Tools to Manage Tasks in Office 365
Catherine Sanders Reach demonstrates task management across Microsoft 365 tools for legal professionals. She covers flagging emails in Outlook, syncing tasks with OneNote, using Planner's Kanban boards in Teams, and aggregating everything in To Do. She also shows SharePoint issue tracking with Power Automate automation, plus specialized legal tools like Law Toolbox and Matter365.
Chapters
Okay, so welcome everyone to the North Carolina Bar Association Center for Practice Management. And today we are going to do a program on Tools to Manage Tasks in Office 365. I am recording this and I will send you all the link to the video once it's produced, and you can share it with anybody on your team who wasn't able to make it today. So what we're going to do is go through different tools in Office 365 that you can use to manage tasks, from things that you may have already been aware of in tools like Outlook all the way up to SharePoint. And so I'm kind of going from simplest to most complex. But one thing that I want to note is that as of April 21st, Office 365 is becoming Microsoft 365. So they are rebranding after we all got used to saying Office 365. They are rebranding the tool and calling it Microsoft 365 to make it easier for us is what they explained. There's two reasons for the rebrand. One, they've kind of simplified the names of the different plans. Most people were using Office 365 Business Premium. That's the product that I'm going to be showing you today. So if you have something other than Business Premium, you may have E3 or E3 Government. All the stuff that I'm going to talk about is in those plans. If you have Business Essentials or Business, some of the things that I show you, you may not have, but hopefully you will have most of this stuff, if not all of it. So again, they're trying to, in quotes, simplify how do you figure out which plan you've got. And the other thing is they wanted to express that when it was called Office 365, you thought that's Microsoft Office— Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And the reality is that Microsoft 365 is a better way to describe that this is a product that has far more. And I actually have a little video I'll send you that gives you a sense of all the things you get with this product because it's well more than just the Office suite. It's, you'll see, SharePoint, Teams, Forms, all sorts of things. So I will, I will put together a bunch of supplemental resources in the materials I'm going to send you so you can take a look at those. So first thing we're going to do is go through Microsoft Outlook and what you have in Outlook. And just to kind of frame this whole discussion, the basic premise that I'm going to go through when you look at managing tasks in any of the, the Microsoft 365 products is that you've got to-dos. And to-dos, I tend to describe as more random tasks. Somebody emails you and asks you to do something. It's not necessarily part of a matter. It may be professional development, or it may be meeting up with someone for a coffee or a virtual coffee. So those are to-dos. And then tasks are a little bit more workflow-oriented. Possibly something you assign to someone else. Then projects are more fully matter management, and so the projects would have multiple steps, multiple assignments, deadlines, things like that. And then one more thing that we're going to look at is issues, and issues are a little bit more urgent. That's— I'm going to show you that in SharePoint, and this is kind of along the lines of I need to respond to somebody. Somebody called and they wanted a copy copy of their will. That's kind of a— it's a to-do, but it's a little bit more action-oriented because it's a task that needs— it's basically, I've kind of framed it as looking at your external clients, whether you're in a government office and your external clients are other people within your office, or if you're in private practice, your clients— everybody has somebody they're responsible to in terms of responding, and so I've kind of framed it like that, but I'll, I'll show you as we move along. So first thing we're going to do is look at all the different ways that you can create tasks in Outlook. So I'm going to drag my Outlook over into the screen here so you can see it. And so this is Outlook for a Microsoft 365 or Office 365. It's the installed application. There is a web version. I tend to not use it. I don't like the interface. I'm old and I'm set in my ways and I understand how Outlook works and have for a long time. So that's what I'm gonna demonstrate in today. So the first thing to be aware of is, and you're probably all already aware of it, but you may not know the full strength of it, is the ability to flag an email for follow-up. And so, say I've got an email from my boss and he's asking me to do something. And I can just go over here and click this flag, and the default setting for flagging for follow-up is that it's due today. Well, this may not be due today, so what I wanna do is I right-click Then you can see that you can change the flags. I can say it's due tomorrow or this week, or if I click on Custom, then it's going to give me the option to set a start date. Say I'm going to be reviewing this product. Let's say we're going to make the due date on the 20th. I can set a reminder and have that reminder pop up before the due date say on the, if I'm gonna start it on the 17th, I'll remind myself that I need to start doing this on the 17th and click OK. So now I've added a good bit of intelligence just to that