Press Releases - 2001

Hunting and gathering with IntelliPLAN

IntelliPRINTPLUS for Domino can be installed even on a Domino Server which uses Microsoft IIS as the HTTP engine.

In the Stone Age, no one cared about appointments, meetings, or being able to keep track of the schedules of every hunter and gatherer. People simply went about said hunting and gathering, and it was good.

Then came the invention of the calendar. This basically screwed up the world as we knew it, forcing the hunters to meet the gatherers at specific times, on specific days. And woe to the tribe's chief, who needed something to track where his hunters and gatherers were on any given day, at any given time.

Society has been struggling with that task ever since.

Fast forward to today. Your company is running the latest version of R5 with all the whiz-bang groupware features you've come to expect. Surely, you must now have the ability to see one calendar that includes all the appointments and meetings of your hunters (salespeople) and gatherers (knowledge workers) in one interface with capable printing, right? Right?

Okay, I know the answer. Group Calendars in Notes just doesn't cut it. It's a nice start for Lotus, but you can't see everyone's calendars at once, so you're stuck viewing them one at a time. This just isn't enough for most managers or executive assistants (the real brains behind the tribe).

Luckily, Cybernet Software Systems, Inc. (http://www.cybernetsoft.com) has attempted to fix the problem that has been nagging us for millennia. The solution? IntelliPLAN.

IntelliPLAN is a piece of software that plugs into Notes and allows the calendars and schedules of numerous people to be rolled up into one GUI (Graphical User Interface). This allows you to have your entire sales force represented on one screen, and better yet, you can print that screen in a variety of formats that Lotus users have previously only dreamed about.

Installation
Before I get into the nitty-gritty details, let's start at the beginning. Installation of IntelliPLAN is extremely easy. You place the storage .NSF file on your Notes server and simply open it in your Notes client (as shown in Figure A).

Figure A

Here's IntelliPLAN's Notes based install screen.

Then, click the Install button and follow the typical installation wizard. This method is great for ease of use. Send a database link through Notes mail and two clicks later your users are installing IntelliPLAN.

Once installed, you can run IntelliPLAN by selecting IntelliPLAN for Lotus Notes from the Actions menu. This will bring you to the Planner screen shown in Figure B.

Figure B

This is a screeshot of the IntelliPLAN GUI.

The GUI itself is very attractive and is divided into two panes. The upper pane holds a planner view that shows you the entire year. The lower pane shows the format in which you've chosen to show data, or print from.

As you can see in Figure B, right now you have no data. That's because you haven't chosen any schedules to monitor yet. This is done on the People tab.

Populating your tribe

On the People tab you have your Add, Edit, and Delete buttons. You also have an Add Me button to get yourself going quickly. The Add button brings up a dialog box (shown in Figure C) that allows you to choose anyone in your address books.

Figure C

Choose the members of your tribe.

My Domino domain also has Directory Assistance enabled, and IntelliPLAN found all four directories without a problem. Once you add a user, it downloads the calendar information into the background. This makes you wait a few seconds before hitting the Add button again to add additional users, which is a minor annoyance.

One nice thing about adding users is that you can place them into various groups according to your tastes. Later, you can use these groups to show different subsets of people on the main Planner screen.

Once you've added your users, it's time to go back to the Planner Tab. Now you'll see in Figure D that the landscape has changed a bit.

Figure D

Here's the planner in the Week Grid 1 Format.

You can now see colors representing your users and their schedules for the entire year. The bottom pane is where the fun begins.

Have it your way

You can choose almost 20 different ways to view your calendar information. There is something for everyone here: weekly, daily and monthly views, GANNT charts, To Do lists, and more. Even better, they actually print out as well as they look on the screen, in both A4 and Letter formats.

The only gripe I have is that not all of the formats support the color-coding, and the few that do make very small use of the color bars. It would've been nice if you could adjust the width of the colored bars, or had names color-coded for printing purposes. Perhaps we'll see that in a future version.

As for other whims, you can tweak on the Preferences tab (as shown in Figure E) to your hearts content. Change column widths, colors, dates to display and anything else to fit into your mode of thinking.

Figure E

There are enough choices to make any tweaker happy.

IntelliPLAN allows you to do more than view and print this data; it allows you to manipulate it as well. You can actually create new appointments (as shown in Figure F) and edit existing ones all through the IntelliPLAN GUI.

Figure F

Creating new calendar entries is easy.

This, of course, is based on Notes security. You can't delete your boss's appointments, no matter how tempting it might be.

To create a new entry, you highlight one of your users, right click on a date, and choose New Activity or New To Do. You then fill out the pertinent information and IntelliPLAN plugs it right into the appropriate Notes calendar.

Take it with you

As if all of this wasn't enough, you can also take IntelliPLAN offline. While offline, you can do everything except add and manipulate data. It's good for when you're on the go and need to look at the current state of the tribe. Hopefully, Cybernet will incorporate offline data entry in a future version.

Is this the answer?

Is IntelliPLAN the answer to the ancient tribal dilemma? I would have to say that it comes as close as anything I've ever seen. If you ever find yourself having to defend the merits of Lotus calendaring and scheduling to a manager or executive assistant, stop wasting your breath. Buy IntelliPLAN and rule your tribe!

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