Outlook Views

The Outlook views are a wonderful tool to automatically sort, quickly find information and rapidly re-arrange messages in any folder. They are the primary interface with which most users will scan through for relevant articles when they are in on the TeamKB folders (Published and Pending Articles). Views can also be organized to group and filter articles to make a particular feature of your information obvious at first glance. Hence, it is no wonder that TeamKB extends the power and flexibility of Outlook views to provide better sense and understanding on KB information when it is required the most! All TeamKB views are organized in a way that they bring out some sense out of the articles - patterns, associations, occurrences or dependencies.

Based on different needs and scopes, users can switch to any pre-defined articles view. For example, the 'problems' view is very useful when users want to group articles by problem category and then further group by problem type. TeamKB provides about 10 or so views available in each 'Published' and 'Pending' Articles subfolders.

Some of interesting views are discussed below with relevant screenshots:

Article Number
This view sorts the articles in the folder by Article Number in descending order. One drawback of Outlook field that employs a numeric data type is sorting, that is, often when you sort a numeric field, the sorting is performed by string (alpha-numerically) rather than numerically resulting in the 'KB #' (Article Number) field out of sequence. But this is taken care of in this view and you will always find the field in sequence no matter how many digit figures are contained in the field.

My Contributed Articles
This view only displays those KB articles that were contributed (made changes and saved) by the current user. All other articles (not contributed by the user) are hidden (in the view only, the data items remains in the folder) and this can be verified easily from the '(Filter Applied)' tag at the right corner of the title bar.





Problems
This is table view that groups all KB articles in the folder by 'Problem Category' and then by 'Problem Type', resulting in an hierarchical listing of articles.

Authors
This is a table view that groups all KB articles in the folder by 'Author'.

My Cases view
TeamKB provides a special view 'My Articles' which filters the folder to show only those KB articles that are authored by the current user (author). That is, the user would only see KB articles in the folder that are his/her.

Customizing a view

The TeamKB views can be modified to suit the team's taste and fields requirements. If you are an Outlook expert, you can even create new views and publish them for all your team in the folder. But detail descriptions on creating new views are out of the scope in this document. However, you can find various resources on the web that especially deals with extending Microsoft Outlook views.