EfficientPIM

The Efficient Personal Information Manager!

$39.95

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Platforms: Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista

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Are you tired of blindly searching for contact info through scribbled address books and disorganized piles of business cards and notes? Do you often find yourself missing birthdays, holidays, and other important appointments? Do you have lots of things to do, but never seem to be able to prioritize them properly?

If this sounds like you, check out EfficientPIM, the professional personal information manager (PIM). It's a time manager, contact organizer, planner, personal reminder, notepad, and password manager all combined into a single, easy-to-use application.

Review Written by Roger Thomasson

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Steven Avery A new (2007) PIM-program from an unknown land, competing in a crowded field against the usual suspects (EssentialPim, Time &Chaos, Pimex, Redbox, uOrganized , UltraRecall and many more, in many price ranges). No discussions or forums I could find.

If anybody can point to, or can offer, a substantive review, it will be appreciated. How good is the integration ? How flexible are the PIM fields and notes ? Any sub-tasks ? Drag & drop integration ? Stable ? Support ?

How about iconico ? Maybe you have some folks using it ?

Thanks.

Shalom,
Steven

Nov 28 2007 at 11:12pm Copy Link

Paul Zhang Soft32.com
Editor's Review - EfficientPIM

5 out of 5
Excellent

EfficientPIM is a handy personal information manager. The ease to use, lots of interesting features, a nice design are just a few features which make this program a valuable office tool and not only.

The program is best suitable for office activity, but it can also be of use at home. The program allows you to manage effectively personal information of friends, partners, employees and acquaintances. On the left hand side of the window, there's a list of items to manage: Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Events, Diary, Notes, Password manager. When you first run the program, you can import predefined holidays such as New Year's day, Valentine's day, etc. You can choose whether to import U.S. holidays, U.K., Australian, Canadian and New Zealand's holidays.

In the Calendar section where you can enter events. You can edit the place, start time, end time, recurrence of the events and add comments or attach files. Reminders (with sound alerts) can be set in order not to miss any events. You can add all your contacts as well with all their identification data. Contacts, events and tasks can belong to several folders, so that you can have a quick access to all the information related to a project.

You can keep track of your projects, by setting up tasks. Here you can add the content of the task, start and due date, state, priority, people taking part in any task, etc. You can also keep a daily diary or even multiple diaries as the program has a nice word processor included.

A very useful feature is the password manager, where you can keep general passwords, software registration codes, e-mail accounts and FTP accounts. You can open URLs directly from EfficientPIM, but you can't auto fill online forms.

The program can be protected with a master password, so that no one will have access to your confidential data. Exporting the data into HTML or CSV file format is a valuable option of this program..

Nov 28 2007 at 11:55pm Copy Link

Shirley Wading-River I'm a bit of a PIM junkie, and a long-time user of ECCO, the abandoned best-PIM-ever.

I bought a copy of EPIM several months ago, and have to say it's the first new program that makes me consider giving up ECCO entirely.

Two features boost it up well above the competition in its price class: a strong hierarchical task manager, and an excellent notes function. The latter, so far beyond the usual yellow-sticky paradigm, allows you to create multiple tabbed outlines of RTF notes.... nicely bridging the gap between your garden-variety calendar / contact list PIM and a 2-pane outliner.

The program also integrates tightly with Outlook, if you use it. I don't, but loaded a copy just to see how it worked. It worked so well that I almost - stress almost - decided to switch my email to that Micro$oft kludge. (Common sense prevailed, though.)

And contrary to a comment above, there is an active support forum on the developer's web site - can't see how anyone missed it.

Bottom line: I was happy to buy this at full price. At $19.95, it's a steal. And if they ever add in an e-mail client, I'd finally have that elusive "one program to handle it all."

Nov 29 2007 at 1:17am Copy Link

charlie arehart Steve, it's true that this is yet another in the crowded space of PIMs. but as Shirley points out, those who've used many over the years often have their favorites (mine go back to Agenda, Grandview, Ecco, etc.) and so one may suit some better than others. I've not yet used this, but any recommendation from an Ecco user gets my attention. :-) I'll also point out that the EPim site does offer a bit of a response to your question: http://www.efficientpim.c...easons.htm .

