Use Forms to Coordinate Team Activities
Published: January 31, 2006
Whether you're responsible for managing a specific project or managing a team of people, using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 forms can help you better coordinate the activities of your group and improve communication among team members.
As a manager, you need to track tasks and resources, and find effective ways for employees to work with each other. You also need a way to track progress towards completion of key milestones and deliverables to ensure your group will complete their projects on time. Learning how to use, and customize, Outlook forms can help you with all of these activities.
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What Is an Outlook Form?
Although it may not be obvious, every item you see in Outlook uses a form to display information. Each mail message, appointment, meeting request, contact form, distribution list, task, task request, journal entry, post, and note is actually a form containing data you've entered
Using Outlook Forms
Using Outlook forms, you can do much more than just send and receive e-mail. You can use Outlook to solicit team feedback, share client contact information, and organize meetings. You can also use Outlook to create and assign tasks to team members, and use Outlook Task Views for simple project management.
Solicit Team Feedback
If you want your team to vote for the location of a company offsite, you can collect their feedback by adding voting buttons to the e-mail form.
To add voting buttons to an e-mail message:
1. | When creating a new mail message in Outlook, on the View menu click Options and select the Use voting buttons check box. |
2. | You can use the Approve or Reject buttons, or delete these default button names and replace them with your own text.  When you add voting to your e-mail, use the Approve or Reject buttons, or type alternative button names into the form. |
3. | Under Delivery options, select the Save sent message to check box and select the folder to save the responses into. |
4. | Click Close and send the e-mail message. Members of the team can click on the voting buttons; an e-mail message will be sent back to you after each person votes, so you can track the responses. |
Solicit Team Feedback
You can share client contact information or important e-mail messages with your team, by saving Outlook items to a public folder. (This feature requires Microsoft Exchange server.) Once an item has been saved to a public folder, all members of your team can access the data.
Organize Meetings
Using Meeting Requests to set up meetings makes it easy to see whether members of your staff are available. (Viewing other people's free and busy times requires your group to be on an Exchange server, but you can send and receive meeting requests no matter what type of mail server your company uses.)
To organize a meeting in Outlook:
1. | To see whether your team members are available, open a new Meeting Request and in the To field type the e-mail addresses of the people to be invited. |
2. | Click the Scheduling tab; the invitees will be displayed in a list, and bars to the right of each name will show when a person is busy. |
3. | Remember to use good meeting request etiquette, to ensure everyone's calendar will be updated if you need to make changes to the meeting time or location. |
Create and Assign Tasks
If you are working on a small project, your can use Outlook to track the tasks, the owner of each task, and the timeline for the project to be completed. You can create a new task, writing a report, for example, and assign it to one of the members of your team; then, track the progress of the task until it is completed.
To create and assign a task in Outlook:
1. | On the File Menu, click New, and then select Task Request. | • | Tip: If you want to quickly create a task from an actionable item in an e-mail message, just drag the text of the message into your Task List. A new task will open, containing the text. Click the Assign button to assign the task to someone on your team. |
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2. | Enter the e-mail address of the person to whom you wish to assign the task, along with a subject describing the task. You can also enter the task's due date, start date, status, priority, and a percentage describing how much of the task has been completed. |
3. | To track the task progress, select the Keep an updated copy of this task on my task list and Send me a status report when this task is complete check boxes. |
4. | You can enter a short description of the task to be performed. You can also add contact information to the task request, and assign the task to a category. After completing the fields, click Send; the recipient of the task will become the Task Owner.  Use Task Requests to assign work to the members of your team. |
5. | The new Task Owner can Accept or Decline the task, or Assign the task to another person. (This functionality requires Microsoft Exchange as your mail server.) The Task Owner can also update the status and percent completion. By clicking on the Details tab, the Task Owner can enter additional data about the task, including Mileage and Billing Information. |
6. | Once the task has been completed, a status report will be generated and sent to you. |
Simple Project Management
You can view the tasks you've assigned and view fields including status, date, and task owner. To view these tasks fields, click Tasks on the Navigation Pane in Outlook.
Outlook lets you view Tasks by a number of criteria, including when the task is due, who the task is assigned to, and whether the task has been completed. You can also view the Tasks displayed in a timeline.
Clicking the Task Timeline option will display a timeline with bars for each task. Put your cursor over the bars to see the name of the task. The timeline shows you, at a glance, the start and completion dates for each task, and which weeks will be the busiest for your team.
Use Task Requests and Task Timeline in Outlook for simple project management.
Creating Custom Forms
You can tailor any standard Outlook form to meet the specific needs of your company. Custom forms are created by removing the elements you don't need and adding labels, fields, and controls for customized data. The Outlook Form Designer makes it simple to drag-and-drop the elements you need to collect specific data from your team, control workflow, or track resources for a project. If you create a customized version of the Contact form, your team will be able to collect client data, specific to your company.
Going Beyond Outlook Forms
If you want to create highly customized forms that connect to databases, you should consider using Microsoft InfoPath. InfoPath allows you to design and publish interactive, user-friendly forms, based on the extensible markup (XML) standard. A recipient of a form can use InfoPath to fill in the data; users without InfoPath can view the form in Outlook or Internet Explorer.
To maximize the effectiveness of meetings, you can also use Outlook in conjunction with SharePoint Meeting Workspaces. A workspace is a Web site that contains team information (like agendas, meeting notes, documents, and contact information). Once you've created a Workspace, you can password-protect the information and assign permissions to let team members view some or all of the data. In Outlook, you can fill in a Workspace field on the Meeting Request form, to point people to your Workspace location.
Summary
By taking advantage of all of the forms Outlook offers, you can create workflow and processes to better manage your project or team. If you need specific fields added to a form, you can customize it without knowing how to program, using the Outlook Form Designer. When you're ready to expand beyond Outlook forms, Microsoft InfoPath lets you create sophisticated forms that can interact with other Microsoft Office applications and connect to databases. You can also create Workspaces to consolidate information shared by your team.
 | Victoria Rosenborg
Victoria Rosenborg is co-founder of Small Business Online, an Internet marketing company that specializes in small business. She is also a Web designer, consultant, and author of PayPal for Dummies. Recognized as an expert in eBooks and ePublishing, Victoria is the author of ePublishing for Dummies and was the Director of Technology for Time Warner Book Group's ePublishing division. Victoria worked for 6 years at Microsoft Corporation as a Technical Evangelist and Senior Program Manager. Earlier in her career, she worked for HarperCollins and R.R. Donnelley, and co-authored A Guide to Multimedia (New Riders Publishing).
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