A Personal Information Manager 3.1

Overview

Personal Information Manager is a free and simplistic alternative to MS Outlook. It does not sport a modern interface, nor does it have the Outlook’s omnipotence. Nonetheless, large strata of users resort to free alternatives instead of buying fancy Microsoft products. Personal Information Manager offers quite a comprehensive set of features for a free application. It is powerful as an address book and contact manager. It helps you keep track of your contacts, their personal details, such as Birthdays, addresses, titles and other relevant information. With Personal Information Manager, you can easily send out Christmas cards in batches to all your contacts.

Personal Information Manager offers more than just an address book. It has several full-featured modules you would expect to see in a specific niche product – scheduler, clip board, notes, label printer, form letter printer, and email. Basically, Personal Information Manager can address to most of your needs in terms of personal information compartmentalizing.

Installation

Personal Information Manager installs and uninstall politely. It does not bring unwanted toolbars, bundled adware with it. Nor does it have any special prerequisites to install correctly. It is Win OS compatible and requires VGA Min Monitor and Pentium. When you launch the email module, Personal Information Manager automatically addresses Outlook, if you have one installed, for a list of contacts. You can authorize access, or deny. Overall, the program seems non-intrusive.

Interface

When evaluating GUI, we focus on usability and looks. If Personal Information Manager is relatively easy to use, with intuitive layout and self-descriptive main modules, it is not particularly handsome in terms of looks. Users can change the color scheme by selecting colors for each particular element, but it is way too time-consuming and boring. There are no additional skins you can switch to, so either tolerate the Win XP-like interface, or let it go. Overall, GUI is rather official and dry, leaving no room for fun and customization.

As easy as the program is, some buttons within the modules are not quite easy to sort out and sometimes you need to click to see what it does. The number of features is quite extensive, and we find the program quite a reasonable, but slightly outdated Outlook alternative. The program also has a comprehensive Help Manual with easy to grasp descriptions of functions and features.

Pros

It is possible to create multiple address books with easy management of names, phones, addresses, emails, birthdays and the like information. The address book has a letter index, so finding names is easy both via the index, and via the in-built search option which is very convenient. In addition, each user of your PC can have a separate personal address book.

You can add pictures and comments, select and sort contacts according to name, address and birthday. Copy-pasting names and addresses between different address books is a two-click operation.

Personal Information Manager offers Calendar and Scheduler, with reminders. In addition, it features a print name and address list options, as well as creating and printing form letters option.  The Help manual is complete and explanatory. Considering the program comes free of charge, it might be worth checking out.

Cons

Personal Information Manager has very limited customization options. There are no additional pre-defined skins, and the main interface is quite boring. Users do have the option to set window and components colors, but you don’t impress anyone with that option nowadays.

Some buttons within the modules may be not as self-descriptive as the others.

Alternatives

EssentialPIM Pro, AIM All-In-One Personal Information Manager, MS Outlook, Efficient Lady's Organizer and Efficient Man's Organizer, to name a few. The PIMS niche is abundant in paid and free personal information management tools, and you can spend some time choosing the one that suits you best.

Conclusion

Personal Information Manager looks a bit old-fashioned and boring, but it offers a wide range of powerful features for convenient management of your schedule, notes, contacts, addresses and other personal information. It is a free program that is compatible with both new and old Windows versions. If you like the dark blue official design, you might as well choose to keep this program.