If your e-mail inbox is the size of a major city's telephone directory, maybe it's time to get organized.

If you can't find the last e-mail from a hot prospective customer who is going to be in your office in 10 minutes, it's definitely time to get organized.

	TIP: Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager enables you to run reports to quickly filter and summarize information about your business contacts and opportunities. For example, run reports to list contacts you have not communicated with recently or to see your sales forecast for the next quarter.

More than half of critical business information is now being transmitted through e-mail. As recently as a decade ago, e-mail wasn't considered by many to be an acceptable form of business communication. Not anymore. As the pace of the business world increases, so does the need for faster communications. That's not going to change.

But an unorganized inbox defeats the purpose if we're spending an inordinate amount of time searching for messages — very much like tearing through a poorly organized file cabinet.

Organize Your Business Communications
What if you could have a tool that allowed you to track virtually all of your business communication with customers, organize it, make it easy to use — and easy to retrieve quickly?

What if you could open an e-mail, read it and respond without having to leave what you're working on to go to a separate screen?

What if you had a software package that could do all of that and more — and a package you and your employees can easily learn?

Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 offers a number of features to make effective communications much easier. That includes features that make organizing, sorting and getting to your e-mails quickly and easily.

The completely revamped Outlook with Business Contact Manager includes numerous improvements to make working with e-mails easier and faster:

• Customizable junk e-mail filters allow users to determine how aggressive the filtering should be. Also, Microsoft provides continual updates to keep your junk e-mail filters current.



• Business Contact Manager keeps all your customer data in one place. It automatically linking e-mails, notes appointments and to-do items — as well as attaching Microsoft Office documents, faxes and scanned material — to business contacts, accounts and sales opportunities. BCM also offers one-click viewing of customer activity histories and associated items.



• A Search Folders feature allows users to organize e-mails effortlessly, by setting them up to group messages by sender or date. The messages aren't literally moved from their original locations, but the feature lets users group, locate and get to messages quickly.



• A more functional Navigation Panel. That's where the Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Task buttons live.



• A larger Reading Pane allows users to read their correspondence faster – you get more reading with less scrolling



• Outlook also can group messages and replies into conversational threads



• The Quick Flags feature allows users to earmark messages for future reference



• New Desktop Alerts notify users when they have new mail. A brief summary about the new message includes the sender's name, the subject and a sampling of the text

An additional feature allows users to simply point to a message for a summary which includes the sender's name, the date and time received and file size. Knowing the date and time can be helpful if you're in a hurry and need to prioritize the messages.

Also, it is not necessary to open the Outlook interface. Just open messages on the desktop.

Anyone who owns, manages or works in a small business would likely agree that spending less time on the computer and more time with customers is the way to run a successful company. Managing your e-mail inbox in an organized, efficient manner can help make that happen.