Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

I'd been looking forward to reviewing this ever since I'd seen it in the Psion Software Catalogue. Office Log is commercial software from Estuary Technologies and I've been sent v2.0 for the Series 3a/3c and v2.5 for the Series 5. More information can be found on their web site.

Different people and different offices work in different ways. Some are very task-focussed and treat incoming communications almost as a distraction. Others might perhaps be communications-focussed and responding to incoming calls, faxes and letters might form the centre of the day's activities. An example of the latter might be a support environment, or where a person's function is to act as a hub for messages for others in the company.

Handling the throughput of these messages is the raison d'etre for Office Log. It allows quick logging of all office communications - phone calls, voice mail, letters, faxes and so forth. Each entry is assigned a date, time, recipient/sender name, short (up to only 30 characters on the 3a/3c version) description and (optionally) an alarm.

Entry of each communication is via a series of single letter 'hot keys', so "F" would start entry of a fax etc. As each communication is processed it can be struck out and purged from the database at a later date. Sorting of entries can be in either ascending or descending date order and a useful Find facility is included to locate entries on a busy day. The alarms facility is particularly useful to make sure that important items are dealt with or passed on before a certain time, though the alarm indicator on each elapsed entry has to be cleared manually, which is a bit of a chore.

So did Office Log impress me? Yes, but with a few minor caveats. The very short 10-character limit on sender/recipient names and the 3a/3c description limit of only 30 characters are both restrictions that I'd think potentially annoying. There's no zoom facility, so font-wise what you see is very much what you get. The general keystroke-interface of both versions takes a moment or two to learn, with Enter and the space bar doing nothing at all and most functions being initiated with letter keys.

The pen interface on the Series 5 is well done, with some rather nice scroll buttons and a switchable toolbar. I was at first concerned about the rather small top-of-screen buttons, but the authors claim (believably) that most users tend to run Office Log entirely from the keyboard.

A summary of all communications and an 'efficiency rating' complete a well-conceived productivity package. Yes, you could accomplish most of Office Log's functions in Agenda by using the built-in To-Do lists, but many people will appreciate the efficiency of a dedicated application. When handling dozens of communiques every day, every last keystroke saved may help send your support or admin. staff home feeling less stressed-out.

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