Tag: IT Tools

Manage Teamwork Like A Boss

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Often, the most difficult aspect of managing a team of employees is keeping on top of all the work. Making sure that nothing is being neglected while ensuring the load is properly distributed, is challenging. When you have a good system all worked out it is difficult. Without one, you’re toast.

There are literally thousands of work management systems on the market. How are you supposed to figure out which one you should be using? Like any project, start with a list of requirements. What do you need to track? Do you want notifications? Do you need access from mobile devices? Chief among your concerns should be user adoption. You can have the most expensive software in the world or the cheapest, both have the same value if your employees won’t use it.

The Outlook task list has been highly efficient people’s secret for years. I know because I am one. Drag an email to the task icon, toss in some categories, set a due date, and boom you’re organized. It’s one of the first things that I setup at a new gig. Being able to insert pics, videos, files, and notes, along with tracking dates, progress, and importance make it an invaluable tool. If you have an on-premises Exchange server, or Office 365 you can even sync your task list with your favorite mobile devices.

If only we could make this tool work for a whole team? Chances are, if your employer has an Exchange sever, they probably have SharePoint too. With a little know how, we can use these products together to manage our team’s work load. Outlook is a ubiquitous communications application, so adoption should not be an issue.

You’ll need a few things before you start creating the group task list.

  • You will need a SharePoint Team site and enough permissions to add an app to it or, you SharePoint site admin’s help.
  • A list of the categories your team will assign their work to. Project, Maintenance, Automation, Planning, Presentation, are some examples of categories.
  • A list of your team’s user names or a group that they all belong to.

Once you have all of your lists, the first thing is to add the Task App to your SharePoint team site. Logon with an account that has enough permissions to add an app. In the upper right of the browser will be a gear icon, click it and choose “Add an app”. Then click the icon for tasks and enter a name. This is the name your team will see in Outlook so choose carefully.

If you check the properties of your new task list (use the SharePoint ribbon), you should see that the column names match the field names of the Outlook task list. Look closely and you may notice an important one that is missing; SharePoint does not have a “categories” column. Most teams and managers will probably want to organize their work by categories; fear not, we just need to add the missing column.

Select the List tab in the ribbon and then click the list settings button.

About half way down the page select the Create Column link. Name the new column Categories, set the type to choice, and enter you desired categories into the choice list’s box. Copy the categories you’ve create when you are finished and send them to your team. They will need to create the same categories in their Outlook tasks list in order for the syncronization to work.

Now go back to the list settings page and under Permissions and Management, click on the “Permissions for this list” link. Make sure that each memeber of your team has at least “Edit” permissions. That’s it for setting up the SharePoint side. Email your team a list of the categories you created and a link to the task list.

Once they get their email, they will need to open Outlook and create matching categories. The process varies a little in all of the different versions of Outlook, but in general, you create a new task and click the drop down under the categories button in the ribbon. Followed by clicking All Categories.


Now each team member needs to link the SharePoint task list to their Outlook. If your organization blocks the creation of PST files you may need to talk to your IT department and ask them to adjust the GPO to allow Shareing PST files, this can be done through an ADMX template or through the registry.

Once you get the PST situation squared away, each memeber on your team will need to visit the task list in their browser and then use the “Connect to Outlook” button in the list’s ribbon. If this button is greyed out, there are several SharePoint settings that could be the cause. Ask your SharePoint administrator to give you a hand. If you are the SharePoint administrator, try reverting to classic Exchange integration (google it), or enabling data export for the site/list.

After you have everybody setup, you and your employees can manage team tasks from either the SharePoint site or from their Outlook tasks. All of the features will work as they always have including reminders. Be sure to “Assign” tasks to the appropriate team member so that you can tell who is working on what. You will find that sorting by category and the assigned to colums are very useful.

Add colums to your Outlook tasks to adjust the information you see, for example the afore mentioned “assigned to” column is not displayed in Outlook by default.

Both Outlook and SharePoint have numerous views, filters, and rule capabilites. You will undoubtadley be surprised with how effective a solution this setup can be. Especially given that it probably didn’t cost you anything to implemeant. If your team wants to sync their tasks with their mobile devices they can either run the SharePoint client for their particular device or use Activesync. Using activesync will require that they copy their team tasks to their personal mailbox task list.

Free Exchange Distribution List Memebers Reporting Tool

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As and Exchange Architect, I often get asked to report on who belongs to a particular distribution list. It is easy enough to open Outlook or ADUC and find the DL group and view the DL members. If your organization has Skype for Business you can also use it to view the membership of a DL. However, exporting information from these tools can be tricky.

PowerShell makes the export task easier if you know how to use it. A quick run of the get-distributiongroup cmdlet with a pipe to out-file, will get you what you want in a hurry. The problem is that we have few employees that are able to use PowerShell from the console but, there are requests to generate this type of report multiple times per day.

What we need is a graphical tool that anybody with enough AD permissions can use to get the data they need. Sure I could write something in C# but I don’t have the time to develop a full app. I know PowerShell already has everything I need to make the report because that’s what I use every time I get asked for it. What if I add a simple graphical interface to a PowerShell script so that my non PS coworkers can easily use it? In the words of Tim Allen; “It’s Tool Time”.

The script below uses the Grid View to display a list of all the Distribution Lists in your Exchange DL OU (you’ll need to input the correct OU path). The user then uses the grid view to sort, filter, or search for the DL they need data from. When they select it, an Excel Spreadsheet will pop up on the screen with the data.

Modern versions of Exchange Server store their DLs in AD as groups so there’s no need to install or load the Exchange PowerShell module to get the data we’re after. This also means we don’t need to give the people who use our tool any special permissions. We will be using the Active Directory module so you may need to install the RSAT depending on the version of Windows.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory
$groups = Get-ADGroup -Filter * -Searchbase "OU=Distribution Lists,OU=Exchange,DC=yourdomain,DC=com"|
Select @{n="Distribution Group"; e={$_.Name}}, DistinguishedName |Sort "Distribution Group"|
Out-GridView -Title "Select a Group, then click OK"  -PassThru
$accounts = Foreach ($group in $groups) {Get-ADGroupMember -Identity $group.DistinguishedName}
$report = Foreach ($account in $accounts) {Get-ADUser -Identity $account -Properties *|
select DisplayName, EmailAddress, TelephoneNumber, Department, City}
$report|Export-Csv -LiteralPath $env:userprofile\documents\dlgroupmemebers.csv -notypeinformation
Invoke-Item $env:userprofile\documents\dlgroupmemebers.csv

Make sure that you replace the Searchbase path with the Active Directory location for your Exchange distribution lists. After that, the instructions are easy. Save the file as a .ps1 and place it on the user’s hard drive.

The person using the tool will need to follow these directions:

  • Right click on the script  –> Open With -> Windows PowerShell

open with powershell

  • Search for or scroll through and click the group or groups (to pick more than one use CTRL + Click).
  • Click the OK button at the bottom of the list.

Grid_View_Select.png

  • A file named groupmembers.csv will be created in the user’s default documents folder and will automatically open with the application associated to that file type (usually Excel).

From the point of view of the person running it, this is a once use app. In reality, its a simple PowerShell script. It wouldn’t take very much effort to convert this report to HTML, use it to cross-referrence mailboxes and other accounts, find the memebers managers, or anything esle you may need. Enjoy.