Information Management: PCMag Review

pcmag.com reviews all the Information Management Software(s)

 Among the programs we looked at, 80-20 Retriever does the best job of helping you deal with information overload, combining a robust e-mail and document search tool with an easily accessible and familiar interface. Retriever can be embedded in Microsoft Outlook, so starting a search is only one click away. And the program's Clustering feature makes digging through search results even easier.

Retriever offers the best overall combination of ease and power, but if you want the most flexible search tool, take a look at dtSearch Desktop. Its interface is a bit dated and difficult to navigate, but the program lets you index e-mail, files, and even Web sites. It also shows you every word indexed and does advanced searches, such as fuzzy and synonym lookups.

Scopeware Vision Professional tries to present users with a very familiar paradigm: a desktop covered with paper. Vision is reasonably easy to use, and its document thumbnails are useful for jogging your memory, but its search capabilities are ultimately too limited.

If you're willing to give your life over to a tool that can help you recall any document or message nearly instantly, Enfish Professional is worth a look. Enfish can be used as a complete mail client and contact manager, but it still suffers from stability issues and requires a lot of horsepower.

Why can't PCs just offer information related to what we're working on? That's the promise of Creo's Six Degrees, which lacks full-text indexing, lowering the application's overhead. But its suggestions aren't as helpful as they could be.

Finally, we like the promise of Idealab's soon-to-be-released Find, which searches as quickly as you type. Idealab has had to make some trade-offs to make this omnipresent yet unobtrusive application work, so there are some shortcomings, such as the inability to search by phrase.