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NAPO

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Two weeks ago, I attended the 18th Annual National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO)conference in Boston, MA.

 

A little about NAPO:

“The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) is the premier national association dedicated to the field of organizing.

Formed in 1985 as a not-for-profit professional association, NAPO is dedicated to sharing information about the growing organizing industry, its trends, and its concerns. NAPO works to set and define quality standards for the organizing profession. NAPO's members include organizing consultants, speakers, trainers, authors, and manufacturers of organizing products. NAPO is The Organizing Authority.” – www.napo.net

The conference was dedicated to giving professional organizers the tools they need both to run their businesses and to help their clients. To this end, the conference had a wide range of exhibits and sessions, ranging from a booth by Rubbermaid demonstrating the latest storage containers, to sessions on how to organize for the grieving client, to blogging, to e-mail management. Electronic management was clearly one of the hot topics at the conference: KJ McCorry’s presentation on e-mail management had over a hundred people in attendance and was standing room only.

 

At the conference, Jessica Arnold and I showed off some of the new features in Outlook 2007. Naturally, I highlighted the task and time management features. Not surprisingly, many of the people at the conference had read Sally McGhee’s Take Back Your Life! and/or David Allen’s Getting Things Done and were very interested to see the changes that we had made since Outlook 2003. The excitement about the next release was palpable (“when can I buy it?” was the most frequently asked question) and it was fantastic talking to customers. As most professional organizers are in business for themselves, it was interesting to hear what features they are most excited about from a small business perspective - such as contact management and Calendar sharing without an Exchange Server. Overall, the time management features (flagging, the To-Do Bar, and Tasks on the Calendar) were well liked, as were Color Categories, Electronic Business Cards, Search, Attachment Previewing, and Sending Calendars via e-mail.

 

The professional organizers I met were fantastic and I wish them all the best in their endeavors.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    What current or planned features support Task/Calendar/etc sharing across organizations (i.e., between Exchange orgs or between Outlook users)? One thing I run into a lot of is small business owners that need to schedule appointments with each other (free/busy) or share tasks. What is the plan for that kind of functionality?
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    Adam,

    Thanks for the comments. I hope to post in the next few weeks about sharing across organizations both with and without an Exchange back end, and with/out SharePoint. For example,there are actually a few things small business owners (Exchange and non-Exchange) can do in the next release to share their calendars: Send via E-mail... which sends an ical of part or all of the sender's calendar and Publish My Calendar... which posts a calendar to the web to be accessed by everyone or just a subset of people.

    More on this topic to come...

    -Melissa