Sunday, October 20, 2002

Lotus Agenda is dead, long live Chandler

I had almost forgotten about Lotus Agenda when I saw a pointer to Mitch Kapor's blog where he talks about his new open source project PIM, Chandler, that is 'in the spirit' of Agenda.

Way back in the late 1980s/early 1990s I worked in the then DEC/Digital VMS (now OpenVMS) development group and PCs where first showing up on engineer desktops. Microsoft Word 2.x and Lotus Agenda were pretty much all it was used for. The nice thing about Agenda was you could just dump in random notes and it would semi-automatically index, sort and categorize them. So a "email Rich project functional design doc" would make a todo entry under email, link to Rich's email and also be searchable by 'functional design doc'.

I have hundreds of email messages (RMAIL files read by evolution, mutt and just plain Mail), status reports (in Microsoft Word format as required by my management chain), notes to myself (simple ASCII text), personal and business contacts (Palm Pilot synced to Evolution Address Book as well as the corporate LDAP). To be able to search for all references to "Joe FieldPerson at onsite at BigCompany" would be a godsend.

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