Barca improvements in the pipeline?

[DrJon]

I've been trialing both Barca and Pocomail for the last couple of weeks with the view to replacing Outlook express and Eudora in our small business. I've been impressed with both products so far and will be purchasing several copies of one of them soon. But which one?

Although many of the extra features in Barca are quite nice, they could do with improving to make them really useful and at the moment would probably confuse some of our users!

The planner for example is a nice feature and would be great for sharing things like holidays between people so you could quickly see who is in the office that day. But, there is no way of sending an email to people that would automatically add your holiday dates to their planner or synchronising peoples planners. Further more, dates in the planner don't appear in the calendar and vice versa. I can see some argument for this but still find it a little confusing.

What I want to know is what enhancements are planned for Barca in the near future that will make it worth the extra $20 (at current prices) over pocomail as based on the current feature set I don't think we'd get much more out of Barca than we would out of Pocomail.

Cheers,

Jon.

[Jim]

What I want to know is what enhancements are planned for Barca in the near future that will make it worth the extra $20 (at current prices) over pocomail as based on the current feature set I don't think we'd get much more out of Barca than we would out of Pocomail.
Jon.

Thank you for your interest in our products. Barca encompasses the well recognized features in PocoMail plus personal information management features. We designed Barca to meet the needs of small/medium sized businesses and professionals. In this regards, besides the ability to create personal appointments/meetings and tasks with reminders, Barca allows you to create group appointment/meeting and invite others to an event complete with auto-addition to each invitee’s calendar and auto-notification of the status of each invitee being sent to the event creator. Furthermore, you can create group task and assign it to your co-workers. You can also import/export calendars information into/out of Barca. Other features that distinguish Barca from PocoMail can be found in the Barca’s features section of our site http://www.pocosystems.com/barca. After taking competitive and practical factors into consideration, we are convinced that Barca is selling at a discount relative to PocoMail, and competing products.

A number of enhancements are planned for Barca (some of which are already in development). This includes PDA synchronization, enhancement of the task feature, more integration between Planner and calendar, and a number of items that our users have requested.

You wrote...

But, there is no way of sending an email to people that would automatically add your holiday dates to their planner or synchronising peoples planners. Further more, dates in the planner don't appear in the calendar and vice versa.

I am not sure making this possible will represent the optimal solution given the objective you have in mind. Adding one’s person’s schedule to another’s can easily result in an overcrowded calendar. Imaging adding 1, 2, 3…20 people’s Planner to yours…Perhaps what you are looking for is a way to view other people’s calendar so you can schedule appointment/task accordingly. Only Outlook offers true real time calendar sharing, and you have to spend a fortune on Exchange server to use this feature in Outlook. As far as Barca is concerned, the ability to view other’s calendar is under serious consideration. Currently, dates in the Planner do appear in the Today screen, but not in the calendar.

Whichever solution you think meets your needs, Barca or PocoMail, you would have made the right decision. Let us know if we can be of further assistance.

[DrJon]

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the Barca pretty much offers the same functionality as Outlook without Exchange server plus all the benefits of Pocomail. And yes, an exchange server setup is horrendously expensive. A product somewhere between the two would be perfect.

Maybe a short term solution is to extend pocoscript to be able to inteface with the PIM aspects of Barca.

Anyway, I think I'll start off with a few copies of Barca for key staff members and see how we get on. Thanks for your support and keep up the good work!

[Jim]

Anyway, I think I'll start off with a few copies of Barca for key staff members and see how we get on. Thanks for your support and keep up the good work!

Actually, the 'thanks' belongs to you. We look forward to making some of the improvements you suggested.

[mochant]

This is the only thing holding me back from wild excitement about the product. Virtually everyone in my company who currently uses Outlook (non-Exchange environment) loves the demo of Barca I've been giving them until I tell them there's no sync with their Palm or Pocket PC devices. Then they mumble "oh well..." and wander off.