Nov 29 2007 at 3:05am Copy Link

Steven Avery Hi Folks, Thanks Paul and Shirley. The first reviews I have seen anywhere. Paul is the EfficientPim developer (from Beijing) so he should mention that above while quoting the soft32 review and while omitting the drawbacks/flaws part of the review (not major flaws, but omitted .. extracting from reviews the negative part is simply not acceptable praxis). Shirley's review is more helpful. A PIM with a good sub-task capable ToDo and strong free-form linked notes is of interest, although search and speed are critical in notes. Anyway, those definitely can be good features, generally lacking in PIMS's. Maybe worth a download trial. (btw... no mention has been made of EfficientPim on the active EccoPro Yahoogroups forum.) As to the chiding (without URL) about not finding this easy-to-find active support forum. You would think an active support forum would be findable from the main page. http://www.efficientpim.com/index.htm Efficient PIM Readers can look around for "Forum" or "Technical Support" or "User Forums" .. anything other than a light FAQ and an email addy. Let me know what you find so easily, and if it is something I missed I will be happy to be corrected and apologize for my lack of due diligence. The "Developer" link above led nowhere in my Firefox, but went through regnow to the Efficientpim site in Opera. I will be very interested in reading the active support forums, when they are found. Shalom, Steven PS. Charlie, I agree with you as to PIM-personality, apparently you also have not found the forums, nor know of any other Ecco user who has mentioned EfficientPim. Rarely have I seen a PIM software with this light a web footprint. One ok review, and a lot of meaningless 5-stars on the no-review shareware forums.

Nov 29 2007 at 3:27am Copy Link

Shirley Wading-River Whoa, whoa, whoa!

I owe everyone, and especially Steven, a HUGE apology.

I saw the similar name, and took a quick glimpse at the screenshot showing a very similar interface, and thought this was ESSENTIAL PIM being offered.

I know nothing whatever about EFFICIENT PIM, even though I just shot my mouth off about it.

Much egg on my face; again, big apologies for my carelessness.

Nov 29 2007 at 4:33am Copy Link

charlie arehart @Shirley, thanks for the clarification. (I have to admit that it didn't seem that this PIM was anything at all like Ecco, but if it appealed to an Ecco user, that was just good news as I contemplated it.)

@Steven, are you yourself a PIM creator or supporter of someone in particular? You seem awfully cantankerous about all this. :-) For clarification I'll say that I have no investment in any of these tools. I'm just a big fan of MakeUseOf and a longtime fan of PIMs. I'm always interested to find if a new one may suit my particular style. (Don't know what you meant about your comment about what I have or have not "apparently found".)

I'd just like to chime in with a comment in contrast to yours. You seem to be particularly interested in a new product's "web footprint" and online support. Those are both of course useful things, but not mandatory, especially for new tools (this seems to be about 2 years old). Plenty of tools start out small in those fronts and they expand over time. If the vendor can answer questions by email, that's what matters to most people.

Granted, if they had a forum or mailing list, then all could observe and learn from the experiences others. Again, that usually comes over time. Since it seems the developer is here, perhaps he can speak to that. I don't myself make it a litmus test for whether to try a tool (or even to fork over $20 if it seems good from that trial today.) But to each his own.

Nov 29 2007 at 4:53am Copy Link

Steven Avery Hi Folks,

Shirley, apology fully accepted, an understandable confusion. EssentialPim has found a good niche in the PIM world, although I don't think most of the Ecco-Tribe will be quite as enthusiastic :-) And it is possible that EfficientPim took their name to capitalize on the similarity.

Charlie, my views toward PIMs are actually probably similar to yours. No particular connections, have used Time&Chaos for awhile, which is quite fine in the free legacy version, took advantage of the Bits UltraRecall purchase recently, used to program my own in Alpha 4 and on green-screen. I simply was looking for real info before investing download and play time with EP.

Of course the lack of a web footprint does not prove anything, however you have no user reviews at SnapFiles, FileForum, CNet or pub reviews at PCWorld, PCAdvisor, etc. So a PIM needs to have some strong points for me to justify time and effort, or $.

Shalom,
Steven

Nov 29 2007 at 7:11am Copy Link

Paul Zhang Thank you all.

Sorry to reply to you all so late. I am in Beijing, China.

1. Yes, at present EfficientPIM cannot be synchronized with Outlook and we will add this function in later versions.
2. This is the first version of EfficientPIM and it needs to be improved. At present the software hasn't the functions of Sub-Task and Drag-Drop. These functions will be provided in later versions.
3. The name of fficientPIM has nothing to do with EssentialPIM. The only reason we named it EfficientPIM is that our objective is
"Everything is to improve your efficiency".
4. When we were developing our software, we have never "copied" the interface of EssentialPIM. The only reason that we look simliar is that we BOTH look like Outlook :)
5. We members are working hard to perfect product, FAQ, provide mailing list supports and etc.

We are young, but we are growing up speedily.

Thanks again.

Best Regards,
Paul Zhang

Nov 29 2007 at 2:49pm Copy Link

Steven Avery Thanks for checking in, Paul. The name thing I accept your explanation fully, I don't mean for that to be a diversion.

Please do be careful about posting reviews with omissions. If you want to leave something out, use the word "excerpt".

Plug away, suggest you try to get on Snapfiles and Fileforum, where the users are really top-notch.

Shalom,
Steven

Nov 29 2007 at 5:05pm Copy Link

someguy --- name coincidence?
nah! we are not childs please. this is another cheap copy made in asia. maybe is good, maybe not , maybe Mr Zhang is a good programmer maybe not, but as a lot of copies in asia, is cheaper to copy and improve, than develop by themselves.

go another place with your "coincidence" story.

Jan 13 2009 at 5:21pm Copy Link