Managing information in your personal and professional life

While all of us suffer from an information overload, how we deal with that information is often what separates us on a professional level. This blog entry is a review of my experiences managing this information, leading up to Evernote, a product that works well in practice.

Here at work we are slowly implementing a records management policy, and a probable outcome is that we will be unable to keep email older than one year. As an IT professional this has implications, because my email is full of useful information that I want to keep. After discussing this at length with our records manager, I came to the conclusion that I really need some sort of "personal information manager". In about March 2009 I discovered Evernote, an online service.

Keyword tags and email

In Q2, 2007 I changed companies, which also meant a change to Outlook email. The immediate frustration of Outlook was the inability to put an email message in more that one folder. (You can copy a message to multiple folders, but this duplicates messages). On top of that the Outlook 2003 search is anemic. Upgrading to outlook 2007 helped searching, but the problem of how to file email remained.

Then I discovered an Outlook add-in product called Taglocity which allows you to add keyword tags to messages. After using keyword tags for several months I realized that this approach actually woks better that filing messages in multiple folders. The reason is that you can search on multiple keyword tags. Its a bit like searching for a message that exists in multiple folders. Although that is something I never did with folders, I do it all the time with keyword tags and find it very useful. The only problem with Taglocity is that it is an add on to Outlook, which means that if I use the web interface, I don't have access to my keyword searching.

The interesting thing about using Outlook now for over two and a half years is that it is no better or worse that Notes email; just different. And that although the Exchange back end has been reliable, there are just as many calendar issues with Outlook as there were with Notes. It seems like the calendar is just a very difficult problem to solve.

SharePoint Adventures

My present company is a Microsoft shop and, although we have a very small Notes setup, we decided to use SharePoint as a collaboration tool. So far we have WSS 3.0 up on VMWare, and plan to go to the full MOSS as soon as we have the data center question resolved (more on that in another post). Obviously each product has its weaknesses and strengths, and it has been very interesting comparing the way things are done in SharePoint with the way things are done in Notes. Here are a few little things that I have found in SharePoint that I really like.