Scrybe beta testing

Cool, I was asked to beta test Scrybe. You don’t know what Scrybe is? Take a look at their video. When I saw their video I signed up for the beta test right away. What I was most enthusiastic about was the Papersync. This tool tries to integrate the digital and paper world! Don’t see that too much…

Scrybe is basically an alternative for Outlook. It has Calendaring, Task lists, Sharing options, and a Notepad.

I had some time to play with Scrybe. Not all features are there yet. But this first version is pretty complete.

My first impressions are:
- the user experience is wonderful. The Scrybe people have look deeply into how people organize their personal work and can productively do that.
- Scrybe offers all the standard (Outlook) functionality, but it integrates Calendars, Notes and Tasks more tightly. What I liked was the international approach to ‘meeting requests’. With Scrybe you can easily, without thinking, request for a meeting with people in different time zones. Scrybe takes care of the calculation of the time. I also like the feature which allows you to type in a meeting in your Calendar and, at the same time, type in the time.
- When you type in tasks and add a deadline (date/time) Scrybe detects the time/date and puts it in your Calendar. I wondered if time detection also worked in the Calendar, but it didn’t.
- Then Papersync. This is the part I really like. Scrybe lets you easily print your Calendar, Notes and Tasks in one handy format. There also one that you can fold so that it fits in your pocket. You could question what the use of this feature is when you have a PDA/UMPC/etc. That’s a good question. Maybe you don’t need this feature. But what I don’t like about my pda and about Outlook is the fact that you don’t have a good overview of you meetings, tasks, notes, etc. Papersync can give you this overview. And, furthermore, many managers have there calendar and corresponding documents printed out for them. Papersync is handy for them too.
- Scrybe also has a ThoughtPad. Something like Google Notes. It actually works a lot like Notes. What I liked about ThoughtPad was the fact that you can easily flip though your notes
- Online/Offline. The first version of Scrybe supports online and offline support (using Google Gears like Zoho?).

That’s all for now. All in all, a really nice tool. I’m looking forward to the “upcoming features”, such as Outlook syncing. Syncing with Outlook is essential, I find. (‘Syncing with Outlook’ can now be done by ‘exporting the Scrybe Calendar to ical format.) Most business people use Outlook and won’t switch (fully) to something like Scrybe.