Upgrading to Outlook 2000

Microsoft Project 98 and Microsoft Project 95, and Microsoft Outlook 2000 work together to provide task scheduling for your users. Microsoft Project 95 users can assign tasks to Outlook 2000 users. However, if the Outlook recipients accept the tasks, Microsoft Project 95 does not add the tasks to Outlook Tasks automatically. Microsoft Project 98 offers additional integration with Outlook. Users can create Outlook reminders from within Microsoft Project 98, and they can add Microsoft Project items to the Outlook Journal.

To use the workgroup features of Microsoft Project with Outlook 2000, you must configure Microsoft Project 98 for a workgroup. These workgroup configurations allow team members to view the custom e-mail messages, such as team status reports, generated in Microsoft Project 98. Project managers can use the TeamAssign feature to send custom e-mail messages, and to assign project tasks to the team members who receive all messages in the Outlook Inbox.

After each team member accepts a task and sends the response to the project manager, the task is logged automatically in the Outlook Task list of the team member. Project tasks are grouped under a new category that corresponds to the project name. Each team member can keep track of the task status in the Outlook Task list.

When they use previous versions of Microsoft Project, project managers have to send TeamStatus messages to team members to request that the team members submit status reports. However, Microsoft Project 98 adds a new menu command called New TeamStatus Report to the Outlook Tasks menu. This feature allows team members to generate and submit TeamStatus reports without waiting for the project manager to ask for them.

When the team member chooses this command, a custom TeamStatus e-mail message is created and stored in the Outlook Inbox. If the team member is tracking the task status in the task list, the status information is added automatically to the TeamStatus report. Users can just open the report and send it to the project manager. In addition, they can use the TeamStatus message to track the task status, and to save and store the message in the Inbox until they are ready to submit it to the project manager.