Lotus Agenda

Last updated
Lotus Agenda
Developer(s) Lotus Software
Stable release
2.0b / 1992
Operating system DOS
Type Agenda
License Freeware
Website www.lotus.com

Agenda is a DOS-based personal information manager, designed by Mitch Kapor, Ed Belove and Jerry Kaplan, and marketed by Lotus Software.

Contents

Lotus Agenda is a "free-form" information manager: the information need not be structured at all before it is entered into the database. A phrase such as "See Wendy on Tuesday 3pm" can be entered as is without any pre-processing.

Its distinguishing feature was the ability to allow users to input data before the creation of database tables, giving the program flexibility to accommodate the myriad pieces of information a person may need to keep track of.

The program was an attempt to create a "spreadsheet" for words. The computing industry was at first quite taken by its audacious goal and the power it brought to users as they were given a tool that allowed them to structure "real life" information in any way they wished.

Its flexibility proved to be its weakness. New users confronted with so much flexibility were often overpowered by the steep learning curve required to use the program. Attempts to overcome this through packaging pre-built databases with the program were insufficient to lift sales to adequate levels. In the end only a few hundred thousand copies were sold.

The program reached version 2.0b. Instead of porting Agenda to Windows, Lotus stopped development on this program and introduced a new PIM, Lotus Organizer, that uses the paper-based organizer metaphor, in its place.

The program

The following jargon is used to describe Agenda's concepts:

An "Item" is a piece of free-form text

A "Category" is a way of organizing information and was the original smart folder concept used by Microsoft Outlook 2003 and by the Spotlight utility in Mac OS X v10.4. Items can be automatically or manually assigned (linked) to one or more Categories.

Categories can be organized hierarchically and viewed as a tree network. "Parent" categories could inherit assignments from "child" categories. Agenda performs automatic categorization after it learns your associations. For example, if you link Project A to Mary, then every time you enter an item about Project A, the item is automatically assigned to Mary.

The information is presented in "views": in effect spreadsheet-like grids with items forming the rows and categories forming the columns. Users can create as many views as they like, selecting columns to include and how to sort the items. For example, you can create a People view that displays items sorted by the people to whom they are assigned and columns such as Project Name, Status and Due Date.

"Conditions" and "actions" allow users to set up assignment rules.

Once an item is entered, the program can interpret the text to assign it to various categories. In every database a "When" category is included automatically so that if a date is embedded within the text, it is interpreted and an assignment is made. For example, the item "See Wendy on Tuesday 3pm" is automatically assigned to the following Tuesday at 3pm. If a category "Wendy" had also been created then an assignment could also have been made as well. You create a Wendy category by adding a Column called People and typing Wendy as a column entry. Then any time you type Wendy in any item, that item is also assigned to the Wendy category without your needing to make the assignment in a people column (and even if the view in which you enter the new item about Wendy does not include a People column).

This gives the user a quick ability to find every item that has an association to Wendy.

The program can be used for:

Technical description

Agenda has some novel technical features. Most notably, database views support item addition and modification, which means that Agenda must infer item attributes from the view. For example, if a view contains the category Home, and the user creates an item "paint bathroom" in this view, then Agenda attaches the Home attribute to the item. In some cases, assignment cannot be exactly determined and Agenda uses a set of heuristics to make reasonable assignment choices.

Agenda's designers described these core concepts in a 1990 CACM paper , [1] and patented some of its internal data structures . [2]

Current status

The program has been released as freeware. It can be downloaded from the links below.

Lotus Agenda can still be used on Windows 3.x/9x/ME/2000/XP computers and there are still many active users around the world (see the Pimlist email list on Yahoo groups).

It suffers from:

Revival attempts

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spreadsheet</span> Computer application for organization, analysis, and storage of data in tabular form

A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate and display a value based on the contents of other cells. The term spreadsheet may also refer to one such electronic document.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HCL Notes</span> Collaborative software platform

HCL Notes is a proprietary collaborative software platform for Unix (AIX), IBM i, Windows, Linux, and macOS, sold by HCLTech. The client application is called Notes while the server component is branded HCL Domino.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitch Kapor</span> American entrepreneur (born 1950)

Mitchell David Kapor is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. He serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building personal networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lotus Improv</span> Spreadsheet program

Lotus Improv is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Development released in 1991 for the NeXTSTEP platform and then for Windows 3.1 in 1993. Development was put on hiatus in 1994 after slow sales on the Windows platform, and officially ended in April 1996 after Lotus was purchased by IBM.

