Managing your time is relatively easy: you write down some tasks, note down some appointments, and if you are super-organised, you even link all this information with some of your contacts to keep track of what is related to whom.
However, managing all your information is much more difficult. Many of us receive up to 100 non-spam emails a day, many of which require some kind of action. Then there are the attachments that come with them, as well as other documents passed over the network that either require attention immediately or at a specified time in the future. Unless you are very organised with your filing, it is easy for documents or emails to become lost or - even worse - accidentally deleted.
In this Masterclass, we will show you how to use the new Project Center feature in Microsoft's Entourage 2004 to get a grip on the information overload you are likely to be experiencing, using it to manage the information you get through email, as well as your documents. Project Center extends Entourage into basic project management with some particularly smart features, but most of all it makes it much easier to group together your time management information - contacts, activities, tasks and so on - with files and folders in a coherent and easy-to-understand manner.
The concept of using locations as an adjunct to tasks comes from David Allen's book, Getting Things Done (ISBN 0-7499-2264-8, Piatkus Books), which is an excellent view of time, information and project management from a modern, email-centric perspective. Although not directly connected to Project Center, the book can spark off some interesting ideas on how to use it better.
What is missing from Project Center?As with most new features, Project Center has some fairly large holes in it, which we are hoping Microsoft will address in a future version. The most obvious is in its features for sharing projects, which are very rudimentary. For example, there is no direct way from within Entourage to protect any project information by password-protecting a file. There is also no way to lock elements of a project, so that, for example, no one except the project administrator can change the deadline for it. Neither can you limit what is shared, so that particular elements are only shared with particular people.
Furthermore, despite its name, Project Center lacks any kind of serious project management tools. There is no way to link the deadlines of tasks together, for example, so you can create tasks that rely on other tasks being completed before they can be started. And, despite being one of the most common complaints about the tasks feature in Entourage, there is no way to create outlines of tasks, which would help in working out the steps required to complete a project.
While we are not expecting Project Center to mutate into Microsoft Project for Mac, we would certainly expect some of these features to make their way into a future version of the product. The most useful feature of all would be: real cross-platform compatibility between Project Center and Outlook for Windows. Being able to share projects between Mac and Windows would give a big boost to the potential for Macs being accepted in the corporate arena, as well as adding some useful features to Outlook.
Author: Ian Betteridge
Managing information with Project Center