Managing your emails - Outlook training videos
This video series aims to highlight the features and tools of Outlook (Desktop App) that will help you to comply with your departmental file retention policies and data protection legislation. We have all become used to having powerful search features within Outlook that seemingly removed the need to organise emails in the way we would do paper files. Unfortunately, this leads to us holding on to information for far longer than necessary, which is inefficient working practice, and, in the case of personal data, also in breach of data protection legislation.
The new University Email and Calendar Policy introduces automatic deletion timescales for some folders within Outlook: the “Deleted Items”, “Calendar” appointments, and “Sent Items”. Your Sent Items folder in particular is likely to contain some important records, for example relating to external contracts, or advice given to a student, which you may need to retain for a longer period of time. In order to make sure that these records are not deleted automatically, we can set up some features to sort and organise the emails, enabling us to retain what we need and delete what we don’t need.
The basic steps covered in the training videos are:
Creation of sub-folders, much like real-world filing cabinets, to store the emails you want to keep in an organised way
Use of “Categories”, also known as “tagging”, to help with ongoing email management, including improving the accuracy of searching, and use of Rules.
Creation of “Rules”, to allow us to automate much of the email management process.
The first automatic deletion will take place in August 2019, so now is the time to start to get your email records organised. Once the sub-folders, categories and rules are active, it should be straightforward to manage your ongoing emails. If you wish to discuss options that are personalised to your department or area of working please feel free to contact D.Carline@chi.ac.uk.
Videos
1. Introduction to managing your emails
2. Changing Cached exchange mode
3. Creating and managing subfolders
4. Basic search
5. Categories