Outlook, Improved

Love it or hate it, Microsoft Outlook is everywhere.

As the worlds dominant PIM (Personal Information Manager, a piece of software that stores your e-mail, contacts, calendar and such), Outlook is installed on millions of PCs across the globe. And though it does a fine job of storing your data, it does little to guide you in using that data. In other words, its a great tool for getting organized, but a poor tool for getting ahead.

Enter FranklinCovey's Plan Plus for Microsoft Outlook, a program whose single goal is to free you from the pain of information overload by letting you plan and direct your days with ease. And it does this strikingly well. Released in late 2004, version 3.0 is an upgrade with some dazzling new features.

Software with a philosophy

PlanPlus expands the features of Outlook to let you set goals, state your vision, and make the most of each day. These are concepts it draws from FranklinCovey's now-famous system of time and values management.

When Stephen R. Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, it quickly became one of the worlds best selling books and has sold over 15 million copies to date. In it, Covey outlined a new way to manage time - in fact, he claimed his system went past simple time management (which he called by the clock) and towards the lofty realm of values, vision, achievement, and leadership (which he called by the compass). Its a message that millions of people related to: PlanPlus is an attempt to merge that line of thought with Outlooks strong data-management tools.

Expanding Outlook

By default, Outlook comes with e-mail, task, calendar, journal, and contact management features, not to mention a powerful search function. PlanPlus leaves these intact, but adds a host of new functions to the desktop and Pocket PC versions of Outlook. To the desktop version it adds a Weekly Compass screen, which helps you plan your life a week at a time; a Goals screen to state what you'd like to achieve; a Mission/Values screen where you write your own mission statement, much like a business writes its mission statement to set its direction; a PowerNotes screen to make quick, off-the-cuff notes (it has far more features than Outlooks Notes function); a revised Today screen with helpful advice on planning and getting things done; and a brilliant Home screen (Fig. 1) that pulls all these features together on a single screen. And each screen is peppered with pithy quotes on getting things done, making a difference, and living a balanced life.

Fig. 1: PlanPlus adds an feature-rich Home screen to the desktop PC version of Outlook, giving users more information at a glance.

But that's just the beginning. PlanPlus 3.0 boasts FranklinCovey's advanced task management system, which trumps the simple lists that Outlook spits out. It includes a Coach Me feature to give you customized help and a Projects screen that lets you outline your projects in detail, and then list the tasks you'll need to achieve them. This is far and away the programs most welcome addition to the desktop PC version of Outlook. It lets you group tasks by subject (Fig. 2) and mark tasks as sub-tasks of other, larger tasks, a simple feature that for some reason has only been offered by large (and expensive) project management programs such as Microsoft Project. While PlanPlus won't give you the Gantt charts and other features that high-end software does, it will let you view all your projects tasks at once, then group them in order to make a plan. Its a simple feature that more than justifies the software's cost.

Fig. 2: The Projects screen is added to the desktop PC version of Outlook, allowing you to outline your projects and list the tasks you'll need to achieve them.

Pocket PC Features

PlanPlus 3.0 also improves Pocket Outlook, enhancing its task management features and adding a Daily Record to boot.