Diaries have always come in handy. A colleague calls up to schedule a meeting, or a customer an appointment, a journalist an interview, a client a negotiation, and are met with, 'Well, just come around when you can, and if I'm in the building, I'll see if I can pop up to the office and with a bit of luck our paths might cross'. Wouldn't work, would it?

But this should hardly come as a surprise - we're all used to the idea of keeping a diary. But where do you keep it? It may seem that the only important aspect of your diary is the words you put into it, but the tools you use can make a major difference too. There's a fair chance that you'll be using pen and paper, although electronic equivalents (Personal Information Managers, or PIMs), are ever more widespread - indeed, most mobile phones come with some manner of calendar. Microsoft Outlook, used by millions of businesses for email, also offers the means to compile your diary. However, it also offers a good deal more, not just keeping the diary but making the best possible use of it.

Working better, together

Paul, James, Claire and Mike are all Government health and safety inspectors, all working for departmental head Charlotte. Charlotte needs to coordinate the department's hectic schedules: for her inspectors travelling all over the country, for her scientists analysing samples, and indeed for herself, balancing her work with the various sections of her department with her obligations to central Government and occasional public relations duties. Outlook's calendar tools help to make sure that managing these essential and frequently conflicting demands takes up as little of her valuable time as possible.

To start with, Charlotte enters all her appointments and duties into the calendar. Nothing complicated about this - click on a date, enter the details, highlight them as she chooses - and she can see at a glance everywhere she needs to be and everything she needs to do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Her inspectors do the same. As they're all managing their diaries with Outlook, they can share them automatically.

For Charlotte, this means that she can see immediately where all of her inspectors will be at any given time, and how long they'll be there for; any inspections, however urgently, can be scheduled easily and immediately in the knowledge of who'll be available.

Her colleagues will benefit, too - for instance, if Claire needs to discuss a case with Charlotte, she can see for herself when her boss is likely to be available; or if James and Mike need to work together on a large piece of work, they can be confident of finding the time most suited to both of them.

Accessible everywhere

James, Claire, Mike and Paul don't spend much of their working week in the office - they're mostly to be found inspecting locations scattered all over the country. Similarly, Charlotte can't always rely on being sat at her own desk when she needs to access the department's diaries.

Fortunately, this doesn't need to hold any of them up. The department uses Microsoft Exchange Server in tandem with Outlook to make those calendars (and all other Outlook services, such as email, instant messaging, voicemail and to-do lists) available everywhere. All Charlotte and her inspectors then need to access their shared diaries is an ordinary web browser on any computer, which can be used to log in directly and securely to their own Outlook account and files. And with the Outlook Mobile App, all this information can even be accessed from a smartphone, making sure that everyone is fully informed wherever they are.

For a department whose duties are so spread out, accessing the shared diaries from anywhere is not just a bonus, but essential.

No large organisation can expect to succeed without cooperation between its staff and coordination of their work. Microsoft Outlook can make working together effectively that much easier, and it's certainly worth considering a short Outlook training course to get to grips with all the tools that the software offers. And however many people you have working together, however widely distributed they may be, Outlook provides the ideal means to push forward as one.