Working with IQTELL: A Great way to save 60 minutes a day.

I have been testing IQTELL for several weeks now and thought I would take some time midstream to provide an evaluation of the product.  So I want to share a little bit about the company, the product, the pros, the cons, and the wish list.  Let me preface this by saying this, I HAVE SAVED 85 MINUTES A DAY USING THIS PRODUCT.  Sorry about the yelling at you hear, but I need to make it clear that IQTELL works, at least for me.

IQTELL is a privately funded tech company based in New Jersey.  Their goal is to provide applications that help you store data, organize your data, connect with your date and do this in a way that is safe and secure.   Their web site calls it “Social Networking for Your Files.”  Their mission seems to be to make things easier to have time for the more important stuff. 

This product itself is a web based/cloud system.  It is a way to organize your e-mail accounts, contacts, web bookmarks, tasks, notes, and so forth.  The product has a dashboard that gives you difference applications to track documents and accounts and so forth.  It provides multiple frames in the dashboard so you can see tasks, notes and documents, bookmarks and so forth.

So now for the pros, one think I like is that when you open something it creates a tab.  So you can go between tabs and do things without having to close one item to get to another.  So I can have my e-mail open and documents and my blog ideas and task and I can tab between them to work more efficiently than opening only one at a time and closing them.  The menu bar on the right side of the dashboard has the feel of the menu tree in Outlook so it is easy for me to customize and make it my own.  It is in the cloud; therefore I have an immediate back up of all my items.  Since it is web based I can access if from any computer with the internet.  I am not been on a system that I could not get access to my account.  The search system is great.  You can search everything in your work space or just a particular folder.  This is really helpful in locating things without having to go and hunt for it.  It is also a good system to integrate the GTD or Getting Things Done platform by David Allen.  This is the basis of my organizational system and a must for any program to work with for me to use it. Another good thing about IQTELL is that they have a lot of training videos out there to help you in your effort to get used to the program and when you first get started there are lots of links in your dashboard to help you get on your way too.  I also have to commend the folks at IQTELL as they have been very responsible by e-mail and social media to my comments, questions and observation.  It really appears to me that they are working hard to make this a good experience for me.

Despite the time saved and things that I like, there are some cons to IQTELL.  The first cons is that I have right now are that it does not have a calendar.  Although it does indicate that it will be coming soon, for me have the calendar integrated in this is the most important thing for me in order to make the system work.  One of the things I like about Outlook is the ability to drag an e-mail over to calendar or into the task folder and be able to create a new task or calendar.  I cannot do that in IQTELL at this point.  The other thing that is difficult to deal with at this point is the lack of a mobile client.  While IQTEL has assured me that this is coming.  I have to supplement my IQTELL use with SpringPadit.com in order to have to do list that can travel with me.  It is too cumbersome for me to log into the website on my mobile phone and pull up list for the grocery store or other errands.  I will supplement this when they add the mobile apps.  Another thing that is difficult is the loading of documents.  With Evernote, I could drag and drop. I cannot do that in IQTELL and it is a little time consuming to update documents.

So I will wrap this post up with a small wish list.  Calendar please and as soon as possible.  Mobile app please, as soon as possible.  Give me the ability to drag and drop please.  I would like to drag and drop documents into the system, drag and drop e-mails into task and the calendar when it is available.  While the search works very well I am spoiled by Evernote where I can search text in all my documents.  Sometimes my searches in IQTELL do not always bring up all the documents with that term in them especially with PDFs.  A wish would be the search function would be integrated to allow me to search for terms in all documents.  Another wish would be to have a way to have a backup/desktop client for use when I do not have access to the internet.  I know that SpringPadit.com had this problem and they were able to rectify it through the use of Google Chrome and you have a saved version on your system.

As with any system, it only works if you adapt it to your personal system and preferences.  I am slowly adapting it to work with me and the systems that I have.  Overall I think that it can work and work well, I mean after all I have already saved 85 minutes a day using it and I have not even really tapped into the potential of what it could do for me. That is 85 more minutes a day I get to spend with my family, reading books with my son, doing puzzles with my twin girls and chasing my youngest son around the house.  And have some time for my wife.  So as I work through it, I will update you occasionally and I encourage you to consider it as you look for ways to stay organized.