MS Outlook: why not blogging?
I did a post late last year on blogging in a private offline journal to record my daily experience, thanks to everyone for the great suggestions.
I use Outlook 2003, and just noticed it has a Journal feature, in fact you can make as many journal’s as you want, they are just like folders.
Now this feature does much more than I need it to, so I’ll only go over the relevant parts to my needs…someone just told me that it can also track your daily history of your interactions with MSoffice files, they call this “record files”…so bascially it will tell you what files you worked on for the day and what meetings you went to, etc…
For each journal entry:
- subject line
- entry type
- timer
- body of text
- contacts
- category (you can add your own to the list)
- private (as you can share your journals)
All entries view:
- customize and sort the fields (includes advanced filtered searching)
- forward a journal entry as an attachment
- share a journal
(this seems to actually mean share it communally, not just for public viewing)
- view by today, week, month
- view by type
This shows a timeline of a day, week, month…depending on how you have set it…and all the entries for this time period are filed horizontally via an icon (different icon for each entry type).
Each entry type is filed vertically, so you get rows of entry by type.
Also you can click on the arrow icon next to each month and get a calendar view and jump to any date
- view by contact (same but filed by contact)
- view by category (same by filed by category)
- view by entry list (looks just like your email inbox)…filter by phone call or last 7 days
You can also use the right click to arrange this view by category, which makes up for not being able to sort this way.
From my quick 30 minute look it seems that the Journal feature on Outlook can be used by a knowledge worker to record, store and, share tacit knowledge.
So it seems this feature is very much like a blog and can be used this way:
- firstly multiple journals means multiple blogs in the one interface
(maybe each journal could be a project blog, it depends how specific it will be because you can also use the category as a project description)
- since you can right click forward an entry as an attachment, this is kind of like a permalink
- title line
- body of text
- category
- fielded search
- browse by date, type, category
I noticed that Share means to actually communally share a journal, and for each entry you can tick to make it private, so can you choose to make your journal a public viewing section of your email client.
This way a journal could act like a public blog (does it have a URL…what about the entries)
All journals combined from all staff could be browsed by date, category or searched
…also view the lastest entries from all journals (also by category)
…what about email alerts or RSS feeds.
The email client is the most used work application, just see MS Outlook: KM Friend or Foe?, and for this reason RSS aggregators are being integrated rather than people learning a new client…so why not include blogging in MS Outlook (it’s got email, contacts, calendars, notes, journals, tasks, feeds…why not blogging).
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
Actually, there have been a few tools written that let you “post” to a special folder in Outlook which is then copied out to your blog. One I know of is OutlookMT (MagicFolder), which was written for Movable Type. http://www.kunal.org/outlookmt/.
Comment by Jack Vinson — January 11, 2006 @ 7:11 am