Organize Your Entire Office With askSam

by Jennifer Bowers

I'm no technophobe. I'm no techno diva either, as the good people in the askSam tech department would probably attest to. But askSam fills all my data organization needs.

I first discovered askSam through my membership with the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP). askSam is a vendor partner of AIIP, and they advertised simple database software at a reasonable rate. I had never designed a database before, but my bookmarks on Internet Explorer were reaching unmanageable numbers. I had more business cards than I knew what to do with and my email inbox was jam packed.

Using askSam, I have organized my entire office. At the end of each day, I import all my email into my email database, including the attachments. Whenever I get a new business card, I enter the contact information into my addresses database. When I need to send a mailout, I make labels right from my address file.

When I ordered askSam, I received a complimentary copy of SurfSaver. Since then, I have moved all my bookmarks into SurfSaver. Whenever I need to pull up a web page, I search by keyword and find the page again. SurfSaver saves the entire page, so I don't have to worry about finding that ubiquitous website that has since disappeared.  Even if changes have been made to the site, I still get the exact same page as before.

I'm independent information professional, and part of my work involves locating expert witnesses for legal counsel. Whenever I find experts on a topic that I haven't covered before, I enter them into askSam. I have designed my own template for my experts database, and I can include their C.V.s, all their contact information, publications and previous expert testimony. When I need to find an expert I've used before, I simply do a key word search, and they pop right up. Updating an expert's contact information or c.v. is very easy.

askSam saves me an incredible amount of time. When you work independently, every moment of time that you don't have to spend doing administration gives you time to be working on projects. With askSam and SurfSaver, I can archive my information as I find it, and I can come back to that information over and over again. Never again will I waste time looking for scraps of paper or business cards, I've got them all at my fingertips!

Jennifer Bowers

CharltonBowers Inc.

Independent Information Professionals

http://www.charltonbowers.com