Learn more on Team TimeSheet for Outlook

Team TimeSheet for Outlook makes working on project activities very easy by seamlessly integrating the access to projects, deployment, tracking and reporting of deliverables all inside Microsoft Outlook. It is engineered and designed from the ground-up using current Microsoft technologies and keeping into consideration, the usability aspect of Outlook that many of us are already familiar with.

The following topics discuss some of the important aspects of Team TimeSheet for Outlook, and how these aid administrators, project managers and workers in performing their project tasks productively and efficiently.

	Project management and timesheet reporting right in your Outlook
	Streamline timesheet collection and reporting process in the organization
	Automatic emails notification to workers and managers
	Keep Project information fully up to date among members
	Control how workers use Outlook for to prepare and report timesheets
	Cost and billing calculation
	Color coding of Outlook items
	Offline Support
	Audit Manager module to accept or reject reported deliverables
	Outlook views especially geared for effective timesheet project tracking
	Statistics - Reporting, Charting, and Data Analysis
	Deploy as many custom fields

Project management and timesheet reporting right in your Outlook

Your team members all use Outlook extensively - all day, every day for email communications, appointments, meetings, tasks etc. When they have relied that heavily on Outlook, why not let them report their timesheets, expenses and project deliverables from Outlook, without ever leaving Outlook?

Leveraging the familiar workflow of Outlook appointments and tasks, Team TimeSheet extends your Outlook as an ideal platform to work, plan on projects and tasks and allows for quick reporting of timesheets, expenses and billing, notes and other intrinsic data to a central database repository.

It simplifies timesheet creation and submission, tracking and approval within a system that automates routines and offers managers and administrators greater control throughout the time reporting process.

Because of the seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook, the functionality of Team TimeSheet add-in is quickly available and blends in seamlessly within Microsoft Outlook�, securing and enhancing the organization's existing investments on the infrastructure and technology already in place. The end result is reduced administration costs and little or no requirement of specialized skills and user training. Your team members are productive within minutes after installing and setting up the application in their Outlook.

Streamline timesheet collection and reporting process in the organization

Often when using traditional technique of reporting such as paper-based recording or feeding disparate IT system, critical data can fall into the cracks leading to information loss and introduce inconsistency in timesheets, expenses or billings.

Team TimeSheet provides a centrally administered control panel from which projects, tasks, timeline and automated notification emails are deployed to all the members across the organization through Outlook. When member works on project related tasks via Outlook, Team TimeSheet can automatically set the timeline (such as start, due or end date) of the Outlook item with those defined for the particular project.

As timesheets and project deliverables are collected from Outlook items in a standardized structure, there is no separate control process that is required for verifying data format and accuracy, thus saving time, efforts and resources.

Moreover, with the assurance that team members are reporting through a regulated Outlook that promotes accurate and consistent project time reporting, managers can leverage precise, up-to-date budget and billing reports for informed and effective business decisions.

Automatic emails notification to workers and managers

Automatic email notification and alerts are essential for keeping team members and managers informed with the progress of the project and tasks.

Team TimeSheet offers a whole lot of notification options for different reporting events such as when a report is submitted, updated or withdrawn, or when a manager is assigned to the project, or when the audited report is approved or declined etc. Furthermore, these notifications can be fully customized using templates.

Automatic emails and alerts are send out directly when a relevant event occurs and the whole exercise is transparent to the users.

Keep Project information fully up to date among members

One of the challenges of project management is deploying projects and their deliverables at the right time to the right people.

Team TimeSheet provides real-time transparency to all members to all the projects by keeping all vital project information fully up to date from the central database. On every Outlook startup, the Team TimeSheet client add-in can be set to synchronize the administrator defined projects, tasks, custom fields and other global settings. This is particularly useful to automatically retrieve any new projects/activities or settings that were added or changed by the administrator in due course.

When new projects are added, team members are notified by email automatically informing about the availability of the new projects and their deliverables. Optionally, expired projects can be made unavailable to all members automatically. If members try to submit their timesheets or deliverables on the expired projects, they can be warned and void the reporting.

Control how workers use Outlook for project deliverables

When collecting timesheets and project deliverables from workers, consistency and accuracy of the reported data satisfying the organizational standard is crucial.

Administrators can apply certain restrictions in the way the Team TimeSheet functions in Outlook such as,

	the ability to report project deliverables from the default calendar or task folders only, or from any folder.
	the ability to update existing published timesheet data.
	the ability to cancel and withdraw published timesheet.
	the ability to check for minimum work compliance.
	the ability to prevent reporting of timesheets for expired project.

Cost and billing calculation

Team TimeSheet provides managers and supervisors with real-time information on all project and workforce cost and billing, thereby aiding to execute and bill projects faster, make more informed decisions, and reduce project time tracking and expense reporting costs.

