October 27, 2007...5:16 pm
Chandler - Manage Tasks, Calendars and Notes In One Place
I’ve just started using a Preview version of Chandler. It’s a new (and free) piece of software that lets you manage your diary, to-do lists and notes from a single programme. It’s aimed at small groups of people collaborating on projects and as it develops I think that it could be useful for some of my association/membership organisation clients that need to co-ordinate committee work or other projects amongst disparate groups of people.
Benefits Of Chandler
Apart from the fact that it doesn’t cost anything, Chandler’s key attraction for me is that it runs on Windows, Mac OS X and has an online version that acts as a hub for sharing information with the rest of your team. One of the nicest things about sharing calendars etc via Chandler is that the people you give access to don’t have to have a Chandler account. You just send them the appropriate link to your calendar depending on whether you want them to have read-only or read and edit access.
Email, Calendar, To-Do Lists and Notes All In One Place
You can also integrate Chandler with your email but I’m going to avoid that for the moment until I’m more familiar with the way Chandler works. The developers of Chandler have been quite clear that it isn’t intended as a replacement for your existing email programme However, email integration does make a lot of sense as often something that arrives via email is a task or an invite.
I’ve not used Outlook for a couple of years now (I replaced it with another programme called Thunderbird) so I’m not familiar with the latest version, but I found that I was only using it for email and it just had too many features. Although tasks, events and email were all in the same place, they were unrelated.
Where Chandler differs from Outlook is that events, tasks, notes, emails etc are all gathered in collections which relate to a project or an aspect of your life. You share a collection with the other people working on that project or those that need to be kept in the loop. Because the Chandler Project provide a free online hub outside of your own infrastructure and because they offer free desktop software that runs on Windows, Apple or Linux there are no technical or cost barriers to collaborating with your project members.
Chandler looks like a very promising project that I think could be very useful for associations and membership organisations. In it’s Preview state, it’s not really in a state to be relied on, but you can try it out for yourself at chandlerproject.org
Leave a Reply