Improving Your Outlook

Now that you know all about the Outlook calendar, we'll look at a typical day in the life of a busy IT professional to see how she uses her calendar to the fullest.

Emily works for a Fortune 500 corporation with two locations, a main office in Los Angeles, California, and a new satellite office in New York City. Emily oversees operation of the local area network (LAN) in Los Angeles, and is in charge of the project to create a new LAN in New York City.

Emily uses her Outlook calendar to schedule meetings, track her flights, remind her to pay her bills, and keep track of important NBA games. Because Emily travels back and forth between Los Angeles and New York City so frequently, she has become a fan of both the Los Angeles Lakers and the New York Knicks.

A typical day for Emily might look something like Figure 12.39.

Figure 12.39. A typical business day for Emily.

Emily has a conference call with the network cable installers at 8:30 pacific time. After that, she needs to tie up as many loose ends as she can at her office before leaving at 10:30 to pick up her dry cleaning. After she gets her dry cleaning, she needs to drive to the airport and catch a flight to New York. She'll arrive in New York at 5:00 p.m. and pick up her rental car. She has reservations at the Hilton New York City for two nights while the network cable is being installed. While in New York, Emily will also take a look at the construction on the new server room and order racks to fit the room.

Emily carries a PDA with Pocket Outlook. So, before she leaves the office, she synchronizes her PDA and packs up her laptop. She stores detailed information about her flights and hotel and rental car reservations in Outlook and that information is synchronized to her PDA. When Emily originally booked her flight, she created the appointment item shown in Figure 12.40.

Figure 12.40. Emily keeps all relevant information about flights and reservations in her Outlook calendar and PDA.

When Emily arrives in New York, she retrieves the rental car confirmation number from her PDA and drives to the Hilton. She has her hotel confirmation number stored in her PDA along with the all-day event for the Hilton.

That evening, Emily boots up her laptop and immediately swaps her time zones. She needs to know when her appointments are scheduled in New York, not Los Angeles. Emily's next day in New York is shown in Figure 12.41.

Figure 12.41. Emily swaps time zones so that her appointments are shown for the correct time in New York City.

After a morning meeting with the cable installers, Emily is off to interview a potential network administrator. Hiring a network administrator would mean that Emily wouldn't have to travel so much.

Emily is spending one more night in New York before she heads home to Los Angeles. Because she travels to New York frequently, she has become a New York Knicks fan. Emily downloaded the New York Knicks game schedule directly to her Outlook calendar from http://www.calendar-updates.com. When she originally booked her plane tickets to New York, Emily checked her NBA schedule and realized she could catch a Knicks game when she was in town. She called and was able to get a ticket for tonight's game.

When Emily flies home tomorrow, she'll again use her PDA and Pocket Outlook to store her flight information and any business expenses incurred on this trip.

As you can see, using Outlook to store detailed business information saves time and helps keep even the busiest IT professional on time and organized.