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David Berlind's Reality Check
By David Berlind
June 24, 2004
After years of battling chronic personal information disorganization disorder, I believe I may have found the cure in a solution called InfoSelect. I lead a project-oriented life--every story is a project and I have many such projects underway at any given time. My projects assimilate information gathered from a variety of sources--interviews, e-mails, the Internet. For example, an e-mail inspires a story idea, so I put the message in an Outlook folder. To research the story, I make phone calls, take notes in Notepad, and save the notes in a folder called "Column Research." Sources for the story and their contact information are either embedded in my research notes, stored in Outlook's contact database, or in my own custom built contacts database. I bookmark some Web sites. Eventually, I start writing the story, using Microsoft Word, and store the story in a folder called "Column Drafts." But, with all the information that I've collected hiding in various nooks and crannies of my system, writing the story is more work than it has to be.
This scattershot approach to my profession has been bothering me for years. About a year ago, after playing around with Microsoft's TabletPC operating system, I began to think that Microsoft's OneNote might be the solution I was looking for. Serving as a central repository for a variety of data types, OneNote enables you to create a hierarchical organization based on the way you work. At the end of the hierarchy's branches, the "leaves" are pages and these pages can hold word processed text, handwritten text or drawings (if you have a TabletPC), and images. For my story projects, I have a branch for "columns in progress" and within that, I have separate branches (you drill into branches through tabs across the top of the screen) for stories in progress. Within the tab for each of these stories, I have pages for each bit of information relating to that story. Pages are also accessible via tabs, but page tabs run down the side of the screen rather than across the top. One page might have the notes from an interview. Another page might have something that was cut and pasted from the Web. When Web pages are cut and pasted into OneNote, OneNote is smart enough to include a hyperlink with whatever was pasted that takes you back to the original Web page. Though I've never tested it, OneNote also has an extremely cool feature that allows you to not only record a meeting, but that synchronizes any handwritten or typed notes with that recording. Although I don't have a TabletPC (I almost never take notes with a pen and wasn't about to start with a stylus), I gave OneNote a try to see if it could keep me organized. I used it extensively for note taking and organization of my research. Before long, I had many branches and many pages within some of those branches. If I lost my way, searching across all of my notes for specific instances of text was a breeze. I could even initiate an e-mail directly from OneNote. Still, OneNote wasn't doing it for me. I had a logical hierarchy in place, but I found it difficult to glance at my life as it was represented by that hierarchy. Multiple branches, for example, can't be left open simultaneously in a way that allows you to see the drill-downs right to the leaf level. So, after test-driving OneNote for over a year, I'm turning my organizational reins over to Micro Logic's InfoSelect. Based on what I've seen so far, I'm impressed. In contrast to OneNote, InfoSelect's two-pane user interface enables the entire hierarchical tree to be shown in one pane while the contents of the currently highlighted leaf are shown in the other pane. If a branch (a "topic," in InfoSelect's parlance) is highlighted instead of a leaf, the second pane goes away until you highlight a leaf again. Like a real tree, leaves (basically documents) can sprout anywhere (including from the trunk) and topics can be deeply nested. Multiple topics of the hierarchy can be "exploded" simultaneously. If your life is reflected in the design of the hierarchy, a quick glance at the tree can help you keep your priorities in order. If a glance won't do it, InfoSelect's other features--including a robust calendaring function--will. With the hierarchy displayed, any branch or leaf can be tagged as a to-do item and a giant blue exclamation point appears next to that item's icon. Any item can also be set to "tickle" you by clicking on a graphical tickler bar while a leaf is open. A mouse-over tip tells you what date the tickler is being set for, and how many days away that date is. InfoSelect's full potential can be realized if you use it to replace your current e-mail and calendaring software. Not only can you set up your calendar as you would with Outlook, but you can add tasks and to-do items that can trigger events at specific times. For example, if you want your system to automatically run an executable file at a specific time, InfoSelect can do it for you. Though InfoSelect can be tied to an Exchange Server via the POP3 protocol and serve as your primary e-mail client, it can't seamlessly participate in MAPI-based group calendaring with other Outlook users. (MAPI is