The Diary is used to record Tasks, Events, Meetings, Holidays, Studies, and Examination Leave. A staff member can record these entries in Drive under their own Staff name or under another Staff member’s name provided they have the required access rights. The default screen when you load DRIVE is the Diary in Week View. Deadlines & Workflow can also appear on the diary but this can be turned on or off.
The diary can be viewed in different ways using the highlighted icons above, depending on the user’s preference. The views available to select include Day, Work Week, Week, and Month.
The filters are available on the toolbar at the top of the Diary under the Show icon below.
Click on the Show button and you can decide how much information to display in your diary.
Tick the boxes as needed and click OK when done.
You can also change the diary settings by clicking the Diary Settings button shown in the two snips below.
Creating an Entry
To create a new diary item, either right-click on My Diary window and select New or alternatively select File and New from the main DRIVE toolbar. The Add Task/Meeting/Event window will appear as shown in the snips below. For example, we will create a new meeting on the 10th of October 2011.
The Task/Meeting/Event window will appear allowing you to enter the details of the upcoming meeting on 10th October 2011 with the relevant client.
Entering the standing information is straightforward and self-explanatory when creating a diary entry. Depending on the type you create there will be different options available. For example, if you create a type of Examination Leave, the client fields will become greyed out as they are not applicable to this type. For the types of Events, Tasks and Meetings there is extra functionality available in the toolbar at top of the Add Diary/Task window.
You can also use the recurrence button should you want to make any meeting, event, or task a recurring entry. The Appointment Recurrence window will appear. Enter the pattern and range details before clicking OK.
When all the Meeting details have been entered you can send these to your timesheets. To do this, click on the Generate Timesheet button as above.
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Enter a WIP Analysis code, for example, A000 (Audit), and then click OK. By clicking OK, this meeting will be added to the existing timesheet for this period or if the timesheet has not been previously created for this period, it will be automatically created.
When all the information has been entered against the meeting, click Save & Close and the item will be saved on the specific date i.e., 10th October 2011 as shown the snip here or click Save & New to enter a new item onto the diary using the same procedure as above
Viewing Multiple Diaries
Drive Diary allows users to view one or multiple staff members’ diaries depending on the user’s level of access. To view, another staff member’s diary selects the Staff hyperlink from the My Diary screen. The active staff list will appear, and you can tick on or off the staff you want to see in the diary.
Click OK when ready.
Entering Tasks
My Tasks will display the list of meetings, tasks, or events generated from the diary or generated through the My Task screen.
This list can be treated as a ‘to do list’ for a staff member. These tasks can then be set up as an alert, so the user does not miss an appointment, meeting, etc. Once you complete a particular task, you can change the status of the task to ‘completed’ and then send the task to ‘history’ to remove it from your current ‘to-do list’.
From the Navigation Bar, choose Drive Desktop and then choose My Tasks. The My Task browse appears.
The snip above displays the current tasks, meetings, and events for this staff member. Users can use this display to work across all communication types to manage outstanding meetings or tasks and see their status. To filter for different status' e.g., outstanding, right-click on the Status column and choose 'Switch On Filter'.
Click on the filter button in the top-right of the column.
You can then select what status to filter by.
By keeping a track of all tasks, you can then run daily, weekly, or monthly reports to show any upcoming tasks for a particular client.