My fling with Cozi

It’s fun to sit in my pajamas (alone) and watch my Cozi collage flash by the screen. What’s not fun is to stand with my husband with beads of sweat collecting on my forehead that moment I first realized that this slideshow is made up exclusively of pictures before-Alec… only ex-boyfriends, old trips, and single silliness. In the 30 seconds we watched together, we saw me finishing my first mini triathlon, me and one guy in Paris, and me and another guy on a date. Cozi has to lose a point for that one.

The promise of Cozi Central™ is free software that includes a shared family calendar, lists, quick messages, and a dynamic photo collage that’s accessible wherever you are. In my mind, this means, I use it at home to add appointments or notes to our calendar, and Alec sees them at work, eliminating the need for one of my many short (but informative, in my opinion) phone calls during the day.

Being a geeky list-maker married to a geekier software engineer, Cozi Central sounded like a natural solution to our family’s information management. Unfortunately, for our family, we’re not quite ready for each other.

On the plus side:

• Photos. Very fun photo integration with family picture and collage. For those who can control it.
• Calendar color-coding and delegating. Cool feature that each family member can have a tab on the calendar and a color. It also allows me to very simply reassign an appointment from being Milo and Mommy to Milo and Daddy with a click or two.
• Software and web interface. The website integrates with the software integrates with text messaging. That’s cool.

But on the down side:

• Photos. As I mentioned, the collage is a random collection of pictures from my Windows instance — none of which are family (or necessarily family-friendly) images. And I can’t see how to fix that.
• Grocery list grouping. My list was a hodgepodge of 37 items randomly listed on the page. For an efficiency nut like myself, that’s no way to shop. If we’re gonna enter in all our groceries into the computer (rather than jotting it conveniently on paper in the kitchen), there needs to be a way to organize (I’m talking categories like meat, produce, frozen, etc.). I think I could hack this into submission, but it’d be a lot of effort on my part.
• Calendar integration. This is another biggie. Unfortunately, Cozi only seems to integrate with Outlook. For many folks, that’s fantastic news; but for us, that’s not helping. I would need the Cozi calendar to integrate with Google Calendar if I was going to delegate appointments to my husband. Sorry, that’s a dealbreaker.

Bottom line: There’s a reason that those ex-boyfriends are exes… though they had many nice qualities, ultimately, I needed the whole package. Cozi has a lot going for it; it’s not them, it’s us.

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This review of cozicentral.cozi.com and Cozi Central™ software console was brought to you by Parent Bloggers and the letter X. RookieMoms will occasionally post such reviews if we believe they are helpful to our readers, and we will always be honest. That’s what a review is, after all.