flag. So I flagged that for follow-up. I actually created a custom search folder, which you can do by going all the way down in your folders and you go to Search Folders, and if you right-click on Search Folders and say New Search Folder, you can create something that basically is running a search for all different types of things, and one of them automatically is flagged for follow-up. So I'd already created that folder, I dragged it up into my Favorites. Now if I click on Follow-up, anything that I flagged for follow-up no matter what folder it's in, because as you can see, these are in my inbox, these are in specific folders because I moved them out of my inbox, but that search folder gives you the ability to see everything you flagged for follow-up in one place. So I'm really a big fan of the search folders. So the other thing that Outlook has is actual tasks. And so if you go down to— and it just depends on how you have your screen set up— to task here. I'm going to click on task, and you'll be able to sort by different things. So I'm gonna sort by start date, and you'll see that there's a lot of things that are flagged for follow-up, a lot of things that I am supposed to be doing, many of which I created yesterday just for you., and so I'll reset the start date. So this is this week. This is the one that I just flagged. So when I flag an email for follow-up in my inbox, it also appears in my to-do list. And so that's really convenient because I can also get a different view. The other nice thing is as I go through these, again, it shows me which folder that email is in, and it also gives me context. So if I click on this, I can see here's the two attachments associated with that email. Here is the email itself. I can double-click on it and go back into Outlook and look at it more fully, but it's, it's contextualizing this whole thing and taking that email and turning it into an actionable task because I've added deadlines and dates and things of that nature. Now, the other thing, the other portion of this is task, and these are different from your to-dos that are pulled over from your flagged emails. And you can create tasks separate from emails. I'm also gonna show you how to create these in OneNote. And so some of these are being inherited from a OneNote folder that I have. But if you wanna create a new task, and this is where it gets fun 'cause you can start assigning things to people. So I'm gonna click on New Task, and it'll open a dialog box, and I'm gonna put the subject is— okay, so I've given myself a task, and even spellcheck works here. Going to create a start date. We're going to say we'll do it on the 20th. The due date is going to be the 24th. You can change the priority. I can change the status. This is one of the things that I've never quite loved about the task in Outlook, but you have this status. Then say I want to add a reminder. So we want to set the reminder before the due date. So if I haven't gotten around to noticing this, I'm going to remind myself on the 22nd to do it. And this is actually going to pop up a little reminder on my screen no matter where I am in Outlook. It'll, it'll pop it up just like a calendar event. Now if I want to assign this to someone, then I go up into here and I click on Assign. I have warned my colleagues that I'm using Ahead of Time. That I'm going to be assigning them tasks. Let's delete them. So you'll note there's two boxes that show up here. So I'm assigning this task to Cheyenne. It'll still be in my task, but I can also check up with her. She's got all this information about start dates and due dates and priorities and all that stuff. And then it's going to keep this copy of the task in my task list complete and send me a status report when the task is complete. So very, very cool stuff. So I'm gonna send that along to Cheyenne. So when I send this, I'm not the owner of the task anymore, but it'll still be in my task list, and I'll get notification when she does it. So there you can see it's added to my tasks, and it's been assigned to Cheyenne, and when she is completed with it she will let me know. Now, there's a couple of views that you can use here. I tend to stay in this view, but you can show what's due in the next 7 days. You can view just what's overdue. You can view anything that's assigned to someone else. So don't forget that you have these nice kind of views that you can use. Now one thing I want to show you is— I'm going to show you how to create tasks in OneNote. If you're a OneNote fan, there's a way to kind of manage tasks by leveraging Outlook's task feature from OneNote. So if I've got a task that was created, as you can see, it's, you know, a lot of these are independent from my— they're in my task folder, but they're independent from my email. So where do they come from? It may be that you created it here, but it may be that you created it in OneNote. And so if you go into any one of these down here and click on it, you can see that this is actually coming from OneNote. And if I click on it and I click on my OneNote button, it actually takes me into that OneNote notebook where this task is coming from. So if I needed to see more context about this, if I had other tabs, if I had other information in OneNote about this task, I can— it'll open it up in OneNote, which I think is super convenient. One more thing that I want to show you about tasks in Outlook is I can drag and drop a task from my email. So instead of flagging it, I can just drag it and turn this into a task. So I can drag this over into task. It takes all of the information in the email body and puts it in there. If there were attachments, the attachments would come through. And again, I can add the start date, the due date, the reminders, set priorities. I can assign this to someone else just by dragging and dropping that email. So a lot of times people, you know, their inbox tends to be a lot of their action lists, but email doesn't cause you to react. It doesn't, you know, it's like, oh man, I forgot to do that. So by turning your emails into actionable tasks, I think is a better way of dealing with task management just out of Outlook. