OK you're now using Softalk Share Server to share your Outlook folders across the team, but what other Outlook add-ins and utilities do you find useful? I've just come across a great, free one via Lifehacker. Outlook on the Desktop pins your Outlook calendar on your desktop as a semi-transparent layer. It's not just the calendar as you can also set it to display tasks, contacts, inbox or notes.
Lifehacker points to an interesting post with 18 ways to stay focused at work. OfficeTalk makes it really easy to use some of these tips:
1. Write out a daily task list and plan your day. You can schedule any OfficeTalk task simply by dragging it onto your diary. The Activities view is also really useful as it will just show the tasks that are due on the day, week or month that you are viewing.
2. Allocate time slots colleagues can interrupt you. This is where OfficeTalk knocks the socks off the competition. Not only can you easily view colleagues' diaries (if you've been granted permission) but you can also create groups and view diaries alongside each other. Meetings mode will search for free time slots. Makes it really easy to let people know when you and can't be interrupted.
3. Apply time boxing. This is something I've always done, but I've never called it time boxing. Working on something and then switching to something else does keep you fresh and for me certainly helps me to think better. Using OfficeTalk you can mark a task as being partially finished so that colleagues can see where you are on it. We also use the notes field and time stamp to keep a note of what's happening, making it easier for colleagues to update clients if you're not available.
4. Setup filters in your email. Not only does OfficeTalk let you create all of the rules you would expect to filter your email you can also set flags for follow-up or assign a task to yourself or a colleague.
There are 14 other tips to check out - not all of which I would agree with. For example the 'Do not check personal email in the morning' wouldn't work for me as all of my email accounts go into into OfficeTalk so that I can keep track of all of my conversations and tasks. The history and pending views on contacts are ideal for refreshing your memory before you speak to friends or business contacts.
tags: productivity, collaboration, email, scheduling, calendars
You can use WorkgroupMail to create a content filter to block certain types of attachment, or alternatively to allow certain types of attachment. For example this is how you block video file attachments:
It's as simple as that.
As part of the launch activity for OfficeTalk 4.5 I've got a couple of quick requests.
If you'd like to do either (or both) then hit me off-list by:
Email stuartb@brucemarshallassociates.com
Telephone London (UK) +44 (0)20 7870 5322 or New York (USA) +1 212 461 4853
I've just come across the Email Overloaded blog. It's full of tips about how to manage your in-box better. The tips mainly assume you are using Outlook (so would suit WorkgroupShare users) but many would work with other email clients as well.
When version 4.5 of OfficeTalk is finally released I'll post some of my own tips for using it to manage your email. The reason for waiting is that some cool new features are being worked on which should improve on how I manage my email.
43 Folders has a round-up of some of its most popular posts about using email more productively - from tips on writing email through to dealing with messages that you receive. Worth a look if you, like me, have to deal with a lot of email.
I'll also put together a post about how you can use OfficeTalk to manage your email. If you've got any tips that you want to share then please comment or email me and I'll include them in my round-up (with full credit to you of course).
Did you know that OfficeTalk provides a really fast and easy way to filter your emails? If you hover your cursor over the field that you want to filter and then right click it gives you the option to filter based on either including or excluding the contents of that field.
I find it most useful to search for attachments I've received. Sometimes I'll have a recollection of receiving something but perhaps can't remember who it was from. Simply being able to see the emails in my in-box that have attachments makes it much easier to manually scan the list and recognize what I'm looking for.
Usually I use rules to help me sort my email and move items such as email newsletters straight into their own folder. But like a lot of people I don't always remember to set up the rules straight away, especially when I subscribe to a new newsletter. The right-click filter trick enables you to quickly find all of the email from a particular sender so they can be deleted or moved.
OfficeTalk provides very powerful search options which are fully explained in the on-line help files but for me the simple right-click trick is often the fastest way to find something.
Did you know that you can use WorkgroupShare to organize meetings in Microsoft Outlook? Our WorkgroupShare product lets users of Microsoft Outlook share their calendars, contacts, tasks and email folders with other Outlook users without needing Exchange Server, but it also contains a free/busy server. This means that you can use it to find out whether or not those people that you want to invite to a meeting already have something scheduled in their calendar at the time of the planned meeting.
Outlook's meeting scheduler lets you enter the email address of those people that you want to invite to the meeting. It then passes this information to the WorkgroupShare free/busy server. WorkgroupShare looks up this information and returns it to Outlook, causing Outlook to block out the time that is already marked as busy.
For more information, see Organizing meetings with WorkgroupShare.
From time to time we will be posting "Did You Know" blogs, that are intended to keep you aware of the features in the Softalk range of products. This is the first of these postings and focusses on message archiving in WorkgroupMail 8.
Did you know that WorkgroupMail version 8 can keep an archive copy of all incoming and outgoing mail messages? This is an extremely useful function as well as a legal requirement for many companies in the US.
The messages can be archived to the WorkgroupMail database or to a separate database. You can archive messages to and from all users or just a subset of users. You can also specify whether or not to archive attachments.
Because WorkgroupMail indexes the contents of the message archive, searching the archive is extremely fast. You can search for words in the subject or body of a message and you can further filter on messages that were sent during a particular date range, sent by a specific person or received by a specific person.
Propellerhead is a new blog that claims to offer hints and tips to solve PC problems. It's a commercial blog by Shiny Media and hopes to make money through clicks on its ads.
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