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Hello and welcome to Method Integration User Tutorials.
My name is Errol and on this video series on the Outlook Plug-in,
we look at synchronizing your Outlook Calendar
with your Activities calendar.
Here I am in Outlook and let me just go over to the Calendar.
Switch it to month view. And the first thing you must do
is click Setup. When you click setup, the settings
for the Outlook plug-in pops up. Hopefully you have the
Method account settings already configured.
But if you don’t, check the first video for plug-in installation.
Now go over to the tab Appointment Details.
What will probably happen is a number of dialog boxes
will pop up stating things are not properly configured.
But that’s why we’re here, so just hit OK on all of them.
Sadly I can’t show you that because it only happens once.
So, just trust me on that.
Anyway, once you’re in appointment details, we have subject
and location format here. These two fields show up
in the Calendar view, so you want them to be useful information.
So I will set the subject format to Activity status.
And the Location format will be the Contact name.
For the body format, you can choose a number of things.
But for now I’m going to check the Contact name again,
the Contact phone number, and the Comments.
OK, we’re not done yet,
I want you to go over to the appointments tabs.
Here we can set which appointments we want synced
from our Activities Calendar. For Activity Types,
I don’t really want to sync email type activities.
So I’ll deselect those and hit OK.
Up here I’ll change this to five days in the past,
and keep thirty days in the future! OK, let’s save the sync settings.
And now I will synchronize. Ha! All done.
Well, I have to watch it go.
Outlook has found all these activities in Method, and...
I want them in my Outlook Calendar. If I didn’t want some of these,
I could have unchecked them here, but I want all of them.
So I will hit OK. Ta-dah! Here’s my Outlook Calendar,
now synched with my Method’s Activity Calendar.
See how it has the time, the status and contact name visible here?
That’s why we set that up in the settings.
Let’s open up this appointment, and here are all the activity details,
but down here, where it says Method begins?
We see the information we wanted to include in the body,
like the comments, the contact’s name, and phone number. Cool.
I’m going to close that. And now let’s create
a brand new appointment in the Outlook calendar.
Let me change the Calendar view to work week,
and I’ll select this time on Friday.
Up here we have this button: Add to Method.
I shall click that so that it automatically gets added to Method.
And this should be familiar to you
if you’ve seen my other videos on the Outlook plug-in.
I will search for Crenshaw, hit enter. And there he is.
Let’s double-click him. Keep the default of
‘Just add an activity for the contact’ and click Next.
And now details! Add in a comment, and then change the type
to Phone call Outgoing. I want to give him a call.
And then at the bottom, click Add to Method.
And it starts processing… Go Go Gadget Outlook!
And it’s done! And look it has pulled into the field, the information
from Method! Over here in Subject it says ‘In Progress’.
Over here in Location it has the Contact.
And the details are in the body. Nice!
Oh! Before we’re done, you may be wondering what this
‘Add Attendees’ is. Well! Let’s say you wish to add an Attendee.
I’ll click ‘Invite an Attendee.’ And next, I’ll click ‘Add Attendee’
and we shall find an email. Let’s type in Mei.
Hit enter to search. Double-click her and it pops her email address
into the ‘To:’ field down here and I’ll hit OK! And look!
She’s here in the To: field as well! I could send this off
so she would receive it. But, I don’t want attendees.
Having people listening in on phone calls is weird.
So I’ll just cancel this invitation. Save and close this appointment.
And we’re done! And there’s our appointment in the Outlook
Calendar, and this was also added in Method! Let’s go over there.
Here I am in the Activities list, I’ll change the filter view
to Activities in the future. And Allo Activity! There it is!
Now let me edit this so I can show you something else.
Because the phone call is not in progress,
I will change the status to ‘Not Started’. Silly me.
Let me just save that, and now let’s go back to Outlook.
And let me hit Synchronize. This pops up again.
I’m going to uncheck the Synchronization of deleted appointments
because that scares me. And before I hit synchronize,
I want you to see this checkbox over here:
‘Do not ask me next time.’ What does this mean?
If I check this, when I hit synchronize up at the top there,
It will sync the calendars and not open up this dialogue box.
I’m not going to check it though. So I will hit Synchronize here.
Things will process, and … hey. What’s this? How fortuitous!
There’s a conflict between Method Activity Calendar,
and the Outlook Calendar. In this case I can choose which one
has priority, but I will say that Method’s information is the correct one
and I’ll hit OK! Well, it’s the default one so I’ll just hit OK.
There we go. And now the appointment is the same
in Method as it is in Outlook.
Another button we have is ‘Send selected appointments to Method’.
If an appointment was created in Outlook
and you didn’t use the ‘Add to Method’ button.
then this will send the appointment to Method.
However I wouldn’t suggest you use this that often. Why?
Well let me just create a brand new appointment with super fast
timey-wimey speed. And now I will select it and hit
‘Send selected appointments to Method’.
Hit Synchronize. It takes the record I wish to sync
and I will hit OK. Processing… done! And now over to Method.
There’s the appointment I just made. But look! There’s no contact!
So now, I have to edit this and add in Bob Crenshaw myself.
And then back to Outlook to do a manual sync,
so that this appointment gets updated.
So, what did we learn? If you change the activity in Method,
you will have to manually sync that in Outlook for those changes
to take effect. But if you add an appointment using the
‘Add to Method’ button in Outlook, then that appointment
gets automatically added to Method as an activity. Phew!
One last thing. Never delete anything in the Outlook calendar,
unless you’re really really really really sure.
Why? Because when you delete anything in the Outlook calendar,
it’s permanent. Watch! Let me delete this in the Outlook calendar...
and it’s gone. I haven’t done a sync yet, so if I go over to Method,
it’s still there. Let’s say I didn’t want to delete it.
Let’s say I edited it and changed the description to
‘No! Don’t delete me!” or something to that effect.
Now I will save this and now let’s go back to the Outlook Calendar!
If I hit sync, and then hit Synchronize again… LOOK!
Nothing happened. It doesn’t let us undelete.
If you want to undelete that, you’d have to use whatever
process Outlook has for undeleting things.
This took me a long time for me to figure out because
my Google skills failed. But hah! It’s back!
So let that be a lesson folks: deletion is scary and bad.
Be very sure before you do that. And we’re done!
That’s the Outlook plug-in for the calendar!
If you have any questions you can check out the documentation
in our Help Center and you can also leave a comment
in YouTube or you can tweet us: @MethodCRM.
Thanks for watching and have a great day! Bye bye!