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit and I'm going to go into OneNote. And OneNote is a really powerful product that has come out, you know, has been on the market with the Office suite. As a separate application or now part of Office 365. There is an app, there's a web version, and then there is the installed software. I tend, again, to like the installed software because it has more bells and whistles than anything else. If you haven't used OneNote before, it's a very powerful product and there's a whole lot you can do with it. Today it's a little outside of the scope of what we're going to do. I'm just going to look at task management, from within a OneNote notebook. So I am going to open OneNote. And this is OneNote, and I have, um, multiple notebooks in here, which you can look at by going here. And so we're gonna look at the Sally and Bob Jones Estate notebook. And when you create a new notebook, you can create it for a matter or a project. You can create multiple tabs. You can actually turn these into templates and reuse them. But what I've done is I've created a task list for the will preparation. So if we're dealing with the whole estate, we've got a number of different things to do, but this is the task list for will preparation. And so I've just gone in and typed in a, you know, a list of things. Right now, the way this is set up, it's not so actionable. It's just a list. And so what I want to do is turn this into tasks. One thing to note, um, when I create this notebook, if I go to the File menu and go to— here's my different notebooks. I'm going to invite people to this notebook, and I am just going to type in and Amy, and I'm going to share this with them, and it sends them a little email that says you have access to this notebook now. So we'll go back. Now we can all see this notebook and be more actionable with it. So like I said, I've created this kind of list of things that need to be done for the will preparation for the Jones matter. I've put the, the matter number in here, and so let's turn this into a checklist. So I just select all of these and then I click on the To Do tag, and what that does is it simply gives it a checkbox. I still haven't integrated this as a task management tool though. So the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go and I'm gonna click next to this item and I'm gonna add it to Outlook Tasks. And so I'm going to put in same thing you would do with the flags in email. We're gonna say I wanna do this this week and wanna do this next week and We'll say that we, you know, and so on and so forth. So now once that's been done, I can assign the task and all of that. So we've got this checklist that we set up, and if I go back into Outlook, and I look at my task, then you can see that in my task, all those things I put in that Outlook or that OneNote notebook are showing up in my task. And I can go through and edit them as necessary. I can change some of the deadline dates and things like that. I can assign it to someone. So just open it up And I can assign the task, I can edit some of this stuff, and again give it a little bit more detail, give it more action. And if I want to go back into the OneNote notebook, I can go back directly from there. So that's kind of— it's a little clunky, but that's how you can take a OneNote notebook with lists of things to do and turn them into actionable tasks that show up in your task in Outlook. So the next thing I want to do is show you Planner. Now this is getting into more of a project management application versus just kind of individual task management. So Planner is a product that you get with Office 365, and it is— the orientation is a project management kind of process called Kanban. And Kanban is— it actually came out of Toyota, and they literally would have sticky notes up on a board that they would move from place to place as they, they finished doing the task. So we'll look at that a little bit. So what I'm going to do is open Planner. And Planner, there, I think there is a desktop app. I've never used it. I've always used it in the web and it's, it's pretty elegant in the web. So that works for me. And so one of the things I'll show you about Planner is it's inheriting plans from, I can either create a plan in Planner or I can create a plan in Teams, but I'm just going to show you Planner first to give you the, the basic layout of what Planner does. And so this is all the different project plans I'm included in. If I wanted to look at my tasks, these are not tasks from Outlook. These are tasks from project plans that I'm on. So I can see kind of at a glance what's not started, what should be in progress, what I've completed. And if I look at that view, I can look at the different project plans. So we're going to create a new plan and we're going to give it a name. And then I'm going to, um, I can add it to an existing group or I'm gonna create a new plan in this case. Public and private, what this means in the Microsoft 365 