How can I manage a large group of people in Outlook?

Leadership Issues

Team leaders nowadays face challenges that increase with larger and larger teams to overview and organize:

• How can I organize and maintain groups in my Outlook calendar?
• Is there a better way to overview colleagues in different time zones?
• Can I switch more easily between views of days, several days or weeks?

Maintaing an overview over various teams, finding any group or project you need without wasting time to search for minutes, finding a solution that integrates in pre-existing systems. Is it even possible to solve performance and flexibility challenges in one fell swoop?

Outlook and its Workarounds

If you need to be able to go through a group of 50, 100 or even more people, Outlook will quickly prove to be nearing its limits. If you need to create several stacks of groups of 10-20 just to go through your teams, or use external solutions to know where any given team member is, what they’re up to, when their next appointments are, you’ll likely end up with an Excel spreadsheet you need to update constantly or similar solutions. All of this, of course, at the cost of time – either because you are manually sorting through things or because the sheer amount of data simply needs time to load. A company that had these exact problems is the PLANAT GmbH.

PLANAT’s Approach to the Challenge

PLANAT GmbH has been developing and implementing ERP/PPS standard software since 1981, specializing in logistics, production planning, production controlling and operational applications. As such, they have high expectations of their software.