Is there an ECCO out there?

Josquin is on a quest to find ECCO, a PIM software offering from NetManage. He felt it was one of the best ones on the market. Since it's quite possible that this particular piece of software has gone to binary limbo, I was wondering if someone might happen to be familiar with this particular package and might be able to suggest other alternative packages. To hear Josquin's own words on the subject, click on the link below."

Josquin asks: "A few years back, when stuck in the morass which is the Microsoft paradigm, I remember one bright spot. It was the PIM known as ECCO Professional. It was owned by NetManage, toward the end of its lifecycle, but judging by their website, they have apparently abandoned it. What made it so compelling was that it actually lived up to the title Personal Infomation Manager. In addition to your standard appointment and address books, it made it very easy to keep track of, categorize, recall, and recombine substantial amounts of largely unrelated data. It let you link your ideas and facts based on whatever criteria made sense to you. It was a breeze to schedule appointments by dragging a phone listing to your calendar. There was also a little arrow shaped icon called the Shooter which allowed you to transfer information between programs. Mail merges could be handled straight from your address book to the major word processing programs of the day, with a link to the document automatically saved under that client's information in your address book. One-off letters could be addressed just using the Shooter from the address book. Ecco Pro was highly configurable, but came with a very complete set of templates that made it pretty simple for new users to customize it to their liking. The only thing I would have added was a way to use this program as your desktop.

This is the kind of personal productivity application that the non-technical masses need: something which makes their day-to-day jobs/life easier to manage. It was a program that actually saved you time rather than just giving you more configurable output (which seems frequently to mean you take an hour to get a letter looking right that only took you 15 minutes to compose.)

I was curious whether anyone was familiar with any product(s) under Linux which were working toward a similar feature set? This could have the potential to be the "must have" application that convinces the money guys to take the plunge into Linux. "Hey, not only is the OS free and reliable, but since we've loaded that SuperPIM, it's giving us three extra hours a week of available time from each of our employees (above and beyond the increase from system uptime)!"

No help, but a plug for Commence

[davie]

I looked at ECCO, but thought it had too many bells and whistles. I'd much rather see Commence (used to be IBM Current) ported to Linux. Commence 2.x has/had a much cleaner interface and is programmable, to a certain extent. Commence seems like a good model/starting point for an Open Source project.

Info-select.

[Malcontent]

I too am an ex Ecco usr. I use Info Select as my PIM now. It's made by Micro Logic and totally kicks butt. Check it out you won't be disappointed. I don't know if they have a Linux ver tho.

Re:ECCO for Linux... hmmm...

[alloneword]

As a long-time Ecco user, I don't think "smart" and "Netmanage" belong in the same sentence. Unless it's the one I just wrote. But it would be wonderful if ecco could be reconstructed as a Linux project (call it "echo", of course).

It seems to me that the structure of the underlying database is not that complex. this may be becasue I am not a programmer; but I have had to think a lot about how to get my information out of ecco and saved somewhere else as it must eventually be.

There was a man in Vermont somwhere working on a program called Zoot which was meant to pick up Ecco users, but the project seems to have died. 3.0 still exists but the promised version 4 never appeared.

Three things that made Ecco uniquely valuable: the ease and flexibility with which you could construct "views" (I suppose they were instantly customised reports); the Shooter, as mentioned, even though this did not often work properly; and it was one of the first PIMs to do synchonisation, so that your laptop and your desktop reinforced each other. Any replacement would have to sychronise with PDAs.

ECCO for Linux... hmmm...

[acacia]

I think you hit the nail on the head. I still use my version from 1996 on my Windog partion, but I am using Win95 less and less, so it is becoming obsolete. Unfortunately, the PIMs for Linux are not that great, and it would be nice to have a version for Linux. Borland is resucitating Delphi by porting a version to Linux, and NetManage could do themselves a favor by following suit. It would be even more killer if they ported with a few improvements, like centralized administration, maybe with an intelligenly done client server architecture or web based architecture, coupled with improved links with Palm OS. The last time I talked with them, I was selecting a PIM for an entire company (150 + licenses) but they just didn't get it. They were more enthralled with developing a Java version of the product than producing something useful (like centralized administration) and so I was forced to pass them over. This time around the playing field is level, and MicroShaft isn't going to be here anytime soon. I think ECCO is another example of an award winning product that was destroyed by "almost free" software from M$ that never really worked right (Exchange ring a bell?) and poor judgement by their management. Netmanage has a chance to get in on the ground floor with a Linux offering, if they are smart enough to take it.