Using distribution lists

This is my third post in the series on Time Manager 2010 Quarter 3.  Today I’m going to keep it simple and show you how to set up distribution lists.  Even though this is a very easy process, it has powerful implications because it means you can now send reports to multiple email addresses simply, and can schedule reports on a regular basis and have them automatically distributed.

To view the video just click here.

To view the other two videos so far in this series you can click on the links below.

Simple report scheduling

Scheduling reports

Next time I am going to roll my sleeves up and show you some of the more powerful features available through the Alerts and Scheduling engine.

Scheduling reports in Time Manager Part 1

In my last post I told you how, in the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager reports could not be sent to a separate Scheduling and Alerts engine.  Today I am going to extend that concept and tell you a little about how reports can be scheduled.  You can view a five minute video of the process by clicking here.

Offloading reports to another process is only of limited use.  However, setting up a report once and then running it at regular intervals becomes much more interesting.  It allows you to pass a great deal of administrative work out to the alerts engine.

An example might be a productivity report you run once a month on the third of each month for the previous month.  Instead of having to remember to open Time Manager, select the report, select what data to appear on the report and run it, you can now set this up as a scheduled report and have it delivered to your inbox automatically.

The video will show you more about how scheduling of reports works.

Next time I will tell you about distribution lists and some of the other alert functions which do not rely on reporting.

Running reports offline

This is the first blog post about the 2010 Quarter 3 release of Time Manager.  This is going to be fairly brief, as I just want to tell you about how, with the introduction of the new Scheduler engine, you can now send reports for offline processing.  This means you free up the system for other work immediately instead of having to wait.  The report will be sent back to you as an email attachment.

All well and good, but you can also send the report and say “Run this next Monday at 5 a.m., and then every Monday from then on”.  That means, for example, you can have a Missing Timesheet report sitting on your desk when you get in Monday morning.  So instead of spending the first ten minutes of the day running reports (or forgetting until Tuesday), the work has been done for you.

The first video showing how to do this can be seen by clicking here.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about Alerts and scheduling other kinds of operations offline.