                      Arabesque ECCO Professional
                         Reviewed by Nathan Kay

    Every so often, a product comes along that is something different,
something extra special. It's rare to find a program that you don't just
like to use, but love to use.
    Arabesque ECCO Professional is such a piece of software. It's
marketed as a 'SuperPIM' (PIM being Personal Information Manager), and
after using it for a few weeks, I believe it.
    When I first read the packaging and press release about ECCO
Professional, I had my doubts. Nothing could be quite as good as they
were claiming ECCO Professional was.
    As usual, installation was provided no problems. Modern Windows
software packages have become very good at installing easily. One word
of warning, however. If you're planning to use the networking features
of ECCO Professional, you'll want to have your system administrator
present. But, as most of us probably are not planning on using the
network features, so it's not a major problem.
    Once installed, I tried simply running the program, without reading
any of the excellent manuals, and skipping the tutorials. It turned out
to be a mistake, in my case. While ECCO Professional is easy to use and
learn, it does help a lot to take the time to check out it's basic
tutorial, which teaches you the best ways to navigate the program, and
also gives you enough of an idea about how the program works that you'll
be able to get started easily.
    Once I'd mastered the basics of ECCO Professional, the first thing I
noticed is how amazingly flexible it really is!  With a few clicks of
the mouse, and just a little thought, I had ECCO Professional doing
things I never thought I'd see any PIM do easily. Tasks like 'nested'
to-do's, meaning that when you finish one to-do, you can have another
to-do that only can be seen once the first has been finished. This can
be very important in implementing projects and such.
    Projects are handled mainly though the use of a very flexible and
powerful outline interface that allowed me to assign priorities to each
outline item, and link parts of the outline into the calendar, or into
the to-do list. Another part of the outline system provides
user-definable columns that can be used to create checklists,
date-completed columns and, well, just about anything that might be
needed. Branches of the outline can also be collapsed and expanded so I
could view any given part of the outl tree without having to view the
entire outline at once. These branches can be linked into to-do's, and
time schedules.
    There's also a special outline called Hot Issues which I could link
parts of my other outlines and to-do's to. The Hot Issues outline
provides one single location in the program where I can go to see a
quick list of the things that I absolutely have to get done soon. It's
little touches like this one all throughout the program that make it
really special.
    I've mentioned the to-do list in ECCO Professional several times.
The to-do list is just that - a list to keep track of the things I need
'to do'. Items in this list can have start dates, or start at whatever
time that I input the to-do. They can be made to end at certain times,
regardless of if the to-do was finished or not, or remain until I mark
them as done. I could set to-do's to repeat in any way I found useful.
To-do's are important to me seeing as they allow me to keep tabs on the
things that I 't have a set time for, but that need to be done.
    I also found the Phonebook very useful. The Phonebook can store much
more than just phone numbers. It  can keep logs of what calls you've
made, and provided you have a modem with a phone attached, it can even
dial the number for you. But the most critical function aside from
storing names and their related phone numbers, is it's ability to keep
records of critical or interesting information about the people in your
phonebook. I found I could store birthdays, anniversaries, information
about what they do r a living, the names of their family, and just about
any other piece of information I might need to know.
    I've been using the default mode of ECCO Professional, which does
personal time management. But sometimes, I need more than personal time
management, and people in management know that what works for managing
your personal time usually doesn't work for managing projects.
    ECCO Professional deals with this simple fact by providing several
'templates' ready-made to help users start working quickly and
efficiently. The Legal Template  was designed to help an Attorney manage
tasks and cases, while the Manager Template was designed as an all
purpose time and task management tool. The Project Template was designed
to help manage projects of any kind. The Research Template was designed
to help you perform research and report writing, and finally, the Sales
Template was designed r the sales professional managing multiple
accounts and multiple or single products.
    Just as wonderful are the network features, which allow a group to
share the information in a given data set, creating not only personal
management files, but giving the chance for a group to all work with the
same planner, giving great access to group planning features. This way,
anyone in the group can check to see what meetings have been planned,
what things need to be done for the group, and what the long-term plan
is, and where they fit in.
    The minimum configuration I'd recommend for using ECCO Professional
would be  a 386SX-16 with four megabytes of ram, at least ten megabytes
of hard disk space, and a VGA monitor. With that system, ECCO
Professional is fully useable, but, as always, the more memory and
processor power you have, the faster and smoother your programs will
run.
    Selling for $279, I must admit, it's not cheap. Those looking for a
good product, but at a lower cost should look at ECCO Simplicity, a
scaled-down version of ECCO Professional. For a recommended price, based
on my experience, I'd say that $200 might have been a nicer price, but
the $279 price tag is certainly worth it!
    I found that once I started pouring my life into it, ECCO
Professional virtually lends itself to all sorts of time and
productivity management. In short, I found ECCO Professional to be a
great pleasure to use!

                        Arabesque Software Inc.
                         2340 130th Avenue N.E.
                        Bellevue, WA  98005-1754
                             (800) 457-4243

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