a Microsoft proprietary protocol for handling e-mail and calendar-based communications between clients and Exchange Servers.) However, InfoSelect does have a collaboration feature that allows any InfoSelect-filed information (topics, documents, calendar items, etc.) to be shared seamlessly with other InfoSelect users across a network or even the Internet. Why would you want InfoSelect to be your primary e-mail client? One reason is that e-mails can be filed under any topic or sub-topic. To the extent that a topic represents a collection of data types, an e-mail is just one of those data types. Unfortunately, whereas a local file is one data type for InfoSelect (for example, a local spreadsheet could be a leaf within a topic), a local e-mail from Outlook isn't--unless you save it as a separate file first. This could prevent users who are married to Outlook from using InfoSelect as a repository for e-mails that are relevant to their projects. My workaround was simply to cut and paste text from relevant e-mails into new InfoSelect notes. InfoSelect supports a mind-boggling number of data types-- e-mail and calendaring items, newsgroup files, plain vanilla notes, and Web pages. For example, point a leaf at a Web page, retitle that leaf , and when you click on the leaf in the hierarchy, the Web page appears in the right pane. You might as well keep your browser bookmarks in InfoSelect. InfoSelect even has a flat file database capability where a table is like a topic, and the fields are like the leaves. This makes it possible to import your entire Outlook address book. Or, you can design your own databases; InfoSelect provides a forms facility for data entry and retrieval. So far, my favorite feature--even though it isn't perfectly implemented--is InfoSelect's ability to work with external relational database management systems through ODBC. After using Sybase Central to create a multi-table query for my deployment of Sybase's Adaptive Server AnyWhere, I tried opening that query with InfoSelect; within about a minute, my 5,000-record query result popped up in InfoSelect's second pane. InfoSelect has a query execute button for any time you want to rerun the query. Unfortunately, the properties of the ODBC connection can only be entered once and not updated or maintained. If something changes about your ODBC connection, you have to delete your existing references to your databases and create new ones. But the most surprising aspect of this ODBC capability is that InfoSelect automatically incorporates the query results into its search set when doing a full-text search across your hierarchy. For example, when I searched InfoSelect on Microsoft, the hierarchy collapsed to only reflect hierarchy items that contained that text. One of those items was my database query; when I clicked on it, the right pane showed a filtered listing of records that contained the word "Microsoft" in any field. In other words, all that InfoSelect was showing once I searched on the term Microsoft were any branches or leaves with the word "Microsoft" in them and any record in any one of my preprogrammed database queries that contained the term in any one of its columns. However, this ability to search across all the data you're keeping in InfoSelect doesn't apply to some data types. If InfoSelect is the container of the data itself, then InfoSelect's search will work with that data. But, if you're inserting a Microsoft Word file from the local hard drive as a leaf or a Web page, then it doesn't work. That said, InfoSelect's search capability has a small option whose results simply astonished me. After inserting your search criteria, there's a small check box that, instead of pointing the search at InfoSelect's data store, tells InfoSelect to direct its search at your Web cache. How many times have you wanted to return to a Web page that you viewed a few days ago but not remembered where it was? Although it's slow, this feature of InfoSelect takes care of that for you by digging through your Web cache and looking for every occurrence of your search term on your previously viewed Web pages. Once it's done, it creates an entire branch in your hierarchy that's devoted to that search and, within that branch, creates a leaf for every Web page from your cache that scored a hit for the search term. Another cool feature of InfoSelect is its ability to encrypt and decrypt your notes. InfoSelect users have the option of using a pair of public/private keys from Micro Logic or PGP. You pick the password and InfoSelect will encrypt your notes, making them impossible to view without the password and the right key pair. Impressed? I am. And this review only scratches the surface of what InfoSelect can do. For example, the Windows version can synch with an InfoSelect version for the PalmOS. If you're expecting InfoSelect to be $49 utility like other jacks-of-all-trades software, you're in for a shock. InfoSelect costs $249. But, if you use it religiously as I am now (it has full word processing capabilities and I'm writing this story with it), you'll recoup that cost and more in terms of what your time is worth. OneNote? Good riddance. You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.
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