world is public is anybody within your organization, anybody on your Office account, not public to the rest of the world. So that means that anybody in your firm or your organization can see this plan. But I tend to stick with private, just the people that I add to it. And then you can give it a group description. And then I'll create the plan. Next thing it's going to do is it's going to ask me who do I want to add to it. So I'm gonna go to members. I'm a member by default. I'm gonna add Cheyenne and Amy and Jeremy. So now you can see these are all the people who are— you can assign things to in this plan. And then the way that this works is the Kanban methodology is creates buckets. And so you can create— the typical bucket is To Do, Doing, and Done, but you may— you could do anything you want. So in this case, I'm going to rename this, and we're going to call this the Intake. And then we're going to add a new bucket, and we're going to call this Conflicts Check. And then we're going to create a new one called Done. So I like the methodology within, um, the Kanban of moving things from Current Task to I'm Done. So I can see the things I'm done. I love checking things off my list. So that's why— you don't have to create that, um, but it is a nice way to kind of keep up with what's, what's happened. So within this, I'm going to create a task in the conflicts check. So the first is, um, and then I can set a due date and I can assign it. And when you click on assign, these are the people that you've added to this plan. So you don't have to guess, and we're gonna assign it to Cheyenne. So I'm gonna click Add Task, and there it is. Now, what's interesting is if you click on this again, this particular task, I can add a lot of intelligence about it. So it's in this bucket. I can change the progress, and since I've assigned this to Cheyenne, she can do this. I can say what priority it is. Since I said this was due on the 16th, we'll have her start it on today, but you don't have to put a start date as long as you have a due date. Then you can add notes. Now here's an interesting thing. Let's add a checklist. And so if we have a checklist and the gather party names, So a lot of the times, um, a task actually has a whole lot of subtasks. That have to be done in order to actually complete the task. So in this case, gathering the party names may require several steps, so you can add that as a checklist into this. If you had a document, like the email that someone sent you, you can add that. You can add more comments to this, and one of the things I always suggest is click on the Show on Card And then once I close this, I said show on card, there we go. Now that sub, that sublist also shows up, and so you can see that this task has subtasks in it, and then as Cheyenne completes these, she can click off the subtasks as well. So Once you click on it, it disappears, and then click on Done. Show this, and just to make me feel good about myself, I'm going to drag it over into the Done column. So that's— this can be as complex as you want it to be. One thing that I will tell you is it's The best way to use this is to kind of create a predetermined workflow for— you could do things like, you know, the conflicts check workflow, or you could do the intake workflow, and create those and then copy the task into a new plan so that you're not having to retype all this stuff. So you can— it's— this is kind of, in quote, a lightweight project management tool. There are certainly far more complex and costly project management tools on the market that you can use that let you create all sorts of templates and other things, but for your purposes this may work pretty well. It's simple, it's pretty easy, and I will show you the added benefit of using it when we look at To Do. So The other thing, and I'll go back to one of my existing projects, is that you can look at this in the board view. You can also look at it in a charts view, and the charts view is a nice at-a-glance to show you what hasn't been started, what's in progress, what's late by the due dates, which is why it's so important anytime you do a task to put a due date so you can see what's late. Also make them actionable.— and then so you can see by the buckets and by priority if you had added a priority to it. And then you never want to see a task that's unassigned. It needs to be assigned to you or someone else, otherwise nobody knows that they're supposed to do it. So I like that. And then you can also get a schedule where you can see when there are tasks by calendar view. Basically. And so I think that's also nice. So go back into that workers' comp. There's by date, gather party names. I'll go back to my board. So again, you know, this stuff is built into your Office 365, so you can play around with it and see what makes sense to you. But it's simple but yet powerful. And so that is Planner. The way you can get to Planner, by the way, is the easiest thing I think to do to get to any of your, any of the Office applications that are not readily apparent in terms of downloaded software that lives on your desktop. You may never have used Planner before. Go to office.com, log in with your account, and then you can see all the apps whoops, that you have available to you. So there's, again, that's why they're rebranding it to Microsoft instead of Office because there's a whole lot of other things in here. And you can see the things that you use a lot like Excel or Word or Outlook or PowerPoint, but then you've got, you know, Planner. So I've never even downloaded Planner. It seems to