The Calendar:
Effective Time Management

Shared calendars transform teamwork. Daily, weekly and monthly display settings let you customise your schedule. You can also overlay calendars of multiple users to simplify team planning. 

The Calendar Button

The diary is maintained for each user and / or each resource (eg Conference rooms, equipment etc); it can be viewed as a 1 day, 5 day, 7 day, 30 day view with a separate planning view for work rotas, holidays etc covering three months at a time, and you can set it for your preferred hours of working.

Incoming Emails

Incoming emails can be converted directly into diary entries and any attachments automatically filed. Where the system recognises the sender’s email address, this person is automatically linked as is the company / organisation they are linked to. Other users can be invited and other links can then be added for projects, sales opportunities, marketing campaign and other documents, in which case the system offers you the possibles for you to choose. 

All users invited to meetings have an ‘accept’ / ‘decline’ option added to their MS Outlook tool bar and their response is shown within the diary entry. 

Personal Diary

and the ‘mode’ and ‘nature’ fields enable an element of standardisation in describing the activity eg ‘Visit’ and ‘Presentation’. The diary entry allows for traveling times to be booked. Diary entries can be recurred on any basis you want.

Users, groups and resources

In running your personal diary, entries can be marked ‘private’ or ‘confidential’, and you can have a group diary in a shared calendar including other people in your group, or a group of resources and / or you can have multiple views each of which can be called from a favourites call. You could even set up a resource "Public Events" and extract the information to give you live data for publishing as part of a public website, with or without login requirements.

Hyperlinks to contacts, companies, campaigns, sales opportunities, projects and documents

The unique feature is that the shared calendars are fully functioning in their own right and in addition each entry can be attached to the relevant marketing campaign, sales opportunity, one of more projects as well as to contacts, users and companies AND with relevant documents attached. This means that from an entry you can hyperlink to any of the records and also that each project etc has all the diary and to-do-actions linked to it.

Useful diary features in use

For Internal Meetings the agenda can be shown, minutes of the previous meeting attached, plus any papers being presented at the meeting, as well as the links to all the relevant users, which means that everything you need for the meeting is all ready and waiting for you. 

A diary entry can be ‘toggle switched’ into a ‘To Do Action’ if the meeting has to be changed, all the hyperlinks stay attached and the entry can be date and time stamped with user name and any notes added. All users automatically receive a Notification of the change and the entry will no longer appear in their diary. 

Integration with MS Outlook or Exchange Server or live access from Nokia 9500

The shared calendars are integrated with MS Outlook and Exchange Server which means that we use the Outlook alarm system and we integrate through to a PDA. What is really exciting is that the diary (and to-do-list) can be accessed by a user live from their Nokia 9500 Communicator.

The Resources diary can be used for booking all regular service, maintenance, inspections, certification and insurance renewals for any equipment, vehicles etc you may have and the document history can be added to as you go along.

We use diary entries for prospect meetings to get answers to qualification questions and then afterwards can add a Visit Report in the entry.

Recurring events

Each diary entry can be set up to be recurring on a daily, weekly, monthly etc basis even (say) the first Tuesday of each month. Diary entries can be emailed to the Contacts attached to them and other users can be invited to attend, in which case a email is automatically sent to them inviting them and requesting accept or decline.