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“I recommend KeyStone's LMS System to all of my clients; it provides outstanding out of the box trainings that minimize IT/HRs trainings, and trainings can seamlessly be captured and published on demand. An easy user interface ensure adoptions from your business teams- allowing for a means knowledge capture and collaboration.”

You need Project....but should you get Standard or Professional?

You have realized you need Project 2010, but now you have to decide if you need the Professional or Standard version. I hope these tips help you in your purchasing decision because it is important you invest in the right version for various reasons.  

If you are going to be using a project server solution, you need to have Project Professional because it has all the collaboration and collection tools that enable you to save plans in the Project Server. If you are not setting up Project Server, you don’t necessarily need Project Professional, but there are several key features you should be aware of.

In KeyStone’s Project 2010 course, Robert Happy, PMP, pointed out some great practices for PMs in any industry, and I wanted to share a couple of the gems I gleaned from the course in terms of which version of the program to purchase. Here are the three items to consider if you are deciding which investment is better for you:

1. Team Planner View
This view in Professional allows you to manage the right mix of people and workloads in a visual and intuitive manner. It lets you click and drag tasks to resources for easy assignments and resource management.

2. SharePoint Synchronization
This feature in Professional enables you to synchronize your tasks to SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 directly from Project and receive updates from team members from SharePoint back into Project.  

3. Inactivate Tool
This tool in Professional lets you render a task inactive without deleting it from the plan. You can conduct what-if analyses or see the impact on the timeline, resource, or cost if a task or group of tasks were no longer included, with the ability to turn them back on at any time

Again, if you plan on connecting to Project Server, you will need Project Professional for all collaboration tools and functionality. So keep these items in mind as you make your decision on which way to go.

I hope these tips were helpful.  For more information on our Project 2010 course and other Project tips, click here.

What do you have to say about our Project 2010 course?

At KeyStone Learning Systems, we always like to have customer feedback on our courses so we know our admins and their learners are offering and taking the courses they need in order to learn software effectively.

We recently asked a few of our customers what they thought of the Project 2010 training course, and this is what they said:                        

“I am about 60% through the Project Server course and really enjoy the structure and content.  The organization of opening a topic with an overview slide, jumping out to examples, and the 1 page summaries work very well for me.” -Jay Hauglid, senior project manager at Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community

“I have been using KeyStone Learning products since the late 90’s and they have always been top notch.   These courses are no exception.” -Jason Blinn, senior project manager at Fox Entertainment Group

We appreciate this feedback and are encouraged to hear the course is helping our customers. Our Project 2010 course includes videos, articles, quizzes and exercises, appealing to all types of learners and encourages learning and accountability.

For more information on our Project 2010 course click here.  To send us your own testimonial or feedback, email me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Great Ways to Get & Stay Organized in Outlook 2010 (Part 2)

Okay, so now that you have been applying the steps I mentioned in my first post, I am excited to share four additional steps that will help you save time in Outlook 2010. If you did not read the first post, the below steps will still help you, but feel free to read the first post here. Below you will see steps 4-7. Enjoy, and become more efficient in Outlook 2010.

4. Do a Quick Search: If, after applying categories, creating Rules and using Quick Steps you still have trouble finding Outlook 2010 items, remember to use the Quick Search bar at the top of each view. It searches as you type. You can enter a sender’s name or any term that might be in the items. If it’s there, Outlook’s Quick Search will find it. And, if just typing a word or phrase doesn’t narrow your search enough, just by clicking inside the Quick Search box grants you access to a Search contextual tab with all sorts of Search criteria fields you can use.

5. Activate Favorites in the Task Pane: It took me a while to realize this was available, but  since I did, I’ll never look at the Navigation Pane the same way again. If you don’t currently see “Favorites” at the top of the Navigation Pane’s folder list, display the ribbon’s View tab. Then, from the Navigation Pane option, enable “Favorites.” Now, for any folder you view more often then others, right-click it and choose “Add to Favorites.” Now, you can switch between different folders way faster because you’re not searching through all of your folders just to get to the ones you need most often

6. Open your calendar (or other favorite view) in a separate window to stop switching back and forth: Make multi-tasking easier by right-clicking your calendar (or other view) in the Navigation Pane and choosing “Open in New Window” from the resulting context menu. Now, you can tile your Outlook windows side-by-side or be able to switch to another view without losing your place in your current view. Brilliant!

7. Close Outlook! I know this sounds counter-intuitive to productivity, but how many times do you get sidetracked from a task because that little message flashes on the lower-right corner of your screen. I know…it’s crazy. One of the best ways to get your productivity back is to close Outlook from time-to-time, just while you’re working on another project. Between projects, you can open Outlook again, check out the new arrivals and see what you have coming up. But, really, does it need to be open 24/7?
 

For more information on KeyStone's Outlook 2010 training course click here. To read part 1 to this post click here.

Great Ways to Get & Stay Organized in Outlook 2010 (Part 1)

Do you ever have the feeling that you spend way too much time in Outlook? If you’re not checking the most recent email that just arrived, you’re searching for one you know you received and it’s somewhere in the 1,478 messages currently stacked up neatly in your Inbox.

It’s overwhelming and, worse than that, it sucks energy and time from your day. But, there are some Outlook 2010 features you can take advantage of to help increase your productivity so you can actually get out of Outlook 2010, allowing you to move along to another program.

1. Start actively using Color Categories: These look innocuous at first, but there’s a great deal of power in categorizing your Outlook items by color. How you categorize is totally dependent on how you work. Maybe you decide to categorize by project, by client, or by urgency. It doesn’t matter so long as you to start to assign categories to email, notes, tasks and appointments. You’ll find available categories and the ability to customize them by right-clicking an Outlook 2010 item. Click “Categorize” from that context-menu and the rest is fairly intuitive. After a short time, you’ll begin to see the colors taking shape in Outlook 2010 and you’ll know what an items pertains to solely by the assigned color.

2. Use Rules to Organize Incoming Messages: I think many of us receive a lot of messages each day that we don’t necessarily need to act upon but that we likely just need to keep a copy of. There are also those messages we receive because we’ve subscribed to a mailing list or regular newsletter. Those non-urgent messages quickly clutter an Inbox. To move them out so you can read them at a later time when you don’t have pressing issues looming, use Rules. Found on the Ribbon’s Home tab while looking at your Inbox, Rules are like little custom macros you create to allow Outlook 2010 to automatically take an action on incoming or outgoing messages based on criteria you set.

3. Take Advantage of Quick Steps: If you don’t quite trust Rules, but you do take similar steps frequently (like forwarding messages to a specific person or group), use Quick Steps instead. When you create a Quick Step (on the Ribbon’s home tab while looking at your Inbox), you define a set of actions you want Outlook 2010 to take whenever the Quick Step label is clicked. This way, you still have a pseudo Rule defined, but you control when it is applied.

Start applying these tips, and I will be sharing more in my next blog post. For more information on our Outlook 2012 course click here.