Using Outlook for Managing Projects in a Small Team

A large number of Outlook users are

oblivious to the fact that Outlook can be used as a great project management tool. Even if you are using an old version of Outlook, say the 2003 edition, it has enough features in it to help you manage projects across a small team. More importantly if you run a small business, Outlook can work as a miracle tool for ensuring time management and streamline project flow across the team. In this article we would look at how this can be achieved.

Start with a distribution list for all your team members

At the very basic, you can start by creating a distribution list for all your team members. This would allow you to share project messages to the entire team. Further group communications can be achieved in one go.

Create Tasks and To Do Lists

In Outlook you can create Tasks and assign them to individuals. You can allocate start time and end time for a task and put several tasks in a To Do list. Moreover the tasks show up on a calendar and the entire calendar can be shared with your team. So let’s say you have multiple tasks running simultaneously, everyone can know the schedule for other team members and know how and when the project needs to be completed.

Grouping Project Messages with Rules and Using Journals

Using Outlook Rules you can ensure that communication related to a specific project is collated together and stored in a separate folder. Next you can take the help of Journals to ensure each team member enter his activities on a timeline. With the help of shared journals you would be in a position track every individual team member at any given point of time.

Unleash the power of Business Contact Manager in Outlook 2013

With the help of the Business Contact Manager in Outlook 2013, you get the choice to create Business projects and exploit its expanded range of features. It gives you the flexibility to record the type of work and associate tasks to it. You can next add project tasks on to it and then delegate them to team members. Using Business Projects you can link up the entire message chain and communication history with a project for easy referral.

Remain vigilant against Outlook Crashes

It is a widely known fact that Outlook crashes are a common occurrence and many of us at times seem to ignore the issue. However sometimes Outlook crashes can prove to be tricky and just a simple restart will not bring back your emails. In fact you may end up losing access to your entire email data and the underlying PST may get corrupted. So it is always prudent to keep a pst repair application handy and one that you can always count on is DataNumen Outlook Repair. Powered by a highly intuitive recovery engine, the application can extract data from compromised files in a rather short period of time. Moreover it is not bogged down by large files or a varied media type and can prove useful in nearly every situation where a corrupted PST file needs to be tackled.

Author Introduction:

Alan Chen is President & Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including sql recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit http://www.datanumen.com/