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Home > Help & Support > Knowledge Base > Email & Collaboration > MASONLIVE > Best Practices for Email & Calendar

Best Practices for Email & Calendar

Email

  • Check Your Junk Folder
    • Check the Junk Folder to make sure you don’t miss legitimate messages.
  • Create Rules (Filters) to Auto-sort Your Mail
    • It will automatically sort your emails to help you save time when going through your inbox.
  • Setup an Automatic Reply
    • If you are going to be out of the office or on vacation setup an Automatic Reply. When people email you they know not to expect a response until you return.

Calendar

  • End a Recurring Meeting Before the Original End Date
    • Although you can cancel a recurring meeting, a better option is to change the end date for the series. This allows you and the attendees to keep a record of the meetings that occurred in the past. If you cancel the recurring meeting altogether, that history is lost. The best option is to set a new end date and then send the update to all attendees. This ends the meeting series early, while keeping a record of previous meetings.
  • Work with Multiple Shared Calendars
    • Periodically you should remove unwanted calendars from your shared calendar list. If you go into the calendar section within Outlook on the Web you’ll see all the calendar you have ever viewed before. If there are any that are not needed anymore it is recommended to you remove them so they no longer synchronizing to the server. Synchronizing multiple calendars will slow down the performance. To remove unwanted calendars you simply right-click on the calendar from the list and choose “Remove”. You can do this in Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac as well.
  • Don’t Move Meeting Requests
    • Don’t move a meeting request from your Inbox to a different folder before you accept or decline the request or before the meeting appears in your calendar.
    • Soon after a meeting request arrives in your Inbox, a piece of Outlook code — nicknamed the “sniffer” — automatically adds the meeting to your calendar and marks it as tentative. This is a fail-safe to keep you from missing the meeting in case you don’t see the request in your Inbox. However, the sniffer doesn’t reply to the meeting organizer. You still need to do that by accepting, accepting as tentative, or declining the request.
    • If you or a rule that you create moves an incoming meeting request from your Inbox before the sniffer can process the request, the meeting never appears in your calendar, and you might miss the meeting.
  • Avoid Calendar Clutter
    • If you don’t want to share your calendar, you can still use a meeting request to let people know when you will be away from the office. Before you send the meeting request, set Show time as to Free so that it doesn’t block out the time that you are away as Busy or Out of Office on the other people’s calendars.
    • So what if someone sends a meeting request or appointment that blocks out portions of your calendar? If you accept the item, set Show time as in the item to Free.
    • To make people aware of your schedule, or to let them know when you plan to be away from the office, don’t send a meeting request or forward appointments that block out portions of your schedule on their calendars. Instead, share your calendar with them.
  • Give Appropriate Access to your Delegate(s)
    • Office 365 offers several roles you can assign to your delegate(s). We recommend that you restrict your delegate(s) to the following four roles: Editor, Author, Reviewer or Free/Busy time. This document provides an overview of the roles and the permissions they grant.
  • Limit the Number of Delegates
    • Outlook does not limit the number of delegates that you can add. However, we recommend that you only grant Editor permissions to one (1) delegate. This allows you to track when and how a meeting was processed. Considering the fact that a delegate can use multiple devices to access your data, having many delegates with Editor permissions makes it very difficult to determine why meetings are missing or out of date. *If more than 1 delegate is needed then only 1 person should actively be managing the account at a time to minimize confusion.
Last modified: September 13, 2018

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