work pretty well on the web. And so I can just go and double-click on it here. So if you're ever like, where is all this stuff? Just go to office.com and log in, and then you'll see everything. Okay, the next thing I'm going to show you is Microsoft Teams. So Teams is probably one of the most popular products that comes with the Microsoft 365 suite. One reason it's gotten so popular so quickly recently is because it has built-in audio and video conferencing. And so for your team, if you don't want to set up Zoom meetings, you can just have it— you can send somebody a message in Teams and say, hey, are you available? And then, you know, click the little phone icon and call them. So that's— I've done lots of Teams meetings just with our internal staff. So Teams creates workspaces, and I'm gonna show you kind of what this looks like. So I actually have the Teams installed, so I have the software, but I also have it on my phone and I can access it through the web. But there's a lot more to Teams than what I'm gonna show you today. But I wanna show you just a couple of things. So the way it works is you create a team and then you add people to it, and then you can add what they call channels. So if I add a channel, um, And I can make it private only. Now, you cannot change this, unfortunately. Once you create the channel, you can't— you'd have to delete it to change availability. So think hard and long whether that you want to have this available to everyone in a team or just specific people within the team. And I'm going to click Add, and now I have this little channel. And if I go back into the general one, first you have the ability to post. So I can start a new conversation with Eric or Jeremy or someone else in my team. I removed everybody, but I can have little chats with people. I can upload files. And you can either create a new file or folder right from in here, or you can upload them from your OneDrive or SharePoint. This is what they call a wiki. I oddly love the wiki stuff. I renamed it Planning Notes, but basically it's just kind of a whiteboard. Sometimes you just want to take notes. You don't want to turn it into a Word document. That's not a great note-taking tool. So for this particular team on this particular channel, I can have planning notes. And then I have projects. And if you saw a little green thing flash up, this is actually pulling from Planner. So I can incorporate Planner plans into a team. And I think that's where Teams becomes really powerful. So I'm gonna show you how to create a new team and add a plan to it. So I'm gonna go down here and create, join, or create a team. Gonna create a team. Gonna build one from scratch. It's going to be private, so only the people I invite. And again, that's only, it's private or public to your organization, not to everybody. And so what I'm gonna call this one is So we're gonna help this company get set up, and then I'm going to add my team to this. Now, one thing I can do is I can make them the owner. I will no longer be the owner, so I probably don't want to do this. And click Close. But if you had somebody who kind of does— if you had someone on your team who's setting these things up, they didn't want to be the owner, they're just setting up the channels and the teams for you, you could have somebody, you know, add the people and then they could switch over and make someone else the owner of it. We'll click Close. And so it starts out, you've got Post. And so if I start a new conversation, I can mention @Jeremy or Cheyenne, so it kind of knows who's in here. And she will get that. All of this communication is kept within this particular team. Which is great because all the communication around a particular project or matter is going to be kept in one place. Then you've got the files like I showed you with the other one, and same thing, I can add new files, I can drag and drop folders. The wiki, again, I renamed. You can rename these things whatever you want to. So if I right-click on it, I can rename this to Planning Notes. Now it's called Planning Notes, and basically you can add, um, and then and so on and so forth. When you click this little button here, it adds a new section, and then you can add new pages. So you can get pretty granular even with just the kind of wiki notes. But what I wanted to show you in terms of kind of the task management is that you can add Planner to Teams. The reason I think that's really powerful is because it gives you more context. So Planner is just that Project Plan. With this, you've got associated files, you've got kind of white paper notes, you've got the communication around it. So if I click on this button here, you can see all the different things I can add as tabs. So I'm going to click Planner, and you can either create a new plan or use one that you've already created. I'm going to create a new one. Also, the fact that I created this, if I go over into post, everybody on my team will be aware that I've added this. So, and also you can message people kind of directly. By mousing over their name and sending them a direct chat. Otherwise, everything that's communicated will be shared with everybody. So go back into Planner. And so in this case, we're going to have different buckets. So I'm going to call this one— and then we'll add a bucket We're going to help this small business get incorporated and give them some policies that you can use. And we're going to add a task and we're going to say creation of an LLC, and that's just basically filling out the forms. We'll make this due on the 17th. I'm going to