For calculating �Total Cost� for published timesheet and project deliverable, you can use the rate from one of the three �Project, Activity or Member. The total cost is calculated automatically when member reports timesheet to the database server. By default, the rate for project is used.

Color coding of Outlook items

Color coding an appointment or task item in Microsoft Outlook makes it easy to distinguish between various items on your calendar or task. By color coding your Outlook items, you can scan quickly and tell what types of appointments or tasks you have coming up. It also helps you to distinguish between various work projects at first glance.

From Team TimeSheet Manager tool, each project can be assigned a unique color code from the supported 25 colors in Outlook. If you enable this option, all the projects with color codes will be added to the �Master Category List� of your Outlook.

Once the projects with color codes are imported to your Outlook, when you tag an Outlook appointment or task item with a project, the corresponding color code would be applied automatically. As this color code is deployed centrally, all members working on projects would have same uniform color coding for the entire team.

In Outlook calendar, appointments tagged with different projects are color coded.

Likewise, in Outlook task folder, the items tagged with projects appears color coded in small rectangle

Offline Support

Supports offline mode with Outlook, allowing coding of time and expenses while away from the office

In leveraging the Microsoft Outlook platform for time and expense reporting, Team TimeSheet offers an ideal billing solution for distributed organizations - companies with multiple locations or employees who travel on a regular basis. Through their Outlook client, team members can work on the time sheets and other deliverables of the projects in Outlook in offline mode wherever they are located.

Once the timesheeets and project deliverables are ready, workers can submit time sheets when they are connected to the database server. Managers can relax knowing their employees are reporting through a regimented system that promotes accurate, consistent project time reporting, while executives can enjoy accurate, up-to-date budget and billing reports.

Audit Manager module to accept or reject reported deliverables

After a time sheet is submitted, it can be routed to the appropriate supervisor, eliminating delays in the approval process.

With Audit Manager, a time sheet can be approved with the click of a button or sent back to the particular member for revision. Additionally, instead of rejecting a report, supervisors and managers can also choose to make amendment to project, task or cost directly and can approve to prevent delays and meet deadlines. Notification emails on approval or rejection are automatically sent out to the concerned member.

Outlook views especially geared for effective project tracking

Outlook views are a wonderful tool to automatically sort, quickly find information and rapidly re-arrange Outlook items in any folder. Views can also be organized to group and filter items to make a particular feature of your information obvious at first glance.

Hence, it is no wonder that Team TimeSheet extends the power and flexibility of Outlook views to provide better understanding on information.

Team TimeSheet provides 13 special Outlook views to help you to work with your projects and deliverables in a simpler and sensible way. These views can be accessed through the �Views� drop down menu, available in the Team TimeSheet toolbar or ribbon. These views are common to both appointment and task items in your Outlook.

Table view of Outlook task folder, where all the reported items are arranged by unique �Report ID� field in ascending order. The Project and Activity fields are also available in the view.

Table view of Outlook calendar folder, where all the appointments are grouped by the reported state. Reported items will be group under �Yes� and unreported items under �No� or �None�. You can easily differentiate reported items from the unique ID value.

Table view of Calendar folder, where all the appointments are first grouped by project, and then sub-grouped by activity value, to generate a hierarchy tree representation and may prove useful to track and pinpoint a specific project or activity, or to get the number of items belonging to a specific project or activity, or simply just to have a listing that is better organized and summarized.

Reporting, Charting, and Data Analysis - multi-dimensional OLAP

With the integrated Online Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tool, managers can analyze submitted timesheets and other project deliverables in multidimensional view to extract critical information and intelligence that will enable better decision in business.

The integrated OLAP tool supports the ability to explore large complex data sets and allows displaying in grids, charts and graphs and support most common operations such as pivoting, drill down/slice and dice, filtering etc. It's simplistic point-and-click interface will ensure managers easily achieve the high-level views of information they require. Additionally, creating reports destined for different management levels is a simple task - and eliminates the manager dependence on IT personnel.

OLAP Grid with a pre-defined report view (Total Cost per Project per Member)

By unifying data analysis needs on a single platform, it provides an unparalleled array of reporting tools for web portals, intranet applications, websites, and other data-rich applications. It also provides more then 30 inbuilt reports geared towards providing out-of-the-box. Managers can also easily create and save their user-defined reports for future references. Any report, chart, grid or graph can be saved to PDF, images, web pages or printed.

OLAP Chart view with customized color code for the Work dimension.

Deploy as many custom fields

You can use deploy up to 10 custom fields for extracting additional project or activity related data when reporting from within the Outlook task or appointment item.

Four (4) of these fields are available as administrator defined drop down lists and the rest as statistic text or numeric and currency data. The titles of these custom fields can be edited to get the proper meaningful label that signifies the information the field store. For example, the first drop down field can be titled as �Client� and the administrator can fill up the names of all their clients for which projects are contracted for. Optionally, these custom fields can be made mandatory when reporting, so that without filled, the Outlook appointment or task item cannot be reported.