OSMO is not an organizer that will do everything for you. I will not sync with your iPhone or your Blackberry. OSMO will not publish your calendar or allow you to drag and drop from one application to another. What OSMO will do is keep track of your calendar, tasks, contacts, and notes. In this article you will learn how to install OSMO and see just what it has to offer.

NOTE: As of this writing, the OSMO website is not responding.

Features

The OSMO PIM offers the following features:

• Calendar
• Tasks
• Contacts
• Notes
• Alarms
• Printing
• Date calculator
• Day notes
• Timeline
• iCal support
• Notification alarms
• GNOME system tray support

And more.

Installing OSMO

Even though the OSMO web site has gone MIA, the application can be found in your distributions’ repositories. So in order to install OSMO you only need follow these simple instructions:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “osmo” (no quotes).
3. Mark the results for installation.
4. Click Apply.
5. Sit back and enjoy the progress bar.

Figure 1

Once OSMO is installed you will find the executable menu entry in the Office sub-menu of the Applications menu. Click that entry and the OSMO main window will open (see Figure 1).

With OSMO, what you see is what you get. This is the only window you will need. From here you do everything. And the very first thing you will want to do is to make sure that OSMO runs in the background so, in order to recall your PIM, you only have to click on the OSMO icon in the system tray (the man in the suit with the black hair).

You can find this configuration option in the Options tab. At the bottom of this tab you will see two options:

• Enable System Tray
• Start Minimized

These should both be self explanitory.

Other options (in the General tab) you might want to take care of in the Options tab are:

• Date format
• Time format
• Web browser
• E-mail client

Now there are also sub-tabs for Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Notes. Poke around each sub-tab and configure these features to your liking. One configuration that might give you pause is the  “command” options. In the Tasks options you will see an option “Global notification command”. What you can do here is set a command for a task notification. You can get creative here, like using a sound with the “play” command. Whatever you use here, make sure it can be executed from within a terminal window. You could do something like this:

(xmessage -near An OSMO task awaits your attention) &

The above would pop up a small window with the message “An OSMO task awaits your attention” when the reminder hits.

That’s it for the more important options. Now let’s take a look at the heart of OSMO.

Calendar

Figure 2

The OSMO calendar (see Figure 1) offers all the standard features you would expect in a PIM calendar. In order to add a task you only have to right click a date and select Add Task. The creation of a task is very straight forward. Also from this right click menu you can browse Notes, iCal Events, and export to iCal.

As you can see, when you view a particular day in the OSMO calendar it will give you the details of that day as well as showing the days tasks. What I like about this is that it is one of the most uncluttered views of all the PIMs I have tried. You quickly get an idea of what your day is like.

Another nice feature is that when you add a task to your calendar it is automatically created as a task. But what if you just want to add a meeting or office hours? You certainly don’t want all of your appointments to show up as tasks. No. To add non-task entries in your calendar you want to toggle the Day Note panel (Upper right icon in the icon toolbar) and then insert a time line by clicking the small clock icon in the Notes pane (see Figure 3).

Figure 4

When you add a timeline in the Notes you will see the notes pane go from an empty window to a window with a timeline broken into the interval you configure (when you click the Add timeline button).

Now you can add meetings in a more standard way, and without adding them as tasks.

Final thoughts

Although OSMO won’t make the balancing act between work and home a simple, automated task, it will allow you to keep yourself organized in a clean, user-friendly way. And you don’t have to worry about losing calendars on a server, getting bogged down in cumbersome UIs, or lost in feature-bloat.

OSMO is a simple, easy-to-use PIM that will keep you simply organized.

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Kontact is the KDE entry in the groupware client race. It is the proverbial tortoise in a race with one giant hare, but as the race continues, Kontact improves and evolves at a faster pace than any of its competition. Does that mean Kontact is ready to usurp your current groupware client? Probably not, but it is definately worth a long, hard look. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the features it offers.

Tools and features

Kontact has the usual suspects when it comes to groupware clients: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and todos. But along with these tools are a few surprises you might not expect but will gladly welcome.

• Summary: Overview of everything happening in your Kontact including: Upcoming events, new email, news feeds, etc.
• Notes: An infinite book of digital sticky notes. You can also drag and drop your notes into emails!
• News: Collect your RSS feeds in one place.
• KitchenSync: The universal syncing component.
• Journal: Keep your own digital journal within the confines of Kontact.
• Time Tracker: Keep track of time spent on projects and work.

Kontact can also communicate with many groupware servers. The list includes:

Kolab

SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server

eGroupware

OpenGroupware

Citadel

Microsoft Exchange*

* Support for Exchange is only partially implimented at this point.

Novell Groupwise

Obviously the single most important groupware server work must be done on Exchange. Once Kontact can fully commnicate with an Exchange server, Kontact will find far more support in the Enterprise level.

