Law Office Technology

How to get your Outlook Categories Back

I am a big user of Outlook’s Color Categories.  Every Contact and Calendar I create has at least one category assigned to them.  I find it much easier to work that way.  If you are moving computers or exchange accounts, you will find that your categories will not move with you.  However, there is a very easy to rebuild them.

Right click on the Inbox and go to Properties.  You will have the option to Upgrade to Color Categories.  If you click on this, Outlook will re add any category that has been used, rebuilding your master category list. 

Your Practice In the Cloud

Your Practice in the Cloud

View more PowerPoint from Lawtopia

 

 

The Mississippi State Bar: Greenville CLE on the Road Program

04/20/2012

Tom O’Connor and Craig Bayer

Problems with Adobe with 64bit Outlook

I have the 64bit edition of Outlook 2010 and Adobe Pro 9.0.  Sometimes in Adobe I want to send a pdf.  When I attempted to do this, I would get the following error message:

 

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/outlook/thread/64c0bedf-2bcd-40aa-bb9c-ad5de20c84be/

Run REGEDIT and goto:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail]

Right-click and create a new key called Outlook64Bridge

Then right-click Outlook64Bridge and create two keys under it DLLPath and DLLPathEx

 

Find the 32 bit version of the file MAPI32.dll and assign the whole qualified pathname to each key, mine were:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Outlook64Bridge\DLLPath

"D:\WINDOWS\system32\mapi32.dll"

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Outlook64Bridge\DLLPathEx

"D:\WINDOWS\system32\mapi32.dll"

 

 

Then go back to the root key name and show the default client as Outlook64Bridge

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail

"Outlook64Bridge"

Email Management Tips

Just read a great article by Ernie Svenson about email management,  and I decided to add my 2 cents.

Once I receive an email I either leave it in my inbox or move it into a subfolder.  If I leave it in my inbox, that means it must get answered that day.  I will not go to sleep with emails in my inbox.

Create Ticket, Create Calendar Event and Create KB

These Folders are monitored by my assistant.  Since I am using Microsoft Exchange she has those same 3 folders in her Outlook.  Create / Add Ticket, means a Client is having a tech support issue and needs help.  Since our company has more consultants then just me,  it is up to my assistant to decide who that issue should get assigned to. Create Calendar is for emails that have an event that I want to attend.  My assistant simply creates the calendar event for me.  Create KB (Knowledge Base)  means the email should get added to our companies Wiki.

Create Contact

For emails that might have someone’s Cell Phone number or other pertinent contact information that I want add to our contact list.

Create To Do – 1.Week 

These are emails that need a response, but it can wait to the weekend.  I still try to answer these emails before then.

Create To 2. Someday

Contains emails that don’t need any response but I might want to glance over at a later time.  Nothing in here is that important. 

Craig Bayer and Lawot

These are storage folders for all emails.  Once an email in the other folders has been acted upon,  it is added in Craig if it is personal or Lawot if work related.

The beauty of this system is that it keeps you in control of your inbox and allows you to filter out the fluff while leaving the important items on top.

Other Observations

 

Create To Do – Today

I used to have a folder called Create To Do – Today where I would put emails that needed to be answered that day.  I decided to just leave them in the Inbox so I could not possibly ignore them.

iPhone / IPad

This system works particular well with the iPhone and  iPad and was mainly designed because of those devices.  It is very easily to read emails on my iPhone and move them to the appropriate folder.

Public Transportation

This one is a little out in left field.   I am not a fan of cars.  I own one and I travel frequently, but I think that the act of driving is a time suck.  I find that when I am living in cities with public transportation this system works extremely well and I get almost all of my emails answered on the bus rides to and from work, leaving the rest of my day extremely productive. 

Exchange / Outlook

I am using Microsoft Hosted Exchange which cost’s $5 a month a mailbox (minimum of 5 boxes) and offers 25gb of storage per Mailbox.  I am also using Outlook 2010 which has many more features to effectively manage email which I will discuss later. 

Junk Mail Tips with Outlook

1.  Create a Folder Called Unsubscribe and move junk mail here first instead of the Junk Mail Folder.  Once a week, go through this folder and unsubscribe from all the emails in this folder and then add them to Junk Mail.

 

2. Set your Junk Email Folder to High

 

3. Check Also trust E-mail from my Contacts and Automatically add people I e-mail to the Safe Senders List.  This will help stop real email being flagged as Junk Mail. 

4. Block Foreign Emails

I block all emails from all countries except the US and Canada.  This does not stop and .com, .net, .org, .ect. 

I also Block Certain Encodings except US_ASCII (which unfortunately what most junk mail is)

Outlook 2010 Quick Steps

There was a program called SimplyFile that I used until Outlook 2010 came out.  It was a toolbar you installed in outlook.  You could create a short cut that would allow you to highlight an email and do one of the following things:

• move an email to a specific folder and mark it read
• take the email’s contents and create a To Do
• take the email’s contents and create a Calendar event

Outlook 2010 has a feature called Quick Steps. 

You can now do the exact same thing without needing to purchase 3rd party software.  

Lets click on Team E-mail

We can give this Team a Name, and then choose who we want to receive an email.  I added all of Lawot’s employees and now when I click on it,  it automatically creates an email to everyone.

Create more Quicksteps

Lets click on New in Manage Quicksteps

Quick Step 1.  Forward an email to my assistant and move it to our read mail folder

I will call this Fwd to Meagan and then I set it to move to the folder Lawot and forward to Meagan.

Quick Step 2.  Create A To Do from an Email

I call this one Create To Do and for actions I move to the folder lawot and Create a task with the text of message.

