Chandler and Foldera are both "cross-silo" applications that allow and encourage users to organize their information around "Subject matter" and "Projects" rather than technology, as in application areas.

However, I think the biggest differentiator between Chandler and other PIMs is that our design is built around information life-cycles with UI workflows that track user needs through all the phases of a piece of information..

Foldera still falls under the category of end-state design. (Of course this is based on what's available on the Foldera website: http://www.foldera.com/index.htm, I've signed up for a beta license.)

End-state design is when you identify all the "elements" or nouns a user needs and make sure that your "tool" has all of those nouns: Email, Events, Tasks, Contacts, Notes, Activities, Categories or Tags.

Lifecycle design looks at how users get from A to B to C and builds workflows to help users move seamlessly between "end-states". (ie. Stamping an event to send it out as an invitation. Labeling an item with an attribute or tag and then flipping it around to create a collection of items based on that Label.)

Looking at Foldera's end-states, there are some unanswered questions wrt how users should use the notion of an "Activity Manager".

What is an Activity? (aka Collection in Chandler)

• Is it something like a mailing list? A huge list of items that may or may not have anything to do with each other? (I think of this as more of a persistent "Area of Responsibility")
• Is it more of a David Allen mini-project of anywhere from 3-10 discrete tasks? (Paint garage door)

How do Activities come about?

• A lot of times they start out as single-item tasks, something you might jot down on the back of an envelope (Paint garage door)
• And then they become multi-step projects as you look into them (ie. Pick paint color, Socialize your color choices amongst family and friends, Research paint brands, Go to hardware store, Schedule a week-end, Check weather report, etc.)
• Sometimes if you're lucky, seemingly simple tasks become full-blown, persistent areas of responsibility (ie. You organize 1 movie night at work so well that you've been volunteered by the group to organize one every month from now into eternity.)

What does it mean to be Activity-centric?

Within each Activity, content is split up by Tool or application area. For example, I'm not sure you can see an Email sitting next to a Document or Task in the same view. (Though I can't say for sure.)

Sharing items is distinct from Emailing information. As a result, if you have a document that needs to go to 5 different people, but only 3 of them are using Foldera and have access to Foldera's sharing capability, you must share the document with 3 people and email it as an attachment to the remaining 2. You are still left to manually reconcile the shared version of the document with the emailed versions.

In reality however, you are Communicating with all 5 people and the software should provide a single workflow for doing so.

Similarly on the flipside, "where" you receive a new document (ie. Inbox versus Documents) depends on the technology used to "send" it to you (ie. Email versus Sharing).

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In sum, we are essentially attempting / proposing a paradigm shift beyond re-organizing data (ie. Activities first, then App tools VERSUS App tools first and then Folders or Views). We're talking about:

Re-defining what the term "workflow" means in terms of both it's size and scope.

Re-defining how much responsibility software takes on when it comes to helping you accomplish your goals.

Is software a set of tools with which the user can build a system? Or is the software the system itself? helping you manage the flow, growth, maturation of your information over time?

-- MimiYin - 16 May 2006