Alternatives to Outlook for Organising task etc

S

swashbuckler

0
Hi everyone,

At the risk of sounding like some upstart I have an alternative approach to using folders in Outlook to organising your catagories according to GTD.

This approach uses the open source Mozilla Calander Sunbird and an ICal based remote calander at icalx.com.

The great thing is you can customize the catagories in accordance with GTD. Moreover if you're on the move or use multiple computers you can set up a remote calander via Sunbird on IcalX.com.

The approach I took was to create seperate calanders for Projects, @home etc. Because I use a PC and an Apple Powerbook I can access these remote calanders with all my tasks and events wherever and whenever I want. Even if you're off-line you can still upload your updates tasks when you get online.

At the moment Mozilla haven't been able to fully integrate their opensource email reader Thunderbird with Sunbird so that you can for example move an email message into sunbird and into your catagories. However there is Mozilla 'Lightning' project which will integrate the email/calander/and web browser into one, and hopefully should be out in the next year.
 
I found this article which answers your question:

Although Sunbird is unable to communicate with a Microsoft Exchange server for calendar sharing, it does offer an interesting open alternative with its use of the webDAV server. The webDAV server allows users “to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.�? The calendar is hosted on the webDAV server and is simply accessed remotely with the use of Sunbird as a client. Since webDAV is able to be run from an Apache web server with the use of the module mod_dav, it allows for a fair degree of flexibility for work groups. Users will be able to use existing Apache web servers to host their calendars and will not need additional hardware, additionally they will be able to access it from anywhere that is connected to the Internet. It will certainly be interesting to see how this feature develops in future builds of Sunbird, as it could become a pure open alternative to an Exchange server.

On top of the webDAV server support Sunbird saves its files to Apple's open iCal standard which allows for a degree of interoperability between the two applications and platforms. As of yet there is no support for Outlook's closed standard but files can be imported into Sunbird once they've been exported from Outlook as an .ics file.
 
Sunbird

I don't need any collaboration functionality, and I've been using Sunbird for a few days. As I understand, it only has very basic calendar functionality, where you can place appointments and tasks, and a primitive todo list. I don't see any Project / Subproject / NextAction and other GTD-specific functionality. Perhaps I haven't looked closely enough.

Also, the software itself is not very polished yet: there are bugs / misfeatures. For example, copying-and-pasting a 2-hour task "automatically" reduces it to 1-hour. Dragging stuff around the calendar doesn't work properly sometimes.

I'm sticking with it for now, because I need something cross-platform, and Sunbird runs on everything (because it runs on top of Firefox). But I'm forced to manage my "projects", "buckets", etc. manually, using text files. I'd like to find something more convenient.
 
slacker said:
I don't need any collaboration functionality, and I've been using Sunbird for a few days. As I understand, it only has very basic calendar functionality, where you can place appointments and tasks, and a primitive todo list. I don't see any Project / Subproject / NextAction and other GTD-specific functionality. Perhaps I haven't looked closely enough.
Click to expand...

You aren't missing anything. Most OSS calendar and productivity apps are total disappointments for a very specific reason - geeks, by and large, don't know how to use them or understand them. This isn't necessarily a geek-only problem because there are lots of dysfunctional productivity systems out there but geeks are the only ones building the software at this point.

MS gets it. The next version of Outlook is VERY HEAVILY influenced by GTD. Unfortunately, that means windows-only, pst file format lock-in. Heck, even now Outlook supports dragging of almost any object to another context. Emails can easily be dragged to tasks or calendars to create entries. How hard can this be to implement elsewhere? Not terribly, I imagine, but, again, we're at the mercy of geeks who don't understand these tools.

And before I get flamed by the geeks on this board, of course there are those that understand productivity systems. In fact, GTD has a lot of cred among geeks (search for GTD on Slashdot sometime). But most OSS developers are still clueless or are not interested in adding this type of polish to a system.

Of course I will be very happy to be proven wrong.
 
The software MyLifeOrganized has a very good sync between the MyLifeOrganized todo list and the Outlook task list. You can sync two ways or one way. If you sync two way, and have marked a task as as complete in Outlook or deleted a task in Outlook, it will be marked complete or deleted in your MyLifeOrganized list.

In MyLifeOrganized, if you go to the software preferences, you can have your todo list show your project name as a prefix, and if you go to the sync preferences, you can have your project name as a prefix in your Outlook task list. So you can have your project name and then your action items on our outline tree, with your action items not containing the project name, but see the [project name] - action item on your MLO todo list or your Outlook task list. Pretty neat.

There is work to get a MyLifeOrganized Pocket PC version up and syncing, but I am more interested in the discussions where MyLifeOrganized will sync with the Outlook calendar as well as the task list. That will be great.

You all may know how to do the following. But if you are in Outlook on your PC, and have a calendar view, and have like a calendar on your left or the middle of the screen, and a task list on the right of your screen, if you highlight the appointment place on your calendar FIRST by dragging your mouse, and then drag and drop a task item onto your calendar, anywhere on the calendar area, the new appointment dialog that pops up will show that day/date/start/end in that dialog that you highlighted before the drag and drop. So whatever you use to get your task lists into Outlook, you can drag and drop those items onto your calendar to the exact location you want. I like the work week view to do this. And if you include your project name in every task list (or a number or abbreviation), then you can "find" all occurances of that project on the calendar, and get a list of all those project appointments. Pretty neat.
 
webagogue said:
Most...calendar and productivity apps are total disappointments for a very specific reason - geeks, by and large, don't know how to use them or understand them...This isn't necessarily a geek-only problem because there are lots of dysfunctional productivity systems out there...before I get flamed by the geeks on this board, of course there are those that understand productivity systems.
Click to expand...
Very good points.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that we did not catch on to some of the software that may have been good productivity tools (Lotus Agenda, Lotus Notes), and instead are expecting email software that we get for free to do more than it was orignially intended to do.

I agree that the way Outlook is going is very good, but I can not fault the original designers of Outlook to have had any idea of how our daily lives would rotate around an email program. If you had told me years ago that in just a few years I would spend more time in Outlook than Excel I would have not believed you.

.
 
I agree that sunbird/calendar is not the polished article and there are some bugs that need ironing out (a curse and I guess a strength in terms of the fact that anyone can submit there own patches/amendments to open source software).

In terms of your problem with creating buckets using Sunbird I found the best solution is to create the buckets as seperate calendars on icalx.com that way tasks and events can be sorted according to projects list, actions, etc. Then you just need to connect your calendar to icalx.com.

slacker said:
I don't need any collaboration functionality, and I've been using Sunbird for a few days. As I understand, it only has very basic calendar functionality, where you can place appointments and tasks, and a primitive todo list. I don't see any Project / Subproject / NextAction and other GTD-specific functionality. Perhaps I haven't looked closely enough.

Also, the software itself is not very polished yet: there are bugs / misfeatures. For example, copying-and-pasting a 2-hour task "automatically" reduces it to 1-hour. Dragging stuff around the calendar doesn't work properly sometimes.

I'm sticking with it for now, because I need something cross-platform, and Sunbird runs on everything (because it runs on top of Firefox). But I'm forced to manage my "projects", "buckets", etc. manually, using text files. I'd like to find something more convenient.
Click to expand...
 
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