Full Featured, Free & a Cinch to use…
If you’re familiar with 37signals’ “Backpack” application, you’ll have no problem getting used to it’s half sister – Zoho Planner. Zoho.com (a competitor of 37Signals) has just released an upgraded version of this personal/project planning application. I found it much more streamlined and less cluttered than it’s Backpack counterpart. Another huge advantage it has is the unlimited storage that accompanies the free user accounts (you may upload files to your account – not to exceed 10mb). You’re looking at $5 per month with Backpack and you still don’t even get as much storage space. I’ve just been using it for a day now, but am already hooked.
A brief overview of the features are as follows: there’s no apparent limitation to the number of pages you can create, and within each page you can add a description along with multiple occurences of To Do Lists, Notes, Appointments and Attachments. In addition to sharing these pages with others, Zoho Planner also provides a comprehensive overview of your To Do’s and Reminders. You can mess around with the demo sign-in and make up your own mind…or, if you’re looking for more opinions, here’s another recent review:
Web 2.0 Journal Product Review: “Zoho Planner” — The Zoho series of online software products from AdventNet has been growing quickly over the last year, and their Zoho Planner product has just been revamped. Designed specifically for the Web 2.0 era, Zoho Planner is an online service for managing task lists and appointments.
There is very little down side to this application, but a few things that I’d like to see added in the future are as follows: a print view (for use with paper planners); persistent URL’s for each individual page (helping integration with components of other various planning systems); sync or export capabilities with MS Outlook 2003 (a feature that no one has perfected to date – not even Microsoft itself)
For the record, I’m only using this as one component of my complete organizing system (based on Getting Things Done by David Allen