Inspiration

- Get more from your Microsoft Outlook™

For many of us Microsoft Outlook™ is the first application we open in the morning and the last to be closed down at night. We rely on it to manage our email, diary and task lists; but why stop there? In a world where more and more business activities require a combination of email, calendar and task management, it makes sense to use Outlook for a whole host of additional business activities - rather than logging on to separate applications and updating multiple sets of data.

The good news is that Microsoft have built in to Outlook all the hooks necessary to create additional functionality. So with a bit of extra customisation, and perhaps some automation, you can create and track just about anything you want from within Outlook.

Here are some ways to get more out of your investment in Microsoft Outlook.

Share Contacts

Rather than keep all your contacts in personal folders where only one person can see them, create a shared contacts folder so that information can be kept up to date, and marketing activities can be more easily carried out.

Create Mail-shots from Contacts

You can send a mail-shot to one or more Outlook contacts using Microsoft Word's mail merge facility. This can send personalised letters and emails to many selected contacts all in one process.

Add custom fields to your forms<How?>

Make your forms more useful by adding extra information about your contacts. Create new forms to contain other information.

• Contact Information
• Company / Account Information
• Set up a Sales Opportunity form
• Task Information

Set up custom folder views<How?>

Set up views of the customised items in your folders which show you relevant information. For example an opportunity folder might shows the opportunity name (subject), due date, projected revenue and next action for that opportunity; with the items grouped by the 'sales cycle stage' of the item.

Other suggestions:

• Shared Contacts sorted by Account Manager
• Team Tasks sorted by Owner
• Project Tasks Grouped by Customer, then project - showing assigned owner, due date and percent complete
• Filter for only My Tasks - sorted by Urgency, then due date
• Contacts filtered to show just those who have not been contacted in the last 6 months

Uses for shared folders with custom task forms

Customise a task form with additional fields, and use it in its own folder to track more complex activities:

• Set up an Opportunity form for tracking Sales Opportunities
• Set up a Project form for tracking projects
• Set up a Trouble Ticket form for Tracking Support Requests
• Set up a Proposal Request form for Tracking actions and completions on a proposals.

Use the activities tab on your contacts to find relevant messages

Contact cards have an 'activities tab which can be used to find messages associated with that contact. The folders in which the tab will look for linked activities are controlled from the folder properties form - on the tab also called activities.

• Quickly find messages form or to your contact from your inbox or sent items
• Set up a grouped public folder to save copies of important emails. Use the activities tab of your Shared Contacts to retrieve everyone's emails which have been sent to/from the contact.

Set up your Outlook™ to make selected Public Folders available offline.<How?>

• Get access to shared contacts, calendar and tasks from your laptop while out of the office.
• Update your Sales opportunities while at your customer site.
• Set up tasks and make notes while out of the office.

Import prospects

Import a list of contacts from an excel spreadsheet or access database directly into Outlook.

Create standard letters/documents from contact data

Set up templates in Word and use the mail merge facility to create standard letter populated with information from Outlook. It needn't be a letter, it could also be

• A contact report
• A quotation
• A monthly statement
• A request for help with a proposal

More inspiration may be gained by reviewing the work carried out on some of our recent contracts.

Last Updated 13/06/2007

[This section is designed to grow as we get time to add more suggestions, and provide links to more details on how to implement them. We are not claiming these ideas are original - just that we think they are good ideas and should be kept somewhere in one place to inspire others. If you want to know more about any of these suggestions, or maybe you have some you want to share - please send us a mail

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