assign this to myself. And again, you click on Add Task. Now if I wanted to add some more detail, I'll need to create the articles incorporation. If I had the form, I could attach the form to this so I didn't have to go hunt it down. And then I'll show this on the card and close this. And so you can add tasks, and then again, same thing, once I'm finished with these, I'll drag them over into Done because I like to be able to kind of show myself what I've done and tick them off. So, and under Policies, if we add a task, we'll say and set a due date. We'll assign it to Amy and add task. So that's how you use Planner but giving it the full context of the communication and the files and the other things in Teams. I think Teams is really powerful. I like having the ability to separate the communication about a particular matter out from email and have it appear here in Teams so it's all in one place, everything that I need to know about it. So next thing I'm going to show you is this magical little tool that you also get with this Office 365, and it's called To Do. And I wrote an article about using To Do in the blog, which I will share with you. But To Do is very cool because it is synthesizing everything from all these different places. My— basically, I create a task in OneNote, and they're now appearing in Outlook Tasks. And then I've created these projects in Planner, and I've got assignments. So what you can use To Do for is to create kind of a place that has all of these different applications' tasks assigned to me in one place. So it starts out with My Day, and if you click on this, My Day is always blank until you click on this little light bulb, and what it does is it shows you— and here's a bunch of the stuff that I've added. Somebody's asking, "Planner Teams to duplicate tasks?" Yes, you can duplicate tasks and kind of turn them into templates. So hopefully that answers your question, but the question was in Planner And in Planner through Teams, can you duplicate tasks? And you can, you can copy tasks. What I would suggest though is to create kind of a template task list, and that way you can copy that and make life easier so you don't have to change particulars. And that's great for checklists in terms of intake, onboarding, closing, things like that, things that are pretty much gonna be the same same tasks every time, you can create those and just copy them into new plans. But in Todoist, this is basically kind of aggregating all the stuff from all these different places. So we'll add some of these to this list, and this deletes every day. It's just kind of to give you, like, you can go through, see all the different things that might be assigned to you or on your to-do list and add them to My Day. So, you know, don't go crazy. They're all gonna stay there, but you just— it's just a way to have at it. So someone's asking, is there a way I can see all of Sarah Smith's to-dos, appointments, and all of that in one place. Let, let me think about that and get back to you. So this is my day, and basically once I click on this, I've completed the task. If I click on the task itself, you can see that this one came from OneNote, and if I click on this, it'll take me over to the OneNote notebook. This one also came from OneNote. This one was a flagged email. And so again, I didn't do a great job when I created this. I gave myself a due date, but I might wanna set a reminder. If I wanna go and open it in Outlook, I can. And so you can see that it knows where it came from and it's aggregating all of these different things. There's other parts of To Do that aggregate. So if I go into Planned, I can see again, it's just pulling from all the tasks that have been assigned to me, whether it was in Outlook or whether it was from OneNote that I created a task into Outlook, or it was from a Planner. And of course, in any of those, I can add, a task randomly. So if it wasn't something that was in Outlook or in OneNote or in Planner, then I can just add a task. And similarly, you can give it a due date. Once I hit Enter, I can remind myself, add a due date, add notes, add files, all that kind of good stuff. So all of this at the top of To Do is just kind of my stuff. And it, again, it's just pulling what, you know, what you've been done, what's outstanding that you've created, where it came from. If something is specifically assigned to you, it pulls it in from here. And you can take these and drag them to My Day most the time. Here's all the flagged emails and all of that. So this just gives you a different way of getting into all the different things that you've had assigned to you. And again, if you click on it, that one shows me it's from OneNote. This one I created in here. That was from OneNote, and so on and so forth. So it's kind of worth going through all those and seeing what's in it. But I think the real strength and interest in this is these lists, and this is where the collaboration part comes in. And so if I create a new list and I'm going to call this list and enter it. Then I can add tasks. And so again, it's really what your preference is and what you like to do with this, but we're going to, we're going to create a task list for the will. So Okay, excuse my bad spelling. For each one of those, I can go in and I can add additional steps. And then I can add this to my day, so if I need to take action on it today, I can do that. I can set reminders and due dates and assignments. Now I can assign this to people and create an invitation link. Files. So for the review previous will, if I had their file, I could