Tips and Tricks for Using Deltek PIM's Microsoft Outlook Plugin

The email management challenge continues to plague companies around the globe with over 306 billion emails being sent daily and nearly half of those being business-related. The Deltek PIM team is committed to continuously improving our solution to help combat these challenges, keeping you organized and productive.

Speaking of improving our solution, have you explored the new features available in the latest release? Let’s take a look at Deltek PIM’s new ‘smart’ email features, as well as some lesser known features that could help you save a lot of time.

Publish Original Email with Reply

Save time and effort by publishing the original email that you received alongside your reply, all at the same time! This feature eliminates the need to return to your inbox to manually publish the original email after you respond. This is particularly helpful when you’re responding to an external teammate who is unable to publish their email into PIM or to an internal teammate who has forgotten to publish their email on send (let’s face it, it happens!).

Publish Reply to Same Location as Original

Conversely, when you receive an email from a colleague from within your business who has published their email, Deltek PIM’s Outlook plugin will ask if you want to publish your response to the same location as the original email, along with the same attributes. Helpful, right?

Semi-Automated Suggestions for Publish Location

The Deltek PIM Outlook plugin will now make weighted suggestions of where to publish an email based on a couple logic paths running in the background: the conversation thread of an email and/or an entity code (i.e., project code) in either the subject line or title of an attachment. This will help your teams publish emails faster because the smart email publishing tool looks for this information and tells your users where it thinks they should publish the emails. Your users still have the option to select a new location if the automated suggestions aren’t sufficient.

Publish Multiple Emails Simultaneously

Users can publish up to 100 emails at a time even if they each need to be published to different projects and/or document pools. Smart email publishing tool also will make suggestions on each email individually if required. This feature helps you clean out your inbox quickly and effectively.

Publish Attachments Separately from Emails

The plugin includes the ability to publish attachments separately so that you can publish attachments to a different project or document pool than where you would like to save your email. This feature eliminates the need to manually save your emails and documents separately.

Search for Documents from within Outlook

By navigating to the Deltek PIM Search area alongside the left side of Microsoft Outlook, you can view all emails that have been published into Deltek PIM. Because you’re in Outlook, Deltek PIM automatically defaults to displaying emails; however, if you switch to the Details View in the classic Document Management System (DMS) (or to Document Mode in the smart view), the system will display documents that are stored within PIM.

Filter Your Search

You also can search within certain entities (i.e., projects, organization). Navigating to the Deltek PIM Search Entities section will provide you with a list of entities (i.e., a list of projects that you can view the emails/documents in), effectively adding a filter so that you only see emails/documents relating to that particular project. Note that you must have marked the project as ‘Show in Outlook’ in PIM for the project to appear in this section within Outlook.

This allows you to navigate the Deltek PIM interface without ever having to leave the Outlook platform, minimizing the number of programs or windows open on your machine at any given time.

Adding Contacts Directly from Deltek PIM

Using the Deltek PIM email plugin when creating emails, you can search for contact records stored in PIM. By using the ‘Add Contacts’ section in the Deltek PIM section of the ribbon, you can search for PIM contacts to send your email to (either internal or external contacts). This then enters the email address for the contact stored in PIM and also shows you the organization they are associated with, ensuring that you send your emails to the correct people using their most up-to-date information.

Attach Documents for External Contacts

When creating a new email from within Outlook, you can opt to attach documents directly from the DMS instead of downloading from the DMS and attaching from your downloads directory. This also ensures that you are always sending the latest version of any given document.

If you have already associated your new email to a particular project, then the system automatically displays documents only associated with that same project. This eliminates the extra manual steps of applying filters or navigating to the project record.

Link Documents for Internal Contacts

If you need to send a document to an internal contact that has access to the PIM system, instead of attaching the document itself, you can insert a link to that document into the body of the email. This then takes the recipient to the latest version in the PIM system.