Sometimes the old saying "It is better to give than it is to receive" may not always be the case when assigning work to other people. I guess it depends on what side you're on: the one giving work, or the one receiving work.  However, it is a common and necessary part of business. Someone gets to be in charge of making sure a project gets done and has to assign things to others in order to accomplish that.

Whether you're in an Exchange Server environment or not, assigning Tasks through Outlook can easily be accomplished.  The non-Exchange environment doesn't have all the bells and whistles when doling out task assignments, but it's still a very doable process.

Watch the video to see how this works.

*Video available in both formats: m4v (for small portable media players) and wmv (for larger desktop viewing)

*Video available in both formats: m4v (for small portable media players) and wmv (for larger desktop viewing) 

Without a doubt, the reason I switched to Office 2007 so quickly was because I couldn't wait to get my hands on the latest and greatest new integration features between Outlook 2007 and SharePoint Services 3.  I'll go on record to say that I haven't been disappointed one single bit. I rather feel like a kid in a candy store. What do I look at next? Can I even single out one or two integration features? Probably not.

The Task integration features between Outlook 2007 and SharePoint Services 3 have brought me more surprises than I imagined, and to make it even better, the To-Do Bar picks them up. Yowzaa!

Check out the video to see more about this feature.

*Video available in both formats: m4v (for small portable media players) and wmv (for larger desktop viewing) 

I really do love the new features of Outlook 2007. A particular favorite is the To-Do Bar. In a nutshell, it provides a centralized place to see calendar items, task items, and other flagged items in one single area. Not only that, but it's there for maximum viewing convenience while you're in your inbox...which is where most of us spend our days anyway, right? It's just another way to increase productivity.

Check out the video to see more about this powerful new feature of Outlook 2007

For those of you using Outlook for contact management, here's a tip that will help you keep track of actual bulk mailings to your clients. You know, like when you send Thank You cards to those that attended your recent event, or mailing out the latest catalog to the Board of Directors.  By utilizing Tasks and Categories, this is easily accomplished. At this point, I'm going to assume you are giving Categories to your contacts as keywords.  First, always start in your Contacts folder, then change the view to By Category. Once you locate and select all the contacts given a specific category, use the Actions menu and select New Task for Contact. This new task is now linked to each of the contacts you selected in this category. Fill in the information about what you did or need to do, attach any files you like, update the Status field appropriately, click Save and Close. To verify the information is  now available and visible in the contact records simply open up a couple of them and view the Activities tab. You'll see the same task and its status on each and every one of them. See the video for a step-by-step on the process.

*Video available in both formats: mp4 (for small portable media players) and wmv (for larger desktop viewing) 

I'm going to show you a simple, yet effective way to remind yourself of recurring tasks. Right about now you might be saying to yourself "but I already know how to set up recurring tasks". While this might be true, I'm going to show you about the task regeneration feature. I really like this feature because, well let's face it, sometimes we don't always do the task we are reminding ourselves about. Task regeneration allows us the dignity of catching up without dealing with a multitude of task reminders that have backed up. It simply creates a new future task once we have finally completed the current task at hand. I know, this sounds a bit confusing. To see this process in action take a look at the video.