just click on here and upload it so I can have it kind of, again, associated with this task. And then I can add notes. Whoop. And I can close the entire program at any time. So I can also, if I click this little star, anything I star shows up in that important. So I can also add other people in my team kind of at a global level for this, and I can invite them via email. And basically sets up an email invitation I can send to anybody I want within the organization, mind you, to have access to this particular one. Or when you set this up, you can go and click on this little people icon and add people that way. And If you want to color coordinate them, and I know that sounds kind of funny, but the reality is sometimes when everything is blue, as you can see, I have color coordinated everything. It just gives me a visual cue of what I'm in and what I'm doing. I've got a lot of communication happening in Slack. I'm on, I don't know, 8 Slack workspaces. I've color coordinated them just so I know where I am from a visual perspective as well as a written perspective. So one of the things about this— so you can create these, you know, individual lists, but let me add some new lists and I'm going to show you how to group them. So we're going to say we're going to do Sally and Bob and All right, so say you wanted to turn these into a grouping and nobody else is going to see the grouping. So you can go in there and you can add individual tasks to all of these, but if I wanted to create a group, I click on this button and I'll say Sally, Bob, and then drag and drop these into the group. Where did I lose my group? No, no. So it's creating a group. The group itself doesn't have any tasks, but if you started creating a lot of these and needed to group them, then you can see the task list for different parts of their matter. Obviously, I mean, I've picked some pretty easy, super simple because I don't want to take too much time. But that's basically To Do. It's worth playing around, seeing what you like about it, but I do like that it kind of aggregates everything. So if I feel like things may be falling outside of my attention, then I can get to them all in one place. Okay, this is the most complex, and I'm going to try to do it very quickly, and this is SharePoint. And so SharePoint really requires some training. It's very, very powerful. It's also very, very confusing. And so I'm going to show it to you mostly to say if you have an IT team or someone who really wants to dig into this, it's worth getting some training to find out how to effectively leverage it because it's not, it's not super intuitive. But SharePoint is basically kind of the what's backing up all of these different applications. And so if you go into SharePoint, you'll go, well, I don't remember creating all this stuff. That's because all of these Teams are basically the underpinning technology under Teams is SharePoint in a lot of cases. So anytime you create a team, it also creates a SharePoint site and you can add to it. So I'm gonna show you kind of what that looks like. If you want to create a new one, you just click Create Site and you can create with either a kind of news post or what they call a team site. And team site is really more about having an intranet for your team. So I'm going to go into one I already created here. And it's not very pretty. You can make it much prettier. I just did this quickly. And so you can kind of have a communication and a news feed with your people here. It's more, more kind of chat-oriented. And then you can add different, what used to be called web parts. I don't know what they call them now. I think they're still called web parts. But kind of pre-created little things. So if you click on Add Lists, Libraries, and Other Apps, You can create a document library. You can create custom lists. Tasks in SharePoint are so divorced from everything else that I don't suggest you use them. But if you scroll down, the one that I chose to use was Issue Tracking. And so Issue Tracking, you can handle this a lot of different ways, but I, I wrote an article about law firms using help desks or ticketing systems. And this, so I created this Issue Tracking basically as a way to try to identify— I've got a phone call and I've got an action item and somebody needs to take care of it. And so when I clicked on it, I created this client ticketing, and you can see I've got some outstanding items. So I'm going to click a new item, and when I click this, I'm going to add And then you can add someone. So I'll assign this to myself. This is where the ticketing kind of thing comes in. This is an active ticket or it's been resolved or closed. In IT world, this is something that needs to be acted on while it's active. Then I would mark it as resolved if I took the action on it, but that would mean that I had let Sally know what her trust balance was and I mark it resolved, and you may have a supervisor go in and actually close it out or make sure that Sally confirmed that she got it and everything's good. You can prioritize it, you can add descriptions, categories, comments, due dates, all that kind of good stuff. So I'm going to cancel it. So I've got some over here, but one of the things, if you saw the categories and you go, well, what, what are the categories? So let's look at what the categories are. Category 1, 2, and 3 is not all that useful. So if I wanted to edit parts of this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on, on the very upper right-hand side under Settings. And I'm going to— actually, I'm going to open this, then I'm