Interview with Craig Pyle

Tabletpctalk.com recently spoke to Craig Pyle Director, Software Products for FranklinCovey. FranklinCovey has recently announced the availability of TabletPlanner 2.0.

(If you using TabletPlanner 2.0 or want to hear more about it, visit our discussion forum at: http://www.tabletpctalk.com/discussion.)

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Tabletpctalk.com: Why did FranklinCovey decide to develop TabletPlanner?

Craig Pyle: FranklinCovey has a rich history. We sell 6 million paper planners a year. We also train 20k people a month in various time management areas. We have a wealth of information in how people interact with their planning system and have been able to incorporate it into this new platform. We feel that we have arrived at a point where we can really do planning in an electronic environment.

We are the first organization to provide ink enabled calendaring, ink enabled task management and now ink enabled contact management. We expect that over time we will be even more robust in these categories in defining how you work with ink in task management, in appointments as well as contacts.

We have spent a lot of effort in understanding what the customers want. We have spoken to a lot of people in the business and feel that we have a fairly representative product and gives us a good platform to grow from at this point. It becomes a tool that people can really use because we now have synch to outlook and we have also added contact manager / address / phone book functionality.

Tabletpctalk.com: Many people said that version 1.0 was good but had some shortfalls.

Craig Pyle: The information that we used in developing 2.0 really came from the marketplace. Stand alone Outlook integration was the number one feature request for 2.0 and we are proud to say that it is part of the application. We offer Outlook and Exchange synchronization. We now have a solution for corporate and stand alone users.

Tabletpctalk.com: How will people use synchronization feature?

Craig Pyle: We think that users will use it in either connected or offline/remote modes. These are two different ways of synchronizing. You pick the one that suits your needs.

Tabletpctalk.com: Can you give us some details on the synching scenarios?

Craig Pyle: Outlook sync will work in the following scenarios:

    1) Online - Connected to Exchange
    2) Offline - Using Offline Folders
    3) Standalone - Personal Folders
    4) Supports Outlook 2000 and XP
    5) Supports Exchange 5.5 and 2000

    Outlook Web Access (OWA):
    1) Supports Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 (Titanium) with limitations.
    2) Wizard tests both http and https. We favor https for security but performance is slightly reduced.
    3) Wizard tests both the WinHTTP and WinInet protocol stacks. WinHTTP is favored for robustness, but WinInet will inherit proxy settings from IE.

With either synchronization model, you get contacts, appointments and tasks. We also have reminders associated with appointments as well as recurring appointments.

Tabletpctalk.com: You have incorporated an Update feature in TabletPlanner 2.0.

Craig Pyle: The intention with the update feature is to be very active and keep our edge with innovation on this platform, so we anticipate using this functionality to push updates as they come available.

Tabletpctalk.com: How often will you update the product?

Craig Pyle: We are very focused on the customer and the customer experience. We will probably provide updates quarterly; if there is a need that arises we can be more aggressive than that. We are just trying to be very customer friendly in providing updates and information to our users.

Tabletpctalk.com: Is there a cost to these incremental updates?

Anything that happens before a 3.0 product with the update feature will be freely distributed to our customers.

Tabletpctalk.com TabletPlanner 2.0 seems to run faster than the previous version

Enhancing our database performance was also a top item for us. It is about 50% of the initial size and run faster due to enhanced compression. It can also scale to 4TB. Scalability of the database will allow us to offer new services in the future.

Tabletpctalk.com: You have done a lot of work on the eBinder. What is new here?

Craig Pyle: We are very interested in notes management. How you manage your wealth of information in notes that you take from phone conversations, from meeting. We are looking to broaden the appeal of TabletPlanner much beyond where people think of us today.

We have added functionality. After you print a document, you can now pan, zoom, rotate on the image itself. Another thing that is great for navigation is that as you print multiple pages to the eBinder and can hover over the page and scroll to anywhere in the document.

This is a killer part of the application in a sense that I am getting all my important documents in the eBinder, so I can annotate over the top of them or search in them.

Tabletpctalk.com: Microsoft has previewed OneNote. It also uses a “binder” metaphor

Craig Pyle: We are aware of what Microsoft is doing with OneNote. We are going to differentiate our product from what they are doing. There is no one out there better positioned to talk to individuals and corporations about planning methodologies that FranklinCovey. I think that there is some uniqueness that we can add to this platform.

Tabletpctalk.com: There are other enhancements to the product. Can you highlight some of them?

Craig Pyle: The contact manager has list views, thumbnail views. You have the ability to sort and add different columns. We tried to remain true to the standard Outlook fields to provide seamless synchronization with it. Contacts are a big deal for us. A lot of that was due to feedback from the marketplace.

We have done a lot of work with navigation. We have added drag and drop functionality in the calendar and task list. If you have a task to make an appointment for the doctor, you can drag it onto the calendar to create the appointment.

We have enhanced and added to our pen functionality. You can now use the pen set up the duration of an appointment, or change it to a different date. We have done some work with the pens and highlighters. You can define them and give them a name and save the settings.

Other areas where we have made changes are:

Ink to text conversion is on the toolbar
Put labels on tasks and appointments
Improved stroke recognition for searching
Changed the default font in the UI
The second page of notes is now a full page

Tabletpctalk.com: What is the future of TabletPlanner?

Craig Pyle: We are very active with our beta customers and interested in their feedback,. We have relationships with OEM partners who are continually evaluating our software.

We are definitely in the space and we are already having discussions about where we go from 2.0. We are behind the product for the long haul and are putting a roadmap together for future releases.

Tabletpctalk.com: What is the availability of the product?

TabletPlanner 2.0 is available for purchase on our website (http://www.tabletplanner.com) for $169.95. We also provide a fully functional 30 day evaluation version.

TabletPlanner 2.0 is a free upgrade to existing customers. If you purchase a Tablet from FranklinCovey, you can purchase it for $99.00.

TabletPlanner will be available in all 174 FranklinCovey retail stores and from out catalogs the week of March 17^th. It will also be sold at CompUsa stores.

You can purchase TabletPlanner from Amazon or Mobile Planet

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