Outlook and includes a multimedia version of the Franklin training programme, so you can use it in the way it was intended. To be honest, if you don't, you might as well stick with Outlook.

The configurable Planner view in FPS brings together the same elements as the paper planner's two-page-per-day layout: your calendar, tasks, contacts and the Daily Record of Events.

The system is driven from weekly and daily planning processes, and FPS provides Wizards that pull together

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information to guide you through the processes. One of the outputs of the daily planning process is a task list, but this isn't just a simple to-do list. Items are prioritised on a daily basis in terms of how urgent and important they are. This Prioritised Daily Task List synchronises with your PDA, complete with priority and urgency settings.

You keep your notes from meetings and a record of what you did each day in your Daily Record of Events. It's a simple memo field in FPS and, again, synchronises with an applet on your PDA.

There are certainly more excellent features in the product worth noting, but the big problem for many users is that they have to use Outlook, because it's the corporate standard. But what if you want to do things the Franklin way? Until last year, I used Outlook on my PC, but added a paper planner and manually synchronised my calendar. Until the release of FPS 8, I used FPO and a Palm, but they don't provide all the elements of the paper planning system.

To address this issue, FranklinCovey now provides TrueSync to allow FPS to synchronise with Outlook. It's a great idea, which very nearly works. But legacy limitations in TrueSync, as well as with FPS, compound some problems, particularly the faintly ridiculous field lengths that result in the FPS version of your data becoming truncated. Also, if you need to synchronise contacts from multiple Outlook contact databases, beware. TrueSync treats Outlook 'folder groups' as a unit, so you can't choose individual folders; you have to have all the contacts in all Public Folders. Not smart. Plus, if you use custom forms, forget it, as TrueSync will overwrite them.

If you're an existing FPS user, there are a few new features that might tempt you, but it's not a huge upgrade and some of the irritants - like the fact that it only supports US date formatsę- are still present.

If you're a paper planner user, I really think the time has come to make the move. This is particularly true if you're a Franklin planner user, of course, but devotees of TMI, 'A' Time and even Filofax will find the combination of FPS 8 and a Palm OS or Pocket PC device a very flexible replacement.

Heavy Outlook users will also like the extra level of sophistication and the additional planning aids that FPS 8 provides, if they're prepared to devote the time to learning the system. Although FPO users are a tiny minority, this provided solution is workable. Word is, though, that FranklinCovey is working on a replacement for FPO that even more closely matches those special needs, and it would be advisable to hold out for that.