Yahoo! PIM properties are made for tabbed browsers

Tabbed browsing is the biggest thing to come to us netizens since broadband. There are many tabbed browsers such as Firefox , Maxthon , Opera , IE7 or IE6 with the new Yahoo! Toolbar (beta) and with them surfing the web has become a multitasking exercise in efficiency and instant recall that can only be described as fun. One way this can be demonstrated is with Yahoo!'s PIM (Personal Information Manager) properties: Calendar , Address Book , Notepad , Briefcase and Mail . I have each of this properties open in a tab from the moment I launch my browser at work. I start with the Calendar and glance at my appointments for the day. That done, I switch over to the Tasks list Calendar view since this is what drives my activities. Every time I promise someone (including myself) that I'm going to do something it gets added and prioritized on my Task list. I often joke that if it something isn't on my Tasks list, it's probably not going to get done. So I grab the first item from Tasks and inevitably it will refer to a client or prospect I need to contact for some reason. I click to the Address Book tab and do a quick search for that contact. I click "Edit" and, using the phone number info on their record, call them up. I talk with them and take care of whatever is at hand, typing copious dated notes into the Comments field in this person's Address Book record. When done I click on "Save" and, while that page is saving and redisplaying, I tab back to the Tasks list. I click on the Task I just completed. I either mark it as "Done" if there's nothing more to do or I edit it to reflect whatever future promise I made as a result of this contact with them. The Notepad serves as a great depository of often referred to cheat notes, reference information, etc. that I can call upon in the spur of the moment. My Briefcase files are my standard document templates which will launch right into my Open Office word processor or spreadsheet application. I can operate from wherever there is a computer since all my data is securely web-based. Since I am sometimes out of my office, I synchronize my Calendar, Tasks, Address Book, and Notepad with my PDA each day which also protects me in the unlikely event I lose access to my Yahoo! account (stranger things have happened). Being able to quickly (without waiting for pages to load) flip between the Yahoo! PIM properties using a tabbed browser makes this very efficient. I have tried Salesforce.com and SugarCRM and have walked away over- and underwhelmed. All I need is quick access to a calendar, a to-do list, and contacts database. These CRM applications have all sorts of stuff to help sales managers keep tabs on what's being done and by who - too much overhead. I got frustrated with the page loading demands too. I hope, as we are expecting to see some freshening up of the Yahoo! PIM properties in the near future, that we will see some dynamic linkages such as a Contact(s) field in Tasks and Calendar Events records that is populated using the same method as AddressComplete uses in Mail. Then clicking the Rolodex card icon on the Task will call up the Contact record in edit mode so note taking can occur. On the Contact record there could be "Add Task," "Add Event" and "Send Mail" buttons to create these events with the contact information preloaded. With VOIM/VOIP coming I would hope to see the ability to make calls from the contact record just as we can in Yahoo! Messenger. Oh yeah, the Tasks list will be sortable by more than one field. Really, I'm just saying that would be nice.   Permalink     Email this     Linking Blogs     Comments