We often get the question: Is Chandler first and foremost a personal information manager or a collaboration tool?

The latter has groupware connotations we don’t want.

The former makes some people think of Outlook and then begs the question: Why don’t you have Contacts? Why aren’t you an email client?

At the end of the day, Chandler is first and foremost a personal information manager. Not in the way the software industry understands the phrase (Email, Scheduling, Calendar, and Contacts Suite), but in the civilian English sense of the phrase; you put information that is personal in Chandler and it helps you manage it.

(We may yet shy away from using “Personal Information Manager” as a way to market the product, but I find it helpful to think about what Chandler is in terms of the “plain” English meaning of the phrase.)

However, today, no personal information management tool is effective unless it has collaboration baked into its core. For “traditional” PIMs, collaboration means email plus scheduling.

For Chandler, collaboration means full-on, read-write, equal-access sharing. Chandler is for full-time, high-bandwidth collaborators; people who are working so closely together that email and traditional scheduling with it’s formal, moderated process of accepting and declining invitations feels like too much overhead and not enough bandwidth for true collaboration on ideas, goals, open issues and decisions.

Takeaway: Chandler is for personal use and it is effective for personal use because it is an individual-centered way to collaborate intensively with others.