Contact Management
Being able to manage contact information—names, addresses,
and phone numbers—is critical to other aspects of
Outlook 2010, such as scheduling and messaging. Outlook 2010 makes
it easy to manage contacts and offers flexibility in the type of
information that you maintain. In addition to basic information, you
can also store a contact's fax number, cell phone number, pager
number, web page Uniform Resource Locator (URL), and more, as shown
in Figure 7. You
can even include a picture for the contact.
In addition to using contact information to address email
messages, you can initiate phone calls using the contacts list,
track calls to contacts in the journal, add notes for each contact,
use the contacts list to create mail merge documents, and perform
other tasks. The Contacts folder also provides a means for storing a
contact's digital certificate, which you can use to exchange
encrypted messages for security. Adding a contact's certificate is
easy—when you receive a digitally signed message from the contact,
Outlook 2010 adds the certificate to the contact's entry. You can
also import a certificate from a file provided by the
contact.
In an Exchange Server environment, Outlook integrates with the
organization's Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and Exchange
Server Global Address List (GAL), enabling you to browse and select
addresses or contact information for other people in your
organization easily. There is nothing you need to do in Outlook to
make these contacts or addresses available—all the necessary
configuration happens automatically when you add an Exchange Server
account to your profile, and the GAL downloads to your computer when
you open Outlook.
As with calendars, you can also work with SharePoint Contacts
lists from within Outlook, enabling you to view and manage a shared
Contacts list in Outlook. Changes that occur in Outlook appear in
SharePoint, and vice versa.
Managing your workday usually includes keeping track of the
tasks you need to perform and assigning tasks to others. Outlook
2010 makes it easy to manage your task list. You assign a due date,
start date, priority, category, and other properties to each task,
which makes it easier for you to manage those tasks, as shown in
Figure 8. As with
meetings and appointments, Outlook 2010 keeps you informed and on
track by issuing reminders for each task. You control whether the
reminder is used and the time and date it's generated, along with an
optional, audible notification. You can designate a task as
personal, preventing others from viewing the task in your schedule,
just as you can with meetings and appointments. Tasks can be
one-time or recurring events.
If you manage other people, Outlook 2010 makes it easy to
assign tasks to other Outlook 2010 users. When you create a task,
simply click Assign Task, and Outlook 2010 prompts you for the
assignee's email address. You can choose to keep a copy of the
updated task in your own task list and receive a status report when
the task is complete.
Tasks are another area of integration with SharePoint. You can
use Outlook to view and manage tasks in a SharePoint Tasks list,
including creating new tasks in SharePoint from Outlook. This means
you don't have to open a browser and navigate to the SharePoint
site—just open the SharePoint list in Outlook and create the task as
you would any other task in Outlook.
Tracking with the Outlook Journal
Keeping track of events is an important part of managing your
workday, and the Outlook 2010 journal makes it simple. The Journal
folder allows you to keep track of the contacts that you make (phone calls, email messages,
and so on), meeting actions, task requests and responses, and other
actions for selected contacts, as shown in Figure 9. You can also
use the journal to track your work in other Office system
applications, giving you a way to track the time that you spend on
various documents and their associated projects. You can have
Outlook 2010 add journal items automatically based on settings that
you specify, and you can also add items manually to your
journal.
When you view the journal, you can double-click a journal
entry to either open the entry or open the items referred to by the
entry, depending on how you have configured the journal. You can
also configure the journal to archive items automatically in the
default archive folder or in a folder you choose, or you can have
Outlook 2010 regularly delete items from the journal, cleaning out
items that are older than a specified length of time. Outlook 2010
can use group policies to control the retention of journal entries,
allowing administrators to manage journaling and data retention
consistently throughout an organization.
Organizing Your Thoughts with Notes
With Outlook 2010, you can keep track of your thoughts
and tasks by using the Notes folder. Each note can function as a
stand-alone window, allowing you to view notes on your desktop
outside Outlook 2010, as shown in Figure 10. You can copy
or move them to other folders, including your desktop, or easily
share them with others through network sharing or email. You can
also incorporate the contents of notes into other applications or
other Outlook 2010 folders by using the Clipboard. For example, you
might copy a note regarding a contact to that person's contact
entry. As you can with other Outlook 2010 items, you can assign
categories to notes to help you organize and view them.
Although the Notes folder has always been a part of Outlook,
its usefulness is honestly limited for most people. You should
consider instead using Microsoft OneNote to manage your notes and
related data. OneNote is a separate application included with Office
that lets you organize notes into multiple notebooks with multiple
sections, complete with graphics, audio, video, formulas, and much
more.
