Improving Your Outlook

Elizabeth works for a large university system that has a hodge-podge of mail systems, often a different one for each department or campus. The IT department is working on consolidating multiple email systems, but until all the systems are merged, Elizabeth has to deal many different mail servers and directories. Most of the mail servers use LDAP for directory services, but a few are Exchange Servers with global address lists.

Outlook limits you to one Exchange Server in a profile, which means that Elizabeth can't use the global address books on the other Exchange Servers, so she set up LDAP services to access those directories. Now she can email colleagues on the other Exchange Servers just as easily as she can email anyone on her Exchange Server. Although Elizabeth could have created contact entries in her own Contacts folder for the people she needs to email in other departments, using LDAP gives her dynamic access to the most up-to-date and complete directories.

Elizabeth also needs to maintain a huge list of contacts outside of the university directories. Because she has so many contacts in her Contacts folder, Elizabeth uses several different folders, along with extensive use of categories, to keep her contacts organized.

After adding categories to the contacts, Elizabeth created several Group By Category views to filter her contacts. She uses the views to show only the groups of contacts she needs to see. When she wants to send messages to a group, she selects the group from the Contacts folder and then uses the Actions menu options to send email, meeting requests, and letters to the selected contacts.

By using categories to create groups of users instead of distribution lists, Elizabeth has dynamic address lists and doesn't have to keep updating distribution lists as people come and go or change addresses.

Elizabeth uses Outlook at home, but because she has fewer personal contacts, she uses just one Contacts folder and categorizes each contact. She can access all the LDAP servers she uses at work from home; as a result, she can send messages to her colleagues from home using the same address list she uses at work.