2. Agendus For Windows Outlook Edition

Agendus is all about making Outlook itself more usable. Instead of being a standalone application that merely helps you to use Outlook, it actually integrates directly with Outlook. It’s actually so integrated that we didn’t realize that it was actually installed since there is no program to start from the Windows Start menu. Instead, it’s just a new toolbar inside of Outlook.

The confusion doesn’t end there. Agendus overlays its own interface on top of Outlook, as well. So, for example, the regular "task" menu in Outlook 2003 will load as usual...there is also now an Agnedus view for tasks as well - it’s the same data, though. But Agendus allows for more granular groupings and follow-ups. Agendus also includes a text-capture tool, though the capture is limited to data that’s already in Outlook. After a limited amount of testing, it proved to be somewhat ineffective. For example, we selected the sender line from an email, selected capture and then expected to easily be able to use the captured data to create a new contact. The problem is Agendus didn’t recognize the address data so no new contact was created. There is also some interesting new calendar functionality that Agendus adds to Outlook. For those of us with really full calendars, the Free Time Finder could be very useful. You just provide a range and the amount of time you’re looking for and free time finder will show you where you’ve got free time or not. It sure makes life easier compared to looking through a calendar manually. There are also versions of the software and extensions that make the Agendus enhancements on Windows Mobile and Palm devices easier to use.

Contact Copy

Contact information lives in a lot of different places. Outside of importing and exporting contact sets using standardized formats, inputting contact information in Outlook is very much a manual affair. The idea behind Contact Copy is that you can grab contact information, wherever it may be, and import it into Outlook. That information can be in a Word document or on a Website; it doesn’t matter. On the intelligence side, Contact Copy will parse out data sets such as name, address, phone number and email address and then attempt to properly populate the appropriate fields inside of Outlook. In our test case, we selected the contact information from the Tom’s Guide/Best of Media contact page to see how accurate a contact we could generate.

For the most part, the information looks good and doesn’t make any obvious errors. Contact Copy also provides an integrated mapping function that uses Windows Live Search maps, which is also a nifty feature. Contact Copy also worked well with non-US addresses and phone numbers. In a limited test, we tried out ContactCopy with the Bestofmedia.com European listing at: http://www.bestofmedia.com/contacts.php. Individual contacts were recognized easily. The only difficulty the system encountered was with multiple contacts when more than one set of address information was selected. ContactCopy generally works well and as advertised.

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