As far as features are concerned, the list is impressive. Outside of the usual groupware client features, Kontact also includes:

Mail

• GnuPG support built in
• Out of office replies
• Favorites folder
• Certificate manager
• Anti virus/Anti spam/Filters managers built in

Calendar

• Publish calendars
• Timeline/Time spent/What’s next views

Contacts

• Distribution lists
• Crypto settings for individual contacts
• Custom fields

Why you should use Kontact

If you are looking for a groupware client that offers more than the standard features, enables you to keep your life well organized (and Thunderbird isn’t enough for you) then Kontact is for you. You will enjoy the stability Kontact offers as well as the outstanding anti-spam tool (SpamAssassin) and anti-virus tool (ClamAV).

Why you should not use Kontact

Figure 1

If you need full Exchange support look the other way. It will be a while before the Kontact team manages to pull off full support for the most-deployed groupware server. You should also avoid Kontact if you prefer a less-is-more approach to your tools. You will understand completely when you first open up Kontact and see it’s “tools aplenty approach” (As you can see in Figure 1 to the left.).

Final Thoughts

I have used Kontact on and off for a number of years. I’ve seen it grow from an unstable, barely usable afterthought to a full-fledge, business-ready groupware client. Until recently I wouldn’t have recommended Kontact to anyone but the biggest KDE afficionados. Now, however, I think most people will find Kontact on par with most groupware clients. Outside of the lack of Exchange support (which is a deal breaker for many) I can’t see a reason not to give Kontact a try.

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One copy of Do-Organizer will be awarded to RG who made the suggestion. The other copies of both software programs are up for grabs. Lets start with a review of Do-Organizer first:

Do-Organizer is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) that helps the user stay on top of everything. The company is offering a fully functional 30-days test version on their website. The personal information manager will run on Windows 2000, XP or Windows Vista.

The first thing that users will notice is the clean but stunning graphical interface. First time users will have to get accommodated to the plethora of icons in the main interface but it should not take long until they feel comfortable especially since everything can be moved around and hidden like in Microsoft Office 2007.

Probably the first step after starting the organizer should be data import from other sources.

Do-Organizer can import Contacts, Tasks, Appointments, Resources, Emails, Bookmarks or Finance Transactions from files. There is always the option to import the data from csv files with additional file types available depending on the data that should be imported.

There is one special import option for Outlook users which makes it even easier for Outlook users to import contacts, appointments or tasks into the personal information manager. All data can be managed in several ways. Contacts for example can be placed into folders like friends, work, important or family with the option to add new folders to the mix. Each contact can be edited to add or change information. It is furthermore possible to use flags to be able to identify items more easily.

Do-Organizer is a general, very comprehensive, all purpose personal information manager that is covering all the basics from managing contacts to appointments and tasks. One of the unique selling points of the software is the ability to link (or associate) items. It is for example possible to link an event with contacts which aids the information flow.

Other modules that Do-Organizer ships with are planners, journals, a password vault, a mind mapping module or a finance and spreadsheet module.

The software comes with a small toolbar that acts independently from the main program. The toolbar docks by default to the top center of the computer screen but it can be moved around freely or closed. It provides quick access to the most important modules of the personal information manager.

Do-Organizer is a very comprehensive personal information manager. It can be installed to a USB device as it does not write information to the Registry which makes it an excellent travel companion that keeps all important data in one secure place.

TexNotes Pro is the second application that is up for grabs today. TexNotes Pro is a feature rich productivity tool, some would say text organizer. What it basically does is that it can store all kinds of data giving the user the means at hand to organize it the way he wants.

Data is divided into so called Notebooks and Notes. Notebooks are folders that contain notes. Notes can contain all kinds of data that the user adds to them while Notebooks are simply the table of contents.

The productivity tools provided by TexNotes Pro are quite extensive. They range from templates and styles to hyperlinks, annotations, anchors, bookmarks and OLE objects (for example Microsoft Office, Open Office documents, PDF documents or even sounds)

The formatting options are as extensive as the productivity tools. Everything that’s in Rich Text Editors is also available in TexNotes Pro. Users can add tables, paragraphs, change fonts and styles, add images and more.

One of the most interesting options of TexNotes Pro is the ability to publish a document as a executable ebook. That’s basically an ebook that can be executed on the computer right away without needing any additional software. Content can also be exported into various formats such as html, rich text format, html with css and even doc or docx.

Four copies of Do-Organizer and 10 copies of TexNotes Pro can be won by filling out a comment below. If you already know those applications you are welcome to add your thoughts in the comments.

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As with every Personal Information Manager Total Organizer combines a calendar, an organizer, a to-do list, notebook and contact management software. Total Organizer uses a tree view that contains categories and subcategories with all those information. A category work could for instance contain different project subcategories each with their own calendar, notes, to-do list and contacts.

The main category combines all information from its subcategories which is important for the schedule obviously. The root category finally contains all information from all categories offering an overview of all activities, notes, contacts and the like.

Keywords can be assigned to every information that is being added to Total Organizer which can be helpful when searching for specific information. Popup reminders can be enabled as well. The application uses less than 7 Megabytes which is pretty good for an organizer.

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