pim software

Vickie,

As a busy Certified Legal Nurse Consultant with a number of attorney-clients, I’ve been wondering, what kind of personal information management (PIM) software should I be using?

Monica R., RN, CLNC

Hi Monica,

That’s a great question. PIM software, depending upon the complexity, can do something as simple as manage your contacts and address book, calendar and even, on higher-end systems, keep track of your marketing efforts and client communications.

To answer your question I consulted with Tom, our tech expert. His response was pretty complex getting into things like databases and the kind of tech-talk that techies do – just because they can. He also did some pretty good research. (Give a man a fish and you feed him dinner. Give him an Internet connection and you lose him for hours.) Rather than give you Tom’s answer (and bore you to near-death) let me distill what I think he said leaving out the gigabytes, megabytes and overbytes.

ACT! and Goldmine used to be pretty good, fast and simple-to-use programs and were the leaders in the PIM field. Goldmine’s personal edition has been discontinued and in its last iteration ACT! added a SQL (pronounced Sea-Quill) database (you don’t need to know what that is) to help keep track of the immense amount of data it generates and handles. This has apparently slowed it down to the point where you need two things to use it – a fast computer and some good computer skills (more than switching it on and off).

In other words some pretty good programs aren’t nearly as pretty or as good anymore. Tom also gave me some SaaS (more than his usual) which means, “Software as a Service,” ideas – this is where the actual software is hosted somewhere in the vast reaches of the Internet and you access it from anywhere. Salesforce.com, uReach^® and Google’s combination of applications are online only. Tom doesn’t recommend investing data in the “cloud” or with an Internet company that may not be there tomorrow (I keep telling him Google is safe). If you keep good back-ups you should be okay. Besides, that’s where all our data will be one day (go ahead and quote me).

What do I choose as a PIM? Well, I used to love the Palm Desktop (Tom says you can still download it for free from Palm, but check the license first.) before I started using Microsoft Outlook 2007. There’s a new Business Contact Manager for Outlook that will do everything the older PIMs do. We haven’t tried it yet but one of our vendors told me it was pretty good. We also have an enterprise-level CRM system that’s way too complex for most individuals (Tom’s words not mine).

My best advice for a legal nurse consultant? Save your money. Until you get over 50 attorney-clients I don’t believe you need to invest the time or money in buying, learning and programming a PIM. Outlook was free with our other software so why spend more money? We surveyed Certified Legal Nurse Consultants and the overwhelming response was that 80% of their revenues come from two to five of their attorney-clients. Don’t buy the geek software until you need it. Save yourself the aggravation and put the time and money into your CLNC^® business.

Success Is Inside!

Vickie