Day 6 – People, OWA Contacts

09/22/2014

30 Days with Office 365 for Educators – Day 6

As you begin to explore Office 365 you may have heard others talk about “OWA” (pronounced Oh Wuh), this is the technical slang term for the Office Web App. The Office Web App is much improved and for the majority of people will offer most of the features you need without connecting to the individual Desktop Outlook Client for basic email services.

The advantage of OWA is that everything is browser based. This means you can access your email (and other Office 365 apps) from any computer with an Internet connection. You can also access ALL of your Contact information once signed into Office 365.

Contacts are accessed from the People menu available from the blue bar at the top of the browser window.

Contacts are one of the features that can be very helpful for busy educators. If you take the time to organize individual contacts and group contacts upfront you are setting yourself up to take advantage of some time saving features in Office 365. If you are migrating from another email system your contacts may be pulled in automatically depending upon the technical setup and conversion process. 

I recommend adding individual contacts for the people that you regularly correspond with. There are many features in Office 365 to help make you become more productive when corresponding with others such as Instant Messaging, Lync for video conferencing, SharePoint, Yammer for social media, and calendar scheduling.

Adding a contact record is easy and helps with future correspondence with individuals in the future.

Sending out bulk emails to your class is made much easier if you setup a Group Contact List. 

Give some thought to your naming convention as your Contact List is sorted alphabetically. Group contacts are intermixed with individual contacts. I like to put the semester and year first, followed by class name, and finally teacher name. Example: (Fall 2014 – 3^rd Hour Science Class – Grissom) 

If your school has standard course numbers you may want to use the course/section number first for your Group Contact name so it is alphabetized by course. Example: (EDU2022-001 FA2014 Grissom) The choice is up to you but having a system will help keep things straight over time. Because you will be using your contact list over time, you will need to periodically update and delete old entries that are no longer needed.

Putting the semester and year in the contact name will help you in the future as you teach the same class next year but with a different group of students. Using this convention all the Fall courses you teach will be under the letter F in your Contact List. Also notice that the individual contact is represented by a single person icon and the Group Contact is represented by 3 person icon. See an example below from a demo account I setup (click to enlarge image, press BACK to return):

You do not have to use my system as it certainly is not the only way to do this. Feel free to vary to fit your needs accordingly. Getting an organized system up front however will pay big dividends down the road.

If you are setting up a new Office 365 account take some time to organize your contacts, it will make future Office 365 communications much easier.

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

@tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc