Beware! Not all PIMs are the same....

This forum lists success stories of EPIM users. If you find EPIM useful- welcome to post here!
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salamander
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Beware! Not all PIMs are the same....

Post by salamander »

when you actually start to play with them. I have installed and tested around 40 'groupware' systems in the past five years, and I can state with confidence that inexpensive as it is, imperfect as its feature list may be, with a simple GUI, EPIM is truly the best overall comprmise. If it had a Project Management module, even a simple one, it would be a world-class winner.

One alternative I looked at recently, "OO", which I actually paid for a 5 user pack, was being rolled out here across a small group until the fatal design flaw was discovered*. That is, the OO mail module has no possibility of a folder structure, nor filter-rules. Mail could be manually tagged, but it remained in a giant list, in the order received. Just one email account here receives around 300 mails a day, of which perhaps 20 are useful. EPIM's mail module does a great job of sorting incoming, but just wading and tagging through 300 emails per user per day, would take an hour per user, and should be an automated task. So I abandoned OO and all it's beautiful GUI, and reverted to EPIM, converting a trial into a paid network version. An issue like this tells you much about the real-world - or not - mindset of the programmer.

Do yourself a favour. If you are in the market for a groupware product to keep a small team in contact, even using a VPN like Hamachi to let remote users connect to the office DB, then download EPIM Network, play with across a few willing users and after a couple of weeks, if you must, try a competitive product, looking closely at the mail module. Also, check how the calendar module actually syncs. One almost hidden feature in EPIM is the ability to use a $12/year external agent like Memotoo to sync EPIM's DB to, in my case, a Windows phone.

But I've done the hard lifting for you. Needless to say, the mighty Big Blue groupware is one of the worst conceived of the lot and in usability terms, quite useless compared to EPIM. :?

* Most of the 40 have significant or even crippling design limitations as a groupware product. It sometimes takes a day or two to find them, and they usually relate to the data exchange between modules in the program. Don't forget that you can host EPIM Network on your own PC, in your own premises under your own lock and key. That puts it in an entirely different security environment to anonymous cloud computing, and actually works out far cheaper. All you need is a bog standard PC, not even a server.

End of advert!

P.S. Although not perfect, iframes in the Notes module would be great for example, I have the feeling that the programmer is listening and will continue to enhance the product.
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johncesta
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Re: Beware! Not all PIMs are the same....

Post by johncesta »

I made a big mistake and paid around $500 for Infoflo. Today I use $39 EPIM.

:(
John Cesta
Knights of Columbus
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