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User: daltonm

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  1. I accept his challenge! on Palm Pilots: Tools or Toys? · · Score: 1

    The article's author presumes that just because one boy is playing games on his father's Palm V then all PDA users must be playing games with theirs. Interesting logic!

    He summarizes that that the good old Daytimer is all that anyone would ever need. That may have been true 20 years but in most large organizations, that no longer is true.

    My employer has used office automation technology for as long as I've worked for them, approaching 20 years. This goes beyond the typical word/document processing technology originally targetted towards secretaries. One of the most fundamental and difficult office automation tasks that is performed is keeping a calendar. It used to be just principals (executives and key managers) that concerned themselves with calendars and they had secretaries to manage those. The rest of us peons didn't worry about that. Over time, however, that changed. More meetings involving more people (remember matrix organizations?) required more individual calendars to be kept. More problems with keeping up with all of the meetings that got scheduled were generated. Just notifying potential attendees, without the benefit of email, became a daunting challenge. And, you want them all to show up, too?

    Office automation in the form of centrally accessed calendaring systems integrated with email became the hottest mainframe applications around. Office automation suite applications such as IBM's PROFS (or DEC's All-In-One) single-handedly justfied the acquisition of a very large number of computer systems.

    Today, my PalmPilot integrates with MS Exchange and MS Schedule+, my employers mandated email and calendaring system. Most employees are required to use MS Exchange to send/receive email and all employees are required to use MS Schedule+ for calendaring. Because of the software integration between my desktop system and my PalmPilot, I can quickly coordinate my MS Schedule+ calendar with my PalmPilot calendar, all without typing or writing anything in! If I do make an appointment outside of reach of MS Schedule+ by writing it into my PalmPilot, it automatically goes into my Ms Schedule+ calendar when I HotSync.

    It seems obvious to me that, by spending some of my own money and time to integrate the PalmPilot system into my office desktop system, I greatly increase my instant access to an accurate, up-to-date calendar at greatly reduced time and effort. Isn't that considered a productivity boost?