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There’s this database template in Notes by the name of Personal Journal, that’s invaluable for managing information. I don’t know what release of Notes this was introduced in, but those of you using R6 and up should find it.

Well, think of the Personal Journal as a kind of scrapbook. You can create journal entries, file them under zero or more (user-defined) categories, format the text with all the rich elements that you associate with a word processor, paste attachments in exactly the same manner as you do in a Notes email or Document Library.

We all have dozens of Word and text files lying around our Documents folder, right? Containing lists, tips, TODOs, email drafts, temporary code snippets, drafts of articles, and numerous other stuff. Now think of the Personal Journal as a way of consolidating all that data, being able to give all your data a consistent look and feel, being able to categorise it, perform all sorts of searches, including full text searches, leverage the advantages of it being a Notes database, like replication, the ease of being able to forward a Journal entry as an email through one click.

I have categories like Articles, Blog Post Drafts, Email Drafts, SANFS (that’s the product I work on at IBM), Defect Analysis (my work), and the default “Uncategorized” category. And I’ve only been using this for about three weeks, I’m sure I’ll add a lot more categories as time progresses. You can even create folders, and categories within folders. I’m not sure if entries can belong to more than one folder, but I don’t think so.

Since I discovered the power of the Personal Journal, I’ve been able to get rid of the HUGE amounts of small text files I’ve tried to maintain over the years. I have been tirelessly evangelising the Personal Journal here at IBM’s India Software Labs Pune, with very positive feedback! My TODO list is now a Journal Entry, a number of useless text files containing little UNIX/Windows tips accumulated over the years are now neatly arranged in a “Tips” file, which I can and do search extensively before I turn to Google for what I want. This kind of feature is right in line with the concept of Notes being the focal point for all your communication and collaboration.

If you use Notes at work, you ought to give the Personal Journal a try! Do email me if there’s a cool tip about the Journal that you’d like to share, and I’ll put it up here.

There are two products that Personal Journal ought to learn from:

Tomboy for the Linux desktop - http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy and
Microsoft OneNote.

I won’t go through what PJ should take from each product specifically, but here are a few improvements I’d like to see very much, in the Personal Journal of the future:

• Be able to create links to documents that open in external applications. I’d like to be able to create a list of path links to MP3 files lying somewhere in My Music, then simply select this piece of text, and hit “Enter”. This should open up Winamp/Windows Media Player/whatever with this list as the curent playlist.
• Alternatively, create links to emails, in drag-and-drop fashion, which could open up in my Notes Inbox. The possibilities are endless.
• Links between Journal entries, like a Wiki. Tomboy does this in spectacular style. Personal Journal must be able to do this. In the future, we ought to be able to link to elements to other databases. Today, we can easily create links to entire databases, but we’d like specific elements within databases. At the very least, only in local replicas.
• I’d also like my TODO list to be linked to my actual TODO database, or alternatively, my TODO database to be exported as a Journal entry. Now that I think about it, there needs to be greater interoperability between the calendar and the TODO database.
• Being able to edit attachments, and have those changes show up in the original document. Like, for instance, I attach a Word document to a Journal entry, and edit it after opening it in the Journal, then all the changes that I make ought to be reflected in the actual Word document on disk, in my Documents.