Project Notes Pro 6.4.0: Calendar, contacts, and email built in

I was looking at that whiteboard calendar the other day, the one with sticky notes for every meeting and follow-up, and thinking about how much project work still happens in little handoffs. Someone adds a meeting. Someone else needs the notes. Then there’s the email, the contact list, and the question of whether everyone has the right details.

I don’t know how often you may find yourself doing the same thing: switching between Project Notes and a plugin just to handle a basic part of the project. I wanted that to feel easier.

In 6.4.0, we moved calendar, contacts, and email integrations out of the plugin system and into Project Notes. These are everyday parts of managing a project. I think they should be easier to find and set up.

Fewer steps between the project and the people

When contact information is tucked away in another tool, it’s easy to lose the thread. The native contact sync work adds provider support for Outlook and Thunderbird, and Apple Contacts on macOS. It also adds matching and review controls, so you can see how records line up instead of treating every change as a mystery.

That matters to me. Contact records aren’t just names in a list. They’re the people who need to hear about a decision, join a meeting, or help move the work along.

Use the calendar and email tools you already know

The new workflows give you more choices for email and meetings: your default mail and calendar apps, Thunderbird, Microsoft 365, and native Mail and Calendar on macOS. The exact path depends on your platform and settings, but the idea is the same. Project Notes prepares the information and hands it to the tool you use.

And you still get to review it. Email and meeting details open as drafts for you to check and send. I don’t want an integration quietly sending a message or invitation before you’ve had a chance to look it over.

Why move this out of plugins?

Plugins gave us room to add features. But calendar, contacts, and email are part of the regular rhythm of project work. Keeping them outside the main application meant extra setup and another place to look when something didn’t work.

I think through this process as a series of small interruptions. You leave the project to find a contact. You reopen a plugin to prepare an email. You copy details into a calendar event. Each step is manageable on its own; together, they make follow-through feel harder than it needs to be.

Moving these integrations into Project Notes is one way to cut down those interruptions. It won’t make every team use the same calendar or mail app, and it shouldn’t. It gives you more ways to connect the tools you already use.

A little less juggling

That’s what I hope you notice in 6.4.0. Your project notes, contacts, email, and calendar are closer together, so you can spend less time moving details around and more time following through with the people involved.

Take a look at the Project Notes releases on GitLab for the latest release information.

Written by Paul McKinney, founder of Project Notes Pro.