Do You Already Own A PIM?

PIM stands for Personal Information Manager. PIMs are software programs which help you to manage your personal data like appointments, tasks, notes, emails and contacts. A PIM can be seen as an electronic form of your organizer.

The primary function of a PIM is to keep you up to date with all relevant information. When you have a meeting, the PIM should remind you, so that you don’t get there too late. When you have several tasks set, the PIM should allow you to define priorities and deadlines, so that everything will be done in the right order and on time. You should be able to adapt all PIM fields like phone numbers or nicknames individually so they fit to your needs. The usage should be intuitive and easy. No one likes long training sessions only to know what to do.

A lot of PIMs store their data on a web server. This enables you to access it, mostly with a modern browser, from every place with an internet connection. But this solution has several big disadvantages. What will happen, when you don’t have an internet connection? And what happens when the web server goes offline for some reason? You simply won’t be able to access your data. So it’s better to rely on a PIM which stores all data on your local hard drive. This is much safer and often a security measure. When you still want to access your data on the way, there are lots of PIMs who offer a web frontend, too.

When you’re working with multiple computers (at home, laptop on the way, in the office) the PIM needs a synchronization feature. It should offer an easy way of syncing the data between several computers, so that it’s available on every machine.

Sometimes you need to share your information with others. Imagine the situation that you’ve become part of a team for your next project. Wouldn’t it be great, if you can share project relevant notes, tasks or contacts with other team members. You should be able to set individual user permissions to ensure privacy and contact colleagues. A good PIM should offer these possibilities. Then you’re prepared for staying organized and informed wherever you are.

Alexander Bartz is senior project manager at soft-evolution, an innovative provider of the team management software Pimero.