Shared diaries, team diaries, etc explained.

Shared diaries, team diaries, resource-booking diaries.
I'm just working out how many different uses we put our diaries to, how we use the shared diaries to best effect.
1. We're a small team of four people and we need to be able to see the 'team diary' so as to ensure we always have 'the office' covered.
2. We need to be able to book shared resources in the resource diary eg the projector and the lightweight eee PC or the meeting rooms.
3. Personally each of us plans our working time in and through the diary and we can 'invite' other team members to a meeting. (This automatically sends them an invitation and in Outlook they can confirm or decline the meeting - this automatically adjusts the diary entry.)
4. The eLink shared diary allows you to enter your travel to and travel from time for better diary planning plus the integration with Outlook enables you to enter a default alarm warning time,(i use 15 minutes.)
5. The diary and all contacts related to any diary entry are synchronised via MS Outlook to our PDAs. This synchronisation also extends to the Outlook warning and the entry and alarm is repeated through our PDAs.
6. When we book a meeting we have software which automatically sends a confirmation email ,within the hour, and then sends a re-confirmation three days prior to the meeting.
7. Actions which need to be on a particular day are entered in the diary and we can block a chunk of time for each of them.

All the documents needed for any meeting can be electronically attached to the diary entry so that I can prepare myself progressively.
All the diary entries show up in the relevant contact records, company records, project records etc
After a meeting the diary entry can be duplicated into an action(s) so that all the links are repeated and the individual person(s) can take responsibility for their particular action(s), so we can all see 'who's doing what'.

Other people we know use them to allocate truck and crane drivers to projects / jobs as customers need them; book electronic instruments to jobs; schedule crane and lifting inspections for insurance purposes; plan routine car and lorry servicing; plan meter readings......

Yes, that's all very well, possibly the, most important parts - every diary entry and action can be linked to a project, a person, a company, a marketing campaign, a sales opportunity, which means that you automatically get a schedule of all the work you've done or anyone's done or doing from any of these areas.

Beyond that let's have some dashboards for todays work - diary, to-dos, recent contacts, recent companies, recent projects, recent documenst and let's have a dashboard for a contact eg recent actions, open documents, open helpdesk issues, open sales opportunities, so I can see everything we may want to talk about and then we'll need to look at from the whole company view. Yes, it's all there.

eLink Lite free of charge for you to use

Now at last we are provide a free of charge eLink Lite online.
We've been working towards this goal for eight years as we wanted to be able to allow people to try eLink for yourelves. You can use it for your private filing, to help your local charity, your club or even for your own business. AND you can have multiple ones if you want them.

We had to negotiate with our suppliers "Whoever thought of someone using our software for free..... huh!" We had to wait for low cost servers supporting low cost databases and make sure that they worked. Agonising and genuinely 'bleeding edge' stuff.

Finally eight years later we're just about there.
Hurrah!

eLink Lite
Simplicity and Efficiency. eLink Lite is a single-user on-line filing system with diary , actions and reminder system and its free of charge. It includes omni-directional relational database for all your filing.

eLink Lite, a web based system held in a secure environment, enables you to deliver exceptional service:
- Manage all the information about your contacts and your activities
- Have access to everything, online anywhere anytime
- Using a shared diary, plan your activities and allocate your resources
- Actively progress every business opportunity
- Create and maintain on-going relationships with all your customers

eLink Lite software is provided on a Software as a Service basis. Software as a Service, hosted software, is the most straight-forward, the lowest risk, with the lowest initial cashflow requirements and crucially your data is secure. All you need is a PC with broadband.

Complete, logical solution for managing your daily activities
 Immediate control in your own hands
 Installation in under ten minutes
 Integration with MS Outlook, Word and also with your PDA

Plus a 'Google' style search on all text, .doc and .pdf files

Effective customer relationship management for:
 Managing contacts, companies and all communications (documents and emails) withcontacts
 Filing documents (commercial proposals, catalogues, price lists, product brochures andmarketing material, etc and all your emails both in and out)
 Organising tasks, projects and work schedules

eLink Lite is completely future-proofed.
Because you can increase the number of users;
integrate with VoIP Advantage phone system;
add personalised mailshots;
add the eLink Taskcentre service;
add more functionality with optional modules for example Sales Opportunity Manager and Timesheets and with personalised workflow routines;
upgrade the security level and the capabilties of the underlying database to MS SQL Server;
integrate with accounting and other third party software.

The largest clients include ING Leasing; Airbus Industries and BNP Paribas and our smallest are .... one man bands. Get ready for the future now.

Call me now 0n 0207 0434217 or email me cliff@yoolaa.co.uk