Essential PIM: A Simple Yet Capable Personal Information Manager A Simple Yet Capable PIM Joseph Moran
For those of us that use a computer to keep personal or business information organized, a Personal Information Manager, or PIM, could be considered essential. Perhaps that's why EPIM Ltd. chose to call their Personal Information Manager Essential PIM. Essential PIM isn't designed to provide the detailed contact management you'd find in a comprehensive PIM like ACT!, but it is a simple and capable information management tool that can be a valuable alternative to something like Microsoft Outlook.
Those familiar with Outlook's layout should quickly become fairly comfortable with EPIM's interface, as there are many similarities in presentation between the two programs. The four EPIM modules are Schedule, To-Do, Notes, and Contacts, mirroring — albeit with slightly different names — four of the five Outlook components (e-mail being the notable exception). Like Outlook, EPIM provides a "Today" screen that displays the day's appointments and ensures that all action items are front and center.
The EPIM database supports multi-user access so you can place its database file in a networked folder for sharing, and EPIM supports multiple languages so you can choose to display the program menus in one of over twenty different tongues. On the minus side, EPIM's lower right corner is occupied by a gratuitous digital time display that looks like it was lifted from a $2 wristwatch. This integrated clock seems like a waste of real estate considering that the time is always available from the Windows Tray, and the blinking of the colon between hours and minutes can be distracting. What's worse is that the EPIM clock can't be turned off.
Far more useful is the fact that you can configure EPIM to minimize solely to the Windows Tray and you can create a custom hotkey to quickly restore it — a feature that saves a bit of clutter on the Taskbar.
EPIM lets you import existing data from Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or the Windows Address Book (WAB). We didn't have any problems importing several years' worth of data from Outlook on our test system. And if you currently use another PIM, you can import information into EPIM using the standardized CSV (comma separated values) format.
Notes
Work (and indeed, life) can often produce fragments of data that may not be easy to categorize but that you nevertheless still want to keep handy, and Essential PIM's Notes component can make this easier. What makes this component most useful is not necessarily the ability to save scraps of simple text, but its support for rich text, which allows you to easily add items like bullets, colors, and other formatting elements to your entries. Notes can also include embedded files or links to files, and can keep related pieces of information together with hierarchical groups of notes. (The ability to organize information hierarchically and attach files to items is something that is available in most EPIM modules.)
