Microsoft Outlook and Real Estate
Technology
Oh no, not another technology blog. I spent about 1.5 years working with Microsoft Outlook on a systems migration for about 6000 users. During this time, Outlook and i became friends on a first named basis. Outlook is a great way to maximize your communications, tracking and mailing list.
Microsoft Outlook has Email, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts and even electronic post-It Notes! What many people do not know is that everything is drop and drag in Outlook. I always encourage agents to spend some time playing with the system. It is difficult to mess it up. The best way to learn anything is to be hands on. let's look at a scenario...
You get an email telling you about an event that is happening. You can click and hold that email from your inbox and drop it on top of the calendar icon and it will open up a new calendar event. The body of the email will be inside the calendar event and all you have to do is set the time and day and save it! Drop that same email on the Note icon and it becomes a post-it note!
The other feature I love from Outlook is when you receive an email, Open the email and right click on the senders email address. In your pull down menu, you are able to save that email address as a contact. This will keep it in your contacts folder. You can add a telephone, address, website and countless other open fields and save it. You can even add categories for easier searching.
Outlook allows you to save time by becoming efficient in managing all of your communications whether you are receiving or sending them. For beginners, an overview class on outlook is a great way to get started. For more advanced users, you will always learn something new. There is also an entire website dedicated to Outlook. Have fun with it!
Update:
The first thing you have to do is add in your Advanced Toolbar. This can be found under "View<Toolbars<Advanced. This allows you to easily change your view to categories. With this you can send emails to just one group of people, rather than your whole contact list. The key is spending the time to set things up when you put the contacts in. This will help with the overall management later.
Another thing to remember is that Outlook is Memory Resident. This means that the menus will change based on what screen you are on. If you are in your Inbox, you will have 1 set of menus in your list of values and these will change when you switch to your calendar.
Explore and have fun with it!
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Date: Monday, February, 11th 2008 @ 09:30:17 AMViews: 403
This blog entry currently has 2 comments posted.
Jim Hirschhorn
Put the comments in as an update as the creator of this blog limits the amount of comments one can leave! Go figure!
Kathleen MacKenzie
Jim - how great this is to tie into "working your sphere". There's so many ways to categorize your client database. Since you are on a first name basis - what are some great tips that you've found when sorting your database?