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Chapter 1 • Using Windows Server 2003 Planning Tools and Documentation
environment.You’ll often hear this referred to as an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). An AUPessentially provides a road map for your users to make decisions about what is and is notappropriate to do with their office computers.Some organizations have a strict zero-tolerance policy, where there can be no personaluse of any company resource, including e-mail. More often, though, you’ll see a phrase inan AUP that allows for “reasonable personal use” of computing resources.The purely finan-cial argument might say, “If we can keep each of our 80,000 employees from spending oneminute a day sending a personal e-mail, then we’ve saved the company X number of dol-lars.” But at the same time, you need to consider the potential for addedproductivity for theaccount manager who is happier being able to send a quick note to his daughter who liveshalfway across the country.You need to carefully consider what type of policy will best suityour organization.
Scheduling/Task Management
Fully featured e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes can extend e-mailfunctionality to include a wide range of calendaring and task-management functions. Userscan manage appointments for anything from small project teams to entire departments andoffices.This can improve the efficiency of users’ time management by providing automaticmeeting and resource scheduling, including notifications of appointments and time con-flicts. Supervisors can manage schedules for an entire group of individuals, tracking meetingattendance, scheduled appointments, and vacations. Administrative assistants can even create,move, and delete appointments on their managers’ behalf.Centralized task management can also assist managers or team leaders in directing theprojects under their supervision. Managers can assign specific tasks and track their progressand completion date from a single location. As you can see in Figure 1.11, you can keepcopies of tasks you’ve assigned on your personal task list, as well as receive status reportswhen an assigned task has been marked as complete.When integrated with e-mail and cal-endaring functionality, task-management functions can greatly streamline work processes forproject teams and departments of any size.
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