Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Sometimes Low-Tech is the Best Tech -- even in calendaring

The New York Times recently did an article "In an Era of 'Smart' Things, Sometimes Dumb Stuff is Better."



You may be surprised that for some people who spend almost all their professional time in Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and breaking legacy calendaring systems (not that there are really any left for us to break), Zyg and Russ are calendar Luddites.

If you've seen us come into a customer site you may have been astounded that the calendaring guys pulled out paper organizers.

Zyg is big on his medium-form filofax and Russ still uses the Time/system book he was trained on at Lotus.

WHY? you are probably asking.

Really simple:  every server, client, and data set at Sumatra is fair game to become an immediate test system by any employee should the need arise.  And yes, it's happened to each of us and we're kind of happy when it does because it means we're shagging down issues making our latest generation of calendar migration tech better.

Now we still have our laptops with Outlook clients.  Truth be told I've tried every organizer / email client since Lotus Agenda.  I do not love Outlook (there is a lot to be unhappy about) but find Outlook just keeps evolving and no other client-based organizer can lay claim to that.

We also both have analog wristwatches.