Who-What-When. (personal information management software) (evaluation)
by Peter Francis

With so many Personal Information Management (PIM) software packages flooding the market, it's easy for some to get lost in the crowd. By concentrating on a few areas, who-what-when breaks from the pack and excels. Designed as a people organizaer, a project manager, and a time-management tool, who-what-when has the ability to view a project and the people involved from a number of different perspectives.

The who facet presents a "people" view that cross-references people and projects, so that any person can be cross-referenced with any other person or project to display all their common tasks. Another component of the who module is a card file that stores basic information about people along with a telephone list.

The what module displays projects, the people involved in them, and project deadlines and milestones. With this module, you set up projects and milestones and develop a calendar to manage a project. Alternatively, who-what-when can display a Gantt overview of aproject in a time-line format.

The when portion of the program displays a personal calendar for appointments, tasks, and deadlines. Also available are daily and weekly office calendars.

A fourth facet of the program is its etc. module, used for genral reference, printing, and housekeeping. Enter the names of the people you want to attend a meeting, find the free time for each person, and coordinate a meeting around each person's schedule. Generate reports to set priorities, schedule project commitments, or develop mailing lists.

Hard disk installation of the program involves no more than typing INSTALL and designating the default drive in which you'd like the application and its data to be placed. You'll need 1.5 megabytes of free hard disk space free, though.

Help is available by pressing the F1 key for simple instructions and background regarding a particular who-what-when application. What is lacking, however, is a panic key that will step a user through a difficult situation.

A nice feature of who-what-when is its ability to use a hot key to switch to a user's favorite applications--communications, word processor, or spreadsheet--while staying in the program.

When you install who-what-when, it gives you to option to hot key in and out of who-what-when and other software. For example, you can use the default memo module for short notes, or you can choose to access your favorite word-processing program instead. The same can be done with the program's default autodial hot key and your communications software, and the calculator hot key and your spreadsheet. If you have no favorite alternative utility application, the who-what-when hot keys can be set up to access other software.

Chronos will release a network version later this year, called who-what-when Enterprise, which will link PC nodes on a network together to coordinate personal and office calendars, project schedules, project milestones, card files, telephone lists, memos, and messages.

Focused on maximizing human resources, who-what-when is first class for small work groups.