Chaos Software’s Intellect - Why I Like it

Posted by Steve
Mar 3, 2014 at 11:38 AM

Chaos Software’s Intellect Review

For many reasons, it’s time for me to share what tools I use for my daily work. Like many of you there is not one side of me that a PIM needs to be useful to help with. There is the work side, the personal side, and the general messing around side. So the tools I use generally need to work in all those sides (environments) as much as possible.

I’m a travel agency owner and a travel agent. I’ve done this since 1984. Some of the duties, or tasks, that I need to manage include:
Communicating with clients, suppliers, friends, and church.
Managing business, personal, and client tasks.
Managing client research and general information.
Managing databases of contacts for business, fraternity, church, and personal.
Managing schedules such as appointments and other related due dates.
Managing recurring tasks, appointments, meetings, due dates.

I’ve been through a few PIM’s over the years. I’ve liked all the ones I’ve used, each has its own forte that gives it that special use for the target market. Maybe target market is the wrong description – most good PIM’s seem to be a very small operation so the PIM has the developer’s personal stamp on it.

My favorite PIM is Above and Beyond (1soft.com), others have been; Lotus Organizer, iambic’s Agendus (http://www.iambic.com/), and some other’s more on a test basis.

Email has become the number one item that moved me to a new PIM around 2008. Supplier’s had moved to electronic documents, much of marketing was electronic, keeping up with client’s contact changing required integration with one dataset. Eudora was dying, my Palm OS was dying, so I had to do something. I rediscovered Chaos Software.

You can read the laundry list of features and benefits at Intellect (http://www.chaossoftware.com), plus they’ve posted some of the hidden features on their blog. What I like is:

Contacts are the hub from which everything else connects.
Tasks, emails, files, etc. are linked to contacts. This means I can display a contact and find all the emails, tasks, files, whatever related to the contact.
Contacts can be linked together. This means friends, business, groups, etc. are easy to find.
Backups are simple and pretty much text based so I’m not locked in to proprietary problems. Same for Email.
Clean, clear workspace for the day. Not a cluttered mess.
Field names are customizable. This means I can not only have my own field names for contact usage, but also multiple email addresses. This is important because when people change emails I can add the new, keep the old so old emails are still linked to the contact.
Export contacts for marketing.
Activity series; check out http://www.chaossoftware.com/university/ and view Intellect 505. Example; I book a trip and now I have a number of tasks that need to be done in the future. I have a series set up to do that.
Email merge marketing – just like the old mail merge letters only this one merges email. Personalize those messages but the other important feature is each email is sent separately.
Search is fast and can be done via a simple

.
Search can be done via the same

but can target tasks, contacts, etc. only.
Restore individual records from a backup. Example, mistakenly delete a contact – you can simply restore just that contact.
Backups are individual – meaning each time I backup, the contacts, tasks, etc are done contacts1, contacts2, etc so I’m not overwriting the previous sets.
Custom copy; in each “module” (meaning contacts or tasks, or projects, etc) you can have your own way of copying data fields to the clipboard. Example for me is I can right-click on a contact then copy the first, last, street address, phone, passport number, expiration date, and credit card data since I have that data in their own named fields.

I think the price they charge is more than reasonable for what they offer. For contact based software that isn’t bloated, I have not found anything better.

Tip; I know people who use it for projects. They use the same linked contact activity but replace the contact with the project name.

Next up; AskSam for client research.

Steve