Review of FranklinCovey's PlanPlus

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
Gertrude Stein.

PlanPlusOne of my resolutions this year was to get some help in sipping from the information firehose that is a typical Microsoft inbox, so back in January I bought a copy of PlanPlus. This is an Outlook add-in from FranklinCovey, and follows the same principles as their successful FranklinQuest series of paper-based planners - prioritized tasklists, daily view, the whole deal. It also has some nice touches such as daily quotations (see above).

Then in the months that followed it seemed like every other Microsoft blog started mentioning the competing "Getting Things Done" system from David Allen: first Scoble (who also persuaded David to start his blog!), followed by Omar Shahine, then John Porcaro, and finally LauraJ. Rock Hymas summed up the differences between the two systems as follows:

"David Allen's Getting Things Done and the FranklinQuest system come from fundamentally different paradigms. Both systems are looking at tasks as actionable items. However, FranklinQuest values the "What should I do today?" view and David Allen values the "What should I do here?" view.

And I've decided that PlanPlus is not for me. I can mostly work around the fit-and-finish issues: the preview pane that downloads all linked images in emails, the home-page calendar view that gets out of sync with its buttons, and the changes to daily notes that spontaneously undo themselves. No, the real reason that I've decided to uninstall PlanPlus is very simple but very compelling - it doesn't work with any other Outlook add-ins. All those cool search tools, such as LookOut? Sorry, can't use them. Send-to-OneNote? Nope, doesn't work. This is what you'll get:

Unable to load PlanPlus Home: Unable to cast object of type System.__ComObject to type Outlook.ApplicationClass

This isn't a new bug - it's been noted on the LookOut forums, and FranklinCovey's tech support admitted it was a known problem back in June. I pointed them to Omar Shahine's article about how "Programming for Outlook using managed code is hard" and offered further help, but heard nothing more. Sorry guys, but this customer isn't waiting around any longer. I'm off to give my money to your competitors instead. Oh, and take a look at Eric Carter's blog - the add-in shimming wizard should mean that programming for Outlook using managed code isn't hard any longer…

“Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.”
Richard Saul Wurman.