Best practices on how to manage delegate access in Outlook

Best practices on how to manage delegate access in Outlook

To begin with, Microsoft Outlook gives you incredible capabilities, and one of these is your delegate access. It’s like having someone to create and manage your meetings, on your behalf. This person, who does it, is called as a delegate, meaning, you are delegating your tasks. Now when you have someone, to do that, you got to set the level of privileges as well for it, which you accomplish by the below levels.

Now when you assign some delegate as an Editor, you are giving him/her, the privileges of creating meeting requests, sending meeting requests, editing and deleting meeting requests as well. In addition, he/she can also be given access to receive mails pertaining the meetings, PRIVATE ITEMS and also accept and reject meetings on your behalf.

You could also assign a delegate as an Author, giving him/her the privileges of creating meeting requests and reading through your Calendar, PRIVATE ITEMS but he/she cannot modify or delete meeting requests. They can be given access to receive mails pertaining the meetings however.

You could also assign a delegate as a Reviewer who can view your calendar and PRIVATE ITEMS but cannot do any edits on it.

You can add your delegate by going to the Calendar pane, then going to File and under Account settings, select Delegate Access.

You get something as below and herein, you add your delegate.

You are all set with adding a delegate but now how do you give them the priviliges? Now once you add a delegate, you would immediately be asked as to which kind of a delegate is he/she as shown below.

This is all the necessary basics that you should know to understand delegate functionality. The following are the best practices that you can use for managing delegate access in Outlook.

1. NUMBER OF DELEGATES: Now ideally it is always advisable that you don’t have multiple delegates as it leads to lot of confusions, duplicities and inconsistencies.
2.  OUTLOOK VERSION: The Outlook version on the manager and the delegate/delegates should be the same.
3.       PATCH LEVEL: At the patch level, Outlook 2007 calls for service pack2, Outlook 2010 calls for Penn for Windows users and Entourage 2008 for MAC users.
4.   RECEIVING EMAILS: The mail should go only to the inbox of the manager, as in, on Exchange server only and not elsewhere like a PST file.
5.       MOBILE DEVICES: Manager can have one/more handheld devices, but try to avoid accepting and updating meeting through mobile devices. Chance’s of corruption significantly increases if you do so. A delegate should not try to manage manager’s calendar using a mobile device. This functionality is not available by design, but there are some third party solutions available and this should not be tried.
6.  DELEGATE PERMISSIONS: It is always advisable that, just incase you are using more than one delegate; you assign only one delegate as an Editor.  NOTE: It is always ideal to avoid confusions, as to who would respond to the meeting requests, either the manager or the delegate (Editor). Mostly it is apt, if the Editor does it, as the manager could be travelling.
7.  DL EDITS: It is good if you do not add or remove recipients from a DL whilst sending meeting requests as it leads to confusions and inconsistencies, at times it also results in some recipients not receiving prospective meeting requests as well. If at all you wish to add someone, do that in the TO field rather.
8.    AUTO ACCEPTING REQUESTS: It is always best to turn off this feature. The delegate should turn of this feature, if he/she is responsible for responding to the manager’s request as it leads to issues in delegate workflows. Go to Tools | Options | Preferences | Email Options | Tracking Options, and make sure that the checkbox “Process requests and responses on arrival” is unchecked for the manager.
9.      MAIL SYNCHRONISATION: On a normal scenario, it is good if you sync your outlook with a consistent mail synchronisation tool to avoid missing items. This means, if you acknowledge or read a meeting request through, one client, don’t try editing it in another. To make it simpler, if you have addressed a meeting request in the office using Windows, do not try editing it using your personal MAC.
10.    RECURRING ITEMS: It is best that you avoid the lags involved in recurring items. The recurring item will be taking place on its usual schedule, once you postpone it further; this causes a change in it. Now this change to the recurrence meeting will be an attachment and thus, an update has to be sent for this. The lesser the updates, lesser probabilities of errors.
11.   RESPONSE: It is always good if the manager responds to the meeting requests from his inbox as this will make less chance so for the delegate to miss the manager’s updates.
12.    EDITION ACCOUNTABILITY: If a meeting request, sent already, needs to be edited, it is ideal, if the manager/delegate, whoever created it, does it, to avoid discrepancies.
13.   OFFLINE MANAGER ACCOUNTABILITY: If the manager is going to be using Outlook, offline, he should ensure that he syncs it before and after making changes, as else they reflect partially, leading to missing items and duplicate items for both, the delegate and the manager as well.