Understanding tags

There are three different statuses, or tags, that you can apply to messages to help you organize them. The first is the ability to say that an item has been read or unread and so when I open a message it's automatically read. This is a setting that you can change in the options if you wish. If I view it in the reading pane then, it's automatically read. If I want to change a message from read to unread, I can right-click it and choose mark as unread, as you've seen earlier in this course.

The second two tags are Categories and Flags and they appear when we actually open a message. This is the only place we can assign a category is in an open message. I can also choose a flag, and I can choose the flag here, or if I click in the information viewer I can flag an item right here, by right-clicking the flag. There's actually one click that I can do that will set a particular flag or will mark something as completed and that's the default flag, which is today when you first start working with OWA.

So these three ways to tag items actually work together. So first whether a message has been read or unread is a basic way to tell that you've gone all the way through all of your emails. When you get to the end of a day every message that's read should be marked read; that's the way Outlook Web Access is designed to work. Sometimes some users will mark a message as unread, because they haven't finished reading it or they haven't thought about its implications or they just glanced at it. That's okay, I would encourage you not to use the unread status though as a way of indicating that you need to take action on an item because you have two better ways to do that.

The second is Categories. So once I've read a message or even if I haven't, if I know who it's from and what it's related to, I can categorize this message. And once I have tagged a category or more than one category onto a message, I can go find all of the messages in a category, I can group my messages together by categories and I'm able to see how my items in my inbox work together. But categories also cross all of the other parts of OWA. So I'll use the same categories in my email and in my calendar, in my contacts, and in my tasks list.

And speaking of tasks, my last choice is to flag an item for action. Now when I flag an item I'm actually flagging it to a particular week or a particular day. I can even flag it to a particular time. But what I'm saying is this item requires some specific work on my part and I want to keep it on a list. So when I read an email, I have the choice immediately to categorize it in a particular way to allow me to organize it and then I can flag it to allow me to organize my actual work; that's how these three tags fit together in OWA.