I will confess that as much as I dislike Microsoft I really do like Outlook. It syncs with my BlackBerry, with Google Calendar and it does a serviceable job with IMAP email accounts.
Me and Outlook, we go way back. All the way back to Office 97. It was very much a love hate relationship back then but really there was no other option. Word and Excel did their job reasonably well and Outlook was there so I used it. I’ve always done at least one upgrade with each new version of Office until Office 2003 came out. As soon as that hit I bought upgrades for all 4 of my personal versions of Office and we bought upgrades for our 3 users of Office at the lab, leaving everyone else on Star Office or Open Office.
Office 2007 was one that I intended to pass on until one of my clients informed me that they would switch to Office 2007 on a hard date. I went through the sample spreadsheet that they included with Office 2003 using the 2007 converters and it just didn’t work well so I broke down and got an upgrade for one of my computers. Office 2007 is alright. The ribbon doesn’t bother me like I thought it would and it is a worthy enough upgrade. I’m thinking about doing the rest of my computers to get the attachment preview in messages in Outlook, but I digress.
Outlook has always been a great calendar and scheduling application. Even without Exchange it will handle invitations and responses better than anything else that I have tried. I had long contemplated using something like Studio+ to get some client and equipment scheduling features but didn’t want to spend the money for it. Instead I used methods like written notes on Post-Its or legal pads, notes in my Palm Pilot/Treo/BlackBerry or worse; my memory.
I became so sick of having to improvise, adapt and overcome a forgotten piece of equipment that I started loading up 2 Domke F2 bags with everything that I own to take on each and every job that I did. Back breaking and very risky to your business to have every piece of equipment that you own on one job site. No more.
Microsoft has released Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot for Outlook 2007 & 2003 (thankfully). It allows you to create a listing of all of your equipment so that with a click of a button you have a window that pops up where you can simply select the client and then fill out your equipment list by checking off what you need. Yes, I am aware that you can manually add these equipment items to the note field but I never did it because it was such a pain in the ass. Now it is rather trivial to get all of that data into the appointment.
When you use tools like Google Calendar to do over the air calendar sync your appointment with all of your equipment needs is uploaded to Google Calendar. From there, you can sync to other computers or more importantly to your BlackBerry and have the details with you always. Now my calendar is the only place that I go to see what I need to take with me. I have lightened my load, reduced my exposure to loss or theft of equipment and did if for no cost. All in all not a bad deal. You can get Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot at the links below.
Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot Product Page
Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot Outlook 2007 download
Microsoft Pro Photo Shoot Outlook 2003 download
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Filed under: Software | Tagged: Microsoft, Office, Outlook, Scheduling
