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Overview

Composed of four applications: KeyDates, KeyContacts, KeyTasks and KeyNotes, they come together into one unified application. Its sole aim is to allow you to bring most of your Outlook stored information with you on your PDA. Nearly all of the Outlook functions are available, which includes support for more than 40 contact fields in KeyContacts than Palm's Contact application, start and end dates for tasks, partial completion, billing time, recurrences for events (the Outlook equivalent of repeating events), and record linking. In addition, you can synchronize Outlook folder to the PDA. This feature is particularly useful especially for those who need to build Outlook filter to sort and manage their Outlook Inbox. Many corporate users will be happy to know that you can also do this if you’re on an Outlook user who’s using Microsoft Exchange. But, please bear in mind that while you can carry your Outlook folders with you, you can't take sync your Inbox and hance your emails. To do that, you'd require a mail application such as VersaMail.

Test Drive

During installation, the setup program asks for permission to disable the default PIM applications as well as permission to remap the PDAs keys so they invoke KeySuite instead.

The biggest selling point about Keysuite is the complete and seamless integration between applications. For example, just by clicking on the arrow at the lower left hand corner allows you to access all for applications without first exiting and opening the another application. Another example of this integration is when you set up a meeting, you can have a direct link to the contact information to the attendees, again without exiting and opening the Contact application. Obviously, in order to see the attendees availability, you must have synced your PDA to the latest attendee status available on the Exchange server. In addition, attendee availability is only available if you are the meeting organizer.



Because it tries to an Outlook-to-Go, you can setup, view and edit meetings details including attendees, their Contact information and much more.

PalmOS default PIM's record units takes up to 4kb. Because, KeySuite is able to handle so many more record types and fields, Chapura opted to use a 32kb to easy manipulation of fields, multiple folders, and categories. This is a vast improvement over previous versions.

If you’re the owner of the new Palm Tungsten T|3, you’ll be happy to know that Keysuite 2.4 can span the entire screen after you slide out the slider.

Synchronizing your PDA between the office and the home PC is now easier than ever thanks to a new feature that can now separate your work and personal folders. This is a great feature when you want to ensure that you personal data doesn’t end up in your work Outlook.

The only few drawbacks we saw were the fact that Keysuite only works with Microsoft Outlook. It doesn’t work with Netscape Mail, or Eudora to name a couple. When glancing at your schedule, it doesn’t fit more than three to four words before the rest of the text goes off the appointment box. We think that Chapura could improve this by simply using smaller while still remaining legible fonts.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a good to have application. Its Outlook-to-Go idea is a good in that you can view and carry your entire appointment, contact, tasks and memos anywhere you go. There’s lots of room as long as your PDA can fit it.

The only missing application is an integrated email application that rivals Palm’s included Versal Mail application.

Chapura KeySuite 2.4 for PalmOS Developed by: Chapura Inc. Distributed by: Chapura Inc. Price: $49.95 Rating: 4.5 out of 5