Memoranda overview

What is the Memoranda?

Memoranda is a personal tool designed to help someone to organize his/her work and actual projects.

Memoranda is intended for the people, whose daily work is shared between a few different projects. This is a tool helping to keep your projects, irrespective of their nature. It aims to solve the following needs:

• To have the one solid place where you can see a list of current projects, browse and edit them, add new and remove out-of-date projects.

• To edit and browse the project documentation. As almost all projects are the processes in a time, we assumed that the time-based diaries would be a better form of organizing the project-related documents, rather than folders and files.

• To create and edit  "to-do" checklists. It allows to set the time bounds for every task in checklist, mark a task's progress and see what is already done and on what you should pay your attention today.

• To have an access to project-related resources (such as external files and web-pages) within one solid workplace. You can collect shortcuts to resources from various locations (local files as well as internet resources) and define an application for opening an each resource type.

• To schedule the events and get the notifications when they are occured.

What is a project?

The project is something what you are working on. If you are a software developer, your project is development of application. If you are a writer, your project is your work on a book or article. If you are a scientist, your project is your research. If you are a manager, your project is your activity on organizing and leading the people to achieve a specific goal. From another point of view, the project is an interval of time. It has a start date, an end date (probably, unknown) and a sequence of days between them.

In Memoranda, each project consists of following items:

	Documents (or Notes ). Any activity is accompanied with producing the documents - plans and blueprints, whitepapers and specifications, reports, guides, memory notes and so on. Memoranda provides a convenient way to create, edit and navigate project-related documentation as project diary items. Memoranda includes the full-featured WYSIWYG editor with various text styling features, images and tables inserting, find & replace functions and exporting/importing the HTML files. Also you can export an entire project diary as a set of linked HTML pages (e.g. for publishing on a web-site). Memoranda has advanced features for browsing and navigating diary pages, including full-text search, bookmarking for important documents and navigation history support. With Memoranda, you should not care about saving your data. All changes you've made are transparently saved in background when you select another date or change a current project.
	Tasks. The jobs that should be done to achieve the goals of project. Each task has a time duration (one day or more), priority level and accomplishing percentage. When you complete some piece of work, you increase that percentage. In the to-do list you see which tasks are already accomplished, which tasks require a further efforts, which tasks are scheduled in future and which tasks are failed today.
	Events. You schedule a number of events and Memoranda will notify you when they are occured. You can define events that will be automatically repeated at a selected day of week or month. Also you can create events associated with tasks (see above) to get notifications about actual tasks. Memoranda has a special "minimal" mode to track the events when the main window is closed. On MS Windows and K Desktop Environment this mode is indicated with an icon in system tray:
	Resources. External files, documents, web-sites and other project-related stuff. Memoranda provides a single project workplace to access to resources from various locations with their shortcuts. When you add a new shortcut to resource, you can define an external application that will be opened by double-click on the shortcut in resources list (as in the Windows Explorer).

Additional features

Agenda. One of useful features is the "Today's startup" (or "Agenda") page that shows you current state of all your projects. On the Agenda page you can see all actual tasks of all projects sorted by their importance and some hints about what requires your special attention today. In addition, the Agenda contains a list of today's events and a number of "stickers" - small coloured boxes for various short memory notes.

Memoranda is a crossplatform application. Memoranda is written with 100% pure Java so it is available on any Java-enabled platform. The exception is a "System tray icon" feature that utilizes a third-party library (SysTray4J by SnoozeSoft) that contains a platform-depended code for MS Windows and Unix + K Desktop Environment (KDE). On other platforms Memoranda has no this feature.

Memoranda is a multiuser application. In a multiuser operating system, each user has a personal separate environment to store all his/her projects data, settings and preferences.

I18N-compliance. The language of user interface selected depending on user's locale. The following languages are currently supported (alphabetically):

• Catalan
• Chinese
• Dutch/Belgium
• Dutch/Netherland
• English (default).
• French
• German
• Italian
• Hungarian
• Japan
• Russian
• Spain

Easy exchange the data across the computers. Memoranda has a special ZIP-based file format for external storing of the projects. You can save ("pack") the project in this file and open ("unpack") it later with another Memoranda installation to get there a complete copy of that project. This is useful for transferring projects between different machines and for backup purposes.

What the Memoranda is not?

• Memoranda is not a project management groupware. It is a personal tool intended for personal tasks. Of course, other people can be involved in your projects, but Memoranda will not help you to organize your workgroup, share the responsibility and schedule the collective tasks.

• Memoranda is not a developers' tool for software projects. Though it can be succesfully used by software engineers, it has no specific features related to software development projects (as well as specific features for other particular kind of activity).

• Memoranda is not a word processor. Though its editor feature is well suitable for actual project documentation and web-pages, it is not intended for very large and complicated documents.