Lotus Organiser (often mispelled as Organizer, cough) was a personal information management tool (PIM) for the desktop. It was developed by Threadz, then purchased by Lotus who later integrated it into their superior SmartSuite office productivity package. Its primary competitor was Microsoft Schedule+ (which was decent), followed by Outlook (which sucked).

Organiser’s wonderful skeuomorphic design set it apart from other tools, even Lotus Agenda for DOS which it nominally replaced. It used the visual metaphor of a Filofax binder, with virtual tabs and pages you would flip through to access your contacts, diary, to do lists, anniversaries, and other notes. You could customise the appearance of the binder, define your own sections, and reference other tabs.

I was more than a little taken with it as a kid! I had no need for a detailed schedule, but I kept school notes, lists of personal projects, and so much more in its charming tabbed interface. It was also the first program I even ran in Wine after moving to the Mac, BSD, and Linux. It remains one of my favourite desktop applications of all time, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

This page is for exploring the different versions of Organiser, in part for a silly project I’m working on.

FAQ

How did you find out about Organiser?

My dad had ThinkPads from work, which came with CDs of SmartSuite. I installed it on the family PC to try it out, and was intrigued by the icon of a binder. The obsession began soon after. I think my parents were just relieved it was harmless.

Ew, Lotus!? I hated that stuff! Notes was the worst, and Organiser wasn’t as good as Agenda, and...

Goodbye then!

What was your favourite version?

Version 5.0 (the penultimate release), before IBM rebranded it as IBM Lotus Organiser. They introduced a bit more depth and colour to the UI, and more binder customisation.

Did you run it on other platforms?

Not initially, I only ever ran the Windows releases. Later I would run these in Wine. One day I should give it a shot on OS/2, right? It would seem fitting.

Did you ever have a paper organiser?

I had one of those Fun Fax! binders as a kid, but no, I never had a Filofax or equivalent. I’d love to.

Do you know what the specific colour of each tab was?

As a matter of fact, yes. Don’t read too much into that.

But isn’t skeuomorphic design bad?

Hating on skeuomorphic design was very much in vogue prior to the release of iOS 7. People thought having depth, visual cues, and accessibility were for chumps, and they’d rather software that conflated minimal with simple. I kid (a bit), but I concede some people found the UI of tabbed organiser to be visually distracting and less efficient than a traditional PIM design. To each their own, but I found it incredibly charming, and a bit whimsical. I miss that in modern software.

Version 1.0 (1991)

What started it all! This was the original Lotus version, co-developed with Threadz starting in 1991. It consisted of six tabs: Diary, To Do, Address, Notepad, Planner, and Anniversary. The tabs were of a uniform size, though this could be changed in settings. Diary is what we refer to these in the glorious (cough) Commonwealth, those this would be renamed to Calendar in later releases for our US friends.

Customisation was limited to changing the binder and tab colours, which were basic but got the job done for the visual metaphor. It was released for Windows 3.0, though the installer warns running on anything less than VGA. I ran it on my EGA VM though, and it still works... albeit a bit squished! Fortunately the “SmartIcons” can be shifted to the right.

Version 1.1 (1993)

Version 1.1 was only a bug fix release as far as I can tell, though I include it here because the Diary was renamed to Calendar. It’s definitely more usable in standard VGA resolution, especially in the Address and Planner tabs. The default matched tab widths though mean the Anniversary is slightly hidden,.

Can I also take a moment here to appreciate the Lotus “SmartIcons” on the toolbar? An arrow pointing in and out of a folder makes so much more sense than disks. The pot of glue for the paste button is also delightful.

Version 2.1 (1995)

The 2.x series was, unsurprisingly, the first major update to the UI and features. It added a Calls tab for logging all those important business conversations, and variable tab widths in order to accommodate it in standard VGA. The Planner was moved above the Notepad by default, though they retained the same colours. It was also the first version of Organizer to be Y2K compliant, with the ability to create contacts well into the present.

The design of the binder was refined with additional depth and textures, though it still looks good in 16 colour VGA. The binder rings were shrunk slightly to give the “pages” a bit more space, and the default cover page was replaced with that quintessential Lotus yellow.

Version 2.12 Classic Edition (1998)

The Learning Company resold version 2 as “Organiser Classic” on CD-ROM. I remember seeing it in stores as late as the 2010s, well after IBM/Lotus stopped selling or supporting it. It otherwise appears to function exactly the same as the 16-bit version 2 from 1995, though the README.WRI file mentions various performance improvements, and bug fixes for Windows NT and NetWare (aaah). It otherwise looked and worked the same.

Version 3 / 97 (1996)

This was the first 32-bit version of Organzier, “optimised” for Windows 95. It could also run on Windows NT 3.51, which I’ve done here using my favourite Windows 3.x theme Bordeau because why not. Maybe I should have used yellow and black.

The most noticable changes were a updated cover, support for rich text and OLE embeds in the notepad, and an additional Calendar view. Windows 95 “look and feel” changes were made to dialog boxes, and support for long file names. More features were also added to the Calls according to README.WRI, but my favourite line was “animated cursors and sound effects to make Oranizer fun to use”. Remember when people cared about stuff like that?

I think this was the first version of Organiser I used as a kid. Or version 4, which looked basically the same.

Version 5.0

Version 5.0 introduced the final refinement and largest visual change to the binder metaphor, which I absolutely love. The rings have been further shrunk to increase horizontal space, and the binder itself now has delightful skeuomorphic stitching and a textured faux-leather texture. Functions previously found in the sidebar have also been incorporated into the binder with Filofax-style pockets. The tabs now have a 3D effect and a more refined colour scheme that still looks great in 256 colours.

PIM software peaked with this design. This is the version I ran in Wine on my Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD machines well after I gave up on Windows, and only had to reluctantly move when I needed shared work/family calendars, and syncing to my modern smartphones.

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By Ruben Schade. Last updated: 2024-05-20.