OL 2003: Seeking replacement for Tasks & Calendar Appointments.

[Bret]

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a replacement for OL 2003's Tasks & Calendar
Appointments ? I'd like to keep Outlook, but just replace the Calendar and
Tasks functions with some third party add-in if possible.

Why you ask? The primary reason involves recurring tasks and recurring
appointments.

1) Recurring Tasks with alarm set: When a task alarm happens, if you
inadvertently hit the Dismiss button, all your recurrences are cancelled too.
I lost a customer over this when I failed to monitor their backups status for
almost 4 months. There should be a "Dismiss just this occurrence or dismiss
all occurrences" option like ACT! has. Imho, there should be no reason at all
to have to go all the way into the task and mark "Completed" to get rid of
the current alarm occurrence.

2) Recurring Calendar appointments with alarm set: When a Calendar alarm is
present in the Reminders window, and you open it up and add some new note
lines, those newly added notes do not propagate to the following recurring
appointments. Thus, you do not know what you did in the past. I don't want to
have to go to some other record keeping mechanism to see past information
associated with an appointment.

I've been evaluating ACT! 2007 and have some usability issues with that
software. There are a couple bugs in the new release too that effect the way
I work as well.

Perhaps MS has fixed these issues in the new Outlook 2007 ??? (That might be
a solution for me). Otherwise, any ideas you have will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Bret

 

[Gordon]

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a replacement for OL 2003's Tasks & Calendar
Appointments ? I'd like to keep Outlook, but just replace the Calendar and
Tasks functions with some third party add-in if possible.

Why you ask? The primary reason involves recurring tasks and recurring
appointments.

1) Recurring Tasks with alarm set: When a task alarm happens, if you
inadvertently hit the Dismiss button, all your recurrences are cancelled
too.

No they are not. Not here. I have a number of recurring events, the alarm
just flags up the CURRENT event, and the "dismiss" button just dismisses the
CURRENT event.

 

[Bret]

Hi Gordon,

Perhaps I was not clear on this. Are your alarms still set on the future
occurences, or was the alarm turned off when you used the Dismiss button on
the first occurence?

Thanks,
Bret

 

[Gordon]

Hi Gordon,

Perhaps I was not clear on this. Are your alarms still set on the future
occurences, or was the alarm turned off when you used the Dismiss button
on
the first occurence?

Alarms set on future occurrences

 

[Bret]

I just did tests again, moving the dates ahead with the clock applet, and no
alarms occured if the task was "Dismissed", and in the task, the Reminder
checkbox was unchecked. Just to be fair, I will not manipulate the system
dates, but rather create a normal "each day" task, and also a "each day after
marked completed" task, and let the time pass normally. I will reply in a day
or two.

Regards,
Bret

 

[Bret]

Hi Gordon,

I just ran another series of tests again. Yesterday at about 3:30pm I
created both 1) a recurring task set to "each day at 4pm", and also a 2)
recurring task for 4pm set to "regenerate each day after the task was marked
completed". I then saved the tasks. At 4pm the alarm window opened to inform
me of the two tasks that were due. While in the alrm window, I pressed the
Dismiss button. Today (a day later) no alarms occured at 4pm.

I am aware that with Tasks that are set to "regenerate each day after the
task is marked completed" do pop if you do not press the Dismiss button, but
instead go into the Task and mark it as Completed.

I do appreciate your input on this very much, but I do not want to argue
about it please. If it works on your system for some unknown reason, then I
am happy for you.

Per my original post, if anyone has a recommendation for an alternate
appointment plugin for Outlook 2003, I would appreciate you recommendations.
I am trying to stay Outlook 2003 centered, but make absolutely certain that
my recurring Tasks remain recurring.

Regards,
Bret