IT Tips - July

It Tips – July

Happy July, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the 4^th and kept all of your extremities.

What’s inside:

Tech Section

·         F Drive Clean-up!

Questions from Users

·         Color coding Outlook recipients



F: Drive Clean-up!



This is a wasteland from the
Star Wars planet 'Balmorra'... I LIKE STAR WARS, OKAY?!



We all know this has been a long-standing inevitability: The F drive is a wasteland. It’s riddled with old files, orphaned files and things some eyes shouldn’t see. As we grow as a company these F drive trends are likely to get worse. We’re wasting server space and employee time. We need shared drive structure, and we need it now.

Our current free-for-all F drive will be replaced by private shares on a departmental basis. That means each department will get their own, private, cozy little nook on the file server.

F Drive Cleanup Basics:

1.      Find ownership of the files currently on the F drive (by department)

2.      Create new shares for each department and set permissions

3.      Migrate the data

Here is a Microsoft Paint masterpiece (courtesy of yours truly) to illustrate the change:

The jumbled, wide-open F drive will be replaced by neat and secure departmental drives.

We’re going to have to endure a little pain and pull this band-aid off quickly. In the end our shared drives will be neater, easier to use and less wasteful. Best of all: you just need to let me know who owns which files and I’ll do the rest!

A Closer Look at the F Drive Cleanup:

Starting this month I will be contacting each department manager to figure out which files are their own. Once we have file ownership I will migrate the data to the respective departmental shares. The shares will be locked up so that only members of each department can see the files and make changes. They will be completely transparent to people outside of your team and each department will get their own drive letter.

W:, T:, F: which letter?! As far as our computer operating systems are concerned the drive letter is arbitrary. There are some departmental shares already configured with commonly used drive letters. However, there wasn’t a solid standard before so the letters associated with shares for may differ from user to user. Some unrelated departments are using the same letter; others have a different letter assigned for the same drive. That can cause some confusion.

When we create our departmental shares we will assign specific letters for each. So when someone says, “It’s on the S drive” it’s the same S drive to me as it is to everyone else that uses the S drive.

What about sharing files with people outside of my department? While the majority of file sharing is done interdepartmentally, sometimes we need to share with others (mother always told me so). There are a few ways to tackle this.

1.   We can get a little specific with permissions. Managers can approve read-only access to their department share for specific people. We can also give them access to a specific folder on the share or the entire thing.

2.   We will have a locked general share for things like the employee handbook, hardware request forms etc… The general share will be read-only and for sharing relevant company-wide information only.

I thought my department was the coolest because we already have a share… You are cool hypothetical person! If you already have a departmental share you should be just fine. We will likely just move any stray files your department has on the F drive to their proper home.

Fun F Drive factoids (that are not necessarily good)

Amount of files currently on the F drive: 125,088

Amount of files currently on the F drive older than a year: 24,860

Amount of unique users that have created a file or files: ~150

Keep your eyes peeled for exciting changes to the share drive structure!

Color-Coding Contacts in Outlook

Do you frequently receive important email from a particular contact? Would it be nice if their email stood out from the rest in your Inbox? Yes? OK, here is how you can do just that!

Outlook allows you to color-code email from a chosen contact. Once you color-code the contact any email you receive from them will be bright and colorful. Like this:

 It’s quite easy. Simply follow these simple steps:

1.   From Outlook, click on an email from the recipient you wish to color-code

2.   Click on Tools -> Organize

3.   Click on ‘Using Colors’ on the left side of the menu that just appeared

  

4.   Outlook will automatically populate the fields. You can choose the color from the drop down and then click the ‘Apply Color’ button

5.   ‘Done!’ will appear next to the button. That’s it! All email from the recipient will now show in the selected color.

Note: If you wish to remove color-coding click on the ‘Automatic Formatting’ button on the top right of the ‘Ways to Organize Inbox’ window.

From here you can activate or delete color-coding rules. (Check/uncheck to activate/deactivate or click on the rule and click delete to remove it completely)

Big thanks to Jaime Kemp for suggesting the color-coding tip!

Have a great Month, everyone!

-Keith

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