Quick Step 3.  Create A Calendar Event from an Email

Call this one Create Calendar and move the email to the folder lawot and Create an Appointment with text of message. 

Example of Create To Do

I am looking at my email inbox at the email Welcome to Microsoft Online Services!

I clicked on Create To Do. 

 

 

It Creates a To Do with the Subject taken from the subject of the email and the body taken from the body of the email.  It then moves the email out of the inbox and into the folder Lawot. 

Email Attachments in Amicus Premium

Best Practices:

 

• Save Emails in Amicus but also leave a copy stored in Outlook
• Save attachments as documents, don't leave them on the email. 

 

You cannot open an email attachment that is in on an email in Amicus without first associating that email with an Amicus File and Saving the attachment to a location on your network.  Therefore if you want to view email attachments without saving them we recommend we click on the View Button to read attachments.

 

 

This is the easiest way to view attachments.  Note,  in some instances you need to have outlook running for this to work. 

Attachments when using Save and Make Associations

In this instance we have an email the outlook view and we want to save it on an Amicus File.

We click on the file we want that email attached to and then Click Save and Make Associations. 

 

Once the email is saved as an amicus email we can see there are 4 attachments on that email.

When we click on the Drop Down list we can chose an attachment to open. 

When we click on the attachment it gives us the option to save the email.  If we click No,  we get the following message. 

Therefore Amicus is forcing you to Save the email before you look at it.  You can never click no and have it work. 

 

Click Yes,  if you click no,  you will get the error message we talked about above. 

 

You then need to chose a file if one is not selected.

 

Amicus will then want you to save the attachment in the location you specified in your Amicus preferences.  So if you have setup your Amicus Preferences,  you just have to click Save every time. 

 

 

 

Now you can tell that the attachment has been saved because there is an icon called Saved Documents. 

Use SQL to Change All Mobile Labels to Cell Labels in Amicus Premium Edition

A problem with Amicus Attorney is that it has too many labels for phone numbers

Having the labels Cell and Mobile ensures that half the firm will use one and the other half will use the other.  This becomes a big problem when setting up the Amicus Outlook Sync.  Outlook has a label for Mobile , but not one for Cell.

The iPhone has a label for Mobile as well, but not one for Cell

The end result is that I get clients complaining to me that they cannot find their customers numbers on their iPhones.  My solution is tell the clients to only use the Mobile Field in Amicus, which I have mapped to the Mobile Field in Outlook, which is mapped to the mobile field in the iPhone.  This is a great solution moving forward, but what about all the legacy contacts with phone numbers in the cell field?

Simple, we run a script in SQL that automatically changes all the Cell Fields to Mobile Fields.   

As we can see from above,  Cell is labeled 7 and Mobile is labeled 11.  Therefore when we run  the following script:

Use amicus
UPDATE dbo.Phone
SET PhoneLabelID = 11
WHERE PhoneLabelID = 7

All numbers labeled Cell will be changed to Mobile.

This is a lot easier then going into each label and changing all the contacts. 

Effective Email Management

I believe I have reached email nirvana using Outlook with Exchange and an iPhone 3GS.  Here is how I did it.

Work Flow:  As soon as an email is read, it is moved into a Folder with an a. in front of it.  Once an action has been taken, the email is then moved into either the Craig Bayer folder if it is personal or the Lawot folder if it is regarding work.

Create / Add to Ticket

When a client needs work done for us we create a ticket.  They should email support@lawot.com for this but if they happen to email me I move it into this folder.  My assistant watches the folder like a hawk and creates a ticket, assigns it to a consultant and moves the email to the Lawot Folder.

Workflow: Ticket is Created from the email immediately and then moved out of the folder.

Create Calendar

When some sends an email requesting an appointment I move it here.  Either my assistant or I will create a calendar event from the email by the end of the day.

Workflow: Calendar Event  is created from the email by the end of the business day and then moved out of the folder.

Create Contact

Anytime I receive an email that has a contact I need to create. 

Workflow: Contact  is created from the email by the end of the business week and then moved out of the folder.

Create KB

Law Office Technology uses an enterprise wiki called Brainkeeper for our knowledge base.  When I see an email that could be added to our knowledge base, like a best practices article I move it to this folder.

Workflow: Knowledge Base Article is created from the email by the end of business week and moved out of the folder.

Create To Do: Today, Week, Someday

Any email that needs a response is moved to one of following To Do folders.  If the email needs to responded to that day it is moved to Create To Do – 1.Today, if it needs a response by the end of the week, it is moved to Create To Do –2.Week.  If there is no deadline I  move it to Create To Do - 3.Someday.

Workflow: Today is responded to that Day, Week is responded to by the end of the business week and Someday has no time limit.  Once responded to the emails are moved to the Lawot folder.

Craig Bayer / Lawot

After the email has been processed, if it is personal, I move it to Craig Bayer and if it is business related it is moved to Lawot.

Facebook / Twitter

I have a rule created in Outlook that moves any notices from Facebook or Twitter to this folder.  I check it when I have time.

Advice for using Hosted Exchange

I have been getting a lot of questions about Hosted Exchange recently.  Law Office Technology has been using it for over a year and selling and setting it for client sites for the past 6 months.  If you are going to use hosted exchange, I recommend buying it from a company that does not force you to enter in your email password every time you open up Outlook.  I had a client that purchased hosted exchange that did that, and every time they opened Amicus, it would crash outlook.  Fortunately the hosted exchange that we resell does not ask you for the username or password when you log into outlook.  If you are linking ay product with outlook, whether it be PCLaw, Amicus, TimeMatters, Worldox, ect, you must make sure that you do not have to enter in your password every time.