What a good Outliner should have

Posted by grendizer
Mar 7, 2010 at 10:14 AM

Hello again

I’m surprised a knowledge base software is called a “PIM”. “PIM” stands for *personal* information manager. I already use Outlook for personal things, like appointments, tasks, emails. A knowledge base is different, it is much less personal, as parts of this knowledge base can be shared with others. I don’t use Outlook and MyBase for the same purposes. I also imagined the word “outline” was refering to the tree view of all the articles.

Reasons for choosing MyBase: it has most of the features of an “ideal” Outliner / PIM , as suggested in my first post: tree view, 2 panes, viewing the file on a mobile device, quick creation of a web site from a branch of the tree.

In my opinion, what makes it stand out is the mobile device compatibility. Being able to check my knowledge base on my phone has been many times very useful to me. As far as I know, the only other Outliner that offers this advantage is OneNote, and it also offers synchronisation, which is way cool. But OneNote is a one-pane software , so it does not fit to my needs.
But as for MyBase, so far I have just been reading my knowledge base file on my phone, I have never tried to edit it yet. I don’t know how editing behaves on the phone, and how it affects the file when it is copied back to the PC.
I hope Windows Phone 7 will be supported in MyBase v6.

Exporting a branch to create a small web site is also a mandatory feature, in order to “make public” a part of the tree and to share it with co-worker. I.M.O. it’s more important than saving a web page into the knowledge base file. I usually select some text in a web page and paste it , unformatted, inside the MyBase article. So I don’t use “web collect”.

Pierre, very interesting article, I have saved this into… my knowledge base file ;) This article will help me to test other Outliners / PIM’s, and it is true that there are many of them.