Lotus Symphony was an integrated software package for creating and editing text, spreadsheets, charts and other documents on the MS-DOS operating systems. It was released by Lotus Development as a follow-on to its popular spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, and was produced from 1984 to 1992. Lotus Jazz on the Apple Macintosh was a sibling product.

Lotus Software was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018.

The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) was a non-profit organization that was established in 2001 with the goal of developing Open-source software applications and tools. The organization's most notable project was Chandler, a Personal information management software and collaborative productivity suite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data dictionary</span> Set of metadata that contains definitions and representations of data elements

A data dictionary, or metadata repository, as defined in the IBM Dictionary of Computing, is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format". Oracle defines it as a collection of tables with metadata. The term can have one of several closely related meanings pertaining to databases and database management systems (DBMS):

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Project</span> Project management software

Microsoft Project is project management software product, developed and sold by Microsoft. It is designed to assist a project manager in developing a schedule, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kontact</span> Personal information manager software

Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs all built on top of a common core.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandler (software)</span>

Chandler is a discontinued personal information management software suite described by its developers as a "Note-to-Self Organizer" designed for personal and small-group task management and calendaring. It is free software, previously released under the GNU General Public License, and now released under the Apache License 2.0. It is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called Lotus Agenda, notable because of its "free-form" approach to information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lotus Jazz</span>

Lotus Jazz is an integrated suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database, graphics, and communication software designed for the Macintosh 512K. The name was intended to evoke a group of musicians who together create something larger than each of the individual players. It was released in 1985 and retailed for US$595.

A pivot table is a table of values which are aggregations of groups of individual values from a more extensive table within one or more discrete categories. The aggregations or summaries of the groups of the individual terms might include sums, averages, counts, or other statistics. A pivot table is the outcome of the statistical processing of tabularized raw data and can be used for decision-making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tree view</span>

A tree view is a graphical widget within a graphical user interface (GUI) in which users can navigate and interact intuitively with concise, hierarchical data presented as nodes in a tree-like format. It can also be called an outline view.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecco Pro</span>

Ecco Pro is a personal information manager software based on an outliner, and supporting folders similar to spreadsheet columns that allow filtering and sorting of information based upon user defined criteria.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Image organizer</span> Software for organising digital images

An image organizer or image management application is application software for organising digital images. It is a kind of desktop organizer software application.

An entity–attribute–value model (EAV) is a data model optimized for the space-efficient storage of sparse—or ad-hoc—property or data values, intended for situations where runtime usage patterns are arbitrary, subject to user variation, or otherwise unforeseeable using a fixed design. The use-case targets applications which offer a large or rich system of defined property types, which are in turn appropriate to a wide set of entities, but where typically only a small, specific selection of these are instantiated for a given entity. Therefore, this type of data model relates to the mathematical notion of a sparse matrix. EAV is also known as object–attribute–value model, vertical database model, and open schema.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Memoranda (software)</span>

Memoranda is an open source and cross-platform personal projects and diaries manager.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FastTrack Schedule</span>

FastTrack Schedule is a Project Management Software app (PMS) for Mac and Windows. It helps teams plan, track, analyze, organize, manage resources, develop resource estimates, and report their projects. It can manage planning, scheduling, cost control, budget management, resource allocation, and Project Portfolio Management (PPM).

PL/SQL is Oracle Corporation's procedural extension for SQL and the Oracle relational database. PL/SQL is available in Oracle Database, TimesTen in-memory database, and IBM Db2. Oracle Corporation usually extends PL/SQL functionality with each successive release of the Oracle Database.

References

  1. ↑ Kaplan, S. J.; Kapor, M. D.; Belove, E. J.; Landsman, R. A.; Drake, T. R. (1990), "Agenda: a personal information manager", Communications of the ACM, 33 (7): 105–116, doi: 10.1145/79204.79212 , S2CID   15342148
  2. ↑ U.S. patent 5,115,504
  3. ↑ "beeswax". Sourceforge. Retrieved 30 August 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.