Reminder Software for Outlook - a Task Management Solution

As a safety net that reaches everyone, Important Dates+ is a simple system that ensures everyone is aware of critical dates, project tasks, appointments or assigned work. Staff can receive reminders whenever and wherever they are, as long as they have access to e-mail.

What it does ...

Important Dates+ is a reminder system enhancement to Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to place reminders on any item in any private folder in Outlook or public folder in Exchange. For example, you can put a reminder on a contact and set daily, weekly, monthly or custom date patterns of your choosing. Reminders are sent as e-mail messages to all recipients noted on the Reminder. Important Dates+ works well as a "Bring Forward" or "Tickler" system and as a basic project and task manager.

How it works ...

Reminders are linked to any Outlook or Exchange item and stored as a database record in the central Messenger database. The Important Dates+ Messenger scans the database of reminder records at a regularly scheduled time, usually nightly, and compiles the reminder messages to be sent out to all persons named in the Reminder. The Messenger then sends out one consolidated e-mail reminder summarizing all reminders for each person. Important Dates+ supports Access (Jet 4.0), MSDE, and SQL Server databases. A Jet database ships with the product. This version of Important Dates+ does not require Exchange server to operate.

Setting Important Dates Plus Reminders
Once the Important Dates+ software has been installed on your machine, the Important Dates+ Lightning Bolt button Important Dates toolbar button

will appear as the last item in your Outlook Standard Toolbar. After selecting an item, you can attach a reminder by clicking on the Important Dates button. If an item is open you can use the Important Dates button displayed in the item’s toolbar to review or set a reminder on that item.

The Important Dates Plus Reminder Form
The Reminder form allows you add a new reminder as well as review or remove an existing reminder. When working in exchange public folders you can even set permisons to prevent others from changing the reminder or restrict them to amending the notes. When working with personal or public folder tasks, when a task is marked Complete, you will automatically be asked if the reminder should be removed.

The Important Dates+ Reminder form gives you the opportunity to set:

The Due Date
The Date to start Reminders
The Reminder Pattern
The People to Notify
Notes about the Reminder
Permissions for the Reminder

Reminder Messages
The following is a sample Reminder Message sent by the back-end Messenger. The Subject of the main mail message is standardized as "Your Important Dates Reminders for date".
Important Dates Reminder message

Each reminder in the message is labelled as an Item and consists of a table showing the; Subject, Item Type and Notes.

Subject	This is the Subject line field from the Outlook or Public Folder item that has the reminder set. The Subject can optionally have a hyperlink to the actual item. Provided that the person receiving the reminder has permissions to look at the original item they can open it directly from the message by clicking on the underlined blue link.
Item Type	The Item Type indicates where the original item is stored and who the Reminder Owner is.
Notes	The Notes from the Reminder are also provided.
Final Reminder	This notice is added to the right hand side of the shaded Item line if this is the last scheduled reminder for the item.
Due Date: dd-mmm-yyyy	This notice is added to the right hand side of the shaded Item line if the Due Date field was set in the Reminder record.

Messenger Notices to Administrators
The Administrator of the Important Dates+ reminder system has the option of receiving an automated message giving the statistics from the last run of the Reminder Messaging system. This message details how many reminders were sent, how many unresolved addresses there were and the time it finished. The details of this message are controlled by variables set in the Administrators tool.
Important Dates Administrator report

Pricing and Compatibility
The licences in use are calculated as the greater of number of unique reminder owners (creators) and unique mailboxes containing reminder items. Note that any number of public folders are treated as a single mailbox

The Important Dates Reminder system is available for Outlook 98 to 2007.
Pricing is $34.95 US per licence plus $250.00 US for backend server. Download - 4MB

| | | | |