Posts Tagged 'Outlook'

Can you control your phone from your computer?

Published April 22, 2010 Feature Highlights , New Leave a Comment
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with beta testing recently, and I’m pretty excited about some new product that will really make customer management easier. Interested? Read on…

First things first. This application lives in your Windows toolbar and works with both your Outlook and your Polycom phone. There are also plans to have it integrate with some common database systems (CRMs), so you can log call numbers and times, customer support information, and case notes from your workers.

It makes all your dialing as simple as typing part of a person’s name. It’s actually just like having all of your contacts on speed dial! When you receive a call, your computer uses the CallerID number to find and display the Outlook contact information, so you will know exactly who it is. It can also flash up a window with the contact’s details when you receive a call, which will let your customer support workers greet each caller in a well-prepared fashion. It’s also only one click to call people back!

Also, it can interact, work, and integrate with Google Maps. If you enter contact info that is not in Outlook, you can perform a search without opening your browser. Once you choose the correct hit, you can call them with only one click. When you’re done, you can create a new Outlook contact, including a clickable link to Google Maps, which will autofill to save time and effort.

The plan is to make this available upon request within the next month. Just email the Sutus sales team and they’ll contact you when it goes live!

-Dave.

Free/Busy Calendar Integration

Published February 11, 2010 Feature Highlights Leave a Comment
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Hi everyone,

Some of the crew in Sutus Support mentioned that asking about integrating a Free/Busy calendar from Outlook was a popular topic, so I decided to do some research. There’s a good article in the Help files, but why go there when you are already here?

First of all, a free/busy calendar is not just a calendar for one person. It is a calendar that combines many schedules and displays them on one page. This really saves time when you are booking appointments or scheduling team meetings, to name but two examples. Essentially, when a person publishes their Outlook calendar to the Business Central, that schedule information becomes available to other employees.

Enough of the talk, Dave. How do we do this? Well, if you’ve used the BC200′s Install Wizard, your Outlook calendar is already ready to use. If you haven’t, or you have recently upgraded your systems, or you just want to know what’s happening under the hood, read on.

These instructions may not be exact if you’re using a different version of Outlook. Here is what to do if you’re using Outlook 2003. (This is all in the BC200 Help files, if you get stuck.)

  1. In Microsoft Outlook, select the Tools menu, and then go to Options.
  2. Click on the Calendar Options button, and then click the Free/Busy Options button.
  3. Check the Publish at My Location checkbox, and then put http://central.YOURDOMAIN:8080/freebusy/daveco.vfb into the Publish at My Location text box. Be sure that you have entered it exactly as in the example! Now replace “daveco” with your Business Central logon name, and “YOURDOMAIN” with your domain name.
  4. Fill in the Search location text box exactly as follows: http://central.YOURDOMAIN:8080/freebusy/%NAME%.vfb This time, don’t change YOURDOMAIN or %NAME%, though.

Now, your Outlook calendar appointments will be visible to other people when they are scheduling appointments in their Outlook. Be careful, though – the Business Central does not support calendar sharing, which is when you can see other people’s calendar information in your own calendar.

It’s hard to be excited about a calendar, I know, but it’s simple to see how this can increase efficiency around the office. I’ll write again next week, as I see that I’m free at 4:30…

-Dave.