going to do that so it knows where I am. And then I'm going to go into List Settings, and then I'm— I can make all sorts of granular changes, set up workflows, all sorts of other stuff. But in category, if I click on that, we're going to say potential And now I've added this, and we're going to save it. Hopefully this saved. Sometimes there are save buttons in these applications, and sometimes they're not. I just hope that it's saved. And go back. And now when I add a new item, hopefully I'll be able to— it didn't save. There's bound to be, there's bound to be a button somewhere. This is, again, I haven't been trained on SharePoint since MOS 2003 Server, so it takes a little while. It's better to have somebody who knows what they're doing, but it's really powerful. Because what happens is then once I create this, if I added a new item to it, I can actually— and I'll show you. Click on Save. So there's Sally's trust balance. One of the things that I did when I set this up was create something called a flow, and flow has been renamed to Power Automate, but here it's still called flow. And so if I create a flow, it kind of knows where I am and what I'm doing, and so I want to send a customized email whenever I add a new ticketing. It sends it to the person it was assigned to via email. So I set that up, and what ends up happening is that here's, here's that tracked issue that was assigned to me. If I open it, then I can see what it is, and then I can flag it for follow-up, and it will appear in, in my To Do, and it will also appear in my Outlook task. So it kind of comes full circle. Real quickly, I'm going to finish this off by showing you that we're not done. Microsoft Project is a separate application, And basically it's $10 per user per month. If you are a serious project management geek, this is a way to handle a lot more complex projects, but it is not part of Office 365. And then to get back to the question about if you want to open Sarah Smith's files and see all the to-dos, appointments, files, contacts, emails, phone calls, all of that. That's not something that Microsoft does particularly well because that you would want a client matter organization structure for this. And even though we're getting closer to having kind of a coalescing of information that's being shared across the platform in different places, we're still not getting that kind of what a law firm needs. So While you can do a lot of kind of onesies, twosies, I think Teams is probably one of the best places to start. But to get it all in one place, you're gonna wanna have to, you're probably gonna have to buy something. And so that's why I threw this section in. So if you do a lot of litigation, Law Toolbox is a rules-based calendaring product and it basically integrates with Outlook and Teams and it creates a group and you can see all the communication around a particular matter, all the court rules, due dates, all of this. It's a really interesting product, so the best thing I can do is suggest that if you have a lot of litigation and are very defined by your court rules and deadlines, take a look at Law Toolbox. The other thing that I just demoed yesterday, it's a fairly new product on the market, it's called Matter365. If you have Office 365 and QuickBooks Online, What this does is it takes all that, it's exactly what you're asking about. It takes all the information from SharePoint, OneNote, Outlook, Teams, Planner, OneDrive, and your QuickBooks and pulls it all into one matter, client matter orientation. So you go and create the matter here and it's using kind of all of the stuff in Office 365, but it's putting what I call a skin on it so that it is organized in a way that does give you that at-a-glance. So for each matter, you can see all of the information. It has reporting, and, you know, you can track your time, you can bill time, you can send out invoices, you can manage the trust account. It is a practice management application, but it, it is using the Office 365 as the underpinning platform. Because of that, because it's not a completely separate application, it's $30 per user, so it's a good bit less expensive than some of the other kind of standalone products on the market, and the integration with the tools that you're already using is much deeper than some of the integrations that you see with separate practice management applications. Another one that just, just recently came out, and I think this may be a little bit more geared towards corporate practice, is called Quro 365. They don't put their pricing on their website, which means they want you to do a demo first. But, you know, look at Matter 365, get a, get a demo with Quro because they're pretty much similar. This is just a screenshot of their, the tracking of your finances. And it generates all of these reports for you and everything. So Kuro is another kind of skin on top of Office 365. And with that, I'm gonna stop the recording and let y'all ask questions, but I really appreciate your time. Sorry I went so long, but there is so much in Office 365, about to be Microsoft 365, that it's absolutely worth creating a couple of tests, playing with it, creating some, you know, templates, being able to apply those in places. And even if you're all by yourself, um, just being able to keep on top of all those things you flagged for follow-up and they never actually did. Um, so you can turn them into actionable things instead of it's still sitting in my inbox, not doing much for me. So, uh, let me stop the recording. I appreciate it. And then I'll, I'll take your questions.
