July 2006
Outlook
Productivity Tips
by Andrea Kalli
Tracking Related Information Using Contact Activities: The ability to link and review related information to your contacts is a powerful contact management feature
The ability to link and review related information to your contacts is a powerful contact management feature. An activity is any Outlook item that relates to an Outlook contact. Activities can be journal entries, emails, meetings, notes, or tasks. You choose which folders contain items that are activities and which activities you want to view at any one time. This feature enables you to quickly view all emails exchanged with the contact, all meetings scheduled with the contact, all journal entries made for the contact (use journal entries to record notes and conversations), and all tasks related to the contact. You can see where all of these items are stored and group by item type (tasks, appointments, email messages, or notes). Activities are tracked automatically. There is no special setup that needs to be configured. Automatic Activities are driven by the email addresses you store in the contact records. Outlook can hold up to 3 different email addresses. You can also use the Actions menu to create items associated with the contact, such as Tasks you need to perform related to the contact. To view activities, open any contact record and click on the Activities tab. After a short delay, all information related to that contact is displayed. You can then go directly to any of the items listed for that contact by double-clicking on it.
Archiving related Contact Activities: Utilize archive folders to maintain a balance of critical information stored related to your contacts and a maintainable Mailbox/Personal Folder size.
While the Activities feature in Outlook is powerful, we must be able to have a balance of critical information storage and a maintainable Mailbox/Personal Folder size. Utilizing archive folders can be your answer in attaining both goals. If you have your Archive folder activated and displayed in the folder list of your Outlook profile, it's as simple as using drag and drop, or even the Find feature to accomplish this. Let's say you have a contact called Susan Jones. You have been receiving emails from Susan about a project for the last 2 months. As long as you have the accurate email address in Susan Jones contact record, the email history is linked and viewable on the Activities tab of the Susan Jones contact record. Then comes time for you to clean out your Inbox and your Sent Items folders. Using the Find feature you can identify and isolate all emails from Susan, select them all, drag and drop them into a folder in your Archive folder, either the Inbox folder or a special folder called "Susan Jones". Follow the same process for the Sent Items folder. You decide how you want to organize them in your Archive folder. The beauty of this is that the links between the emails and the contact record stay in tact and will still be available via the Susan Jones Activities tab on her contact record. It just doesn't get any easier than this, folks!
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