I'm wondering if any other Tess organizations have done any fancy, fun integrations with Microsoft Outlook. Specifically with syncing contacts between the two.
I would like to get all of our employees actively using Tessitura as their main source for contact info for our patrons but it isn't always the fastest option. For example, if our Executive Director wants to send an email to 10 people that already live in her Outlook contacts it would be much faster for her to simply type them in the To: line of the mail rather than looking for them individually in Tess or building a list and executing an output set.
The problem we have (which may seem fairly obvious) is that our contact emails are being stored in multiple places. We may have someone reply to our Exec Dir's email requesting to update their email address. So it is updated in that specific user's Outlook contacts and no one else's Outlooks contacts. It's very possible that it also does not get updated in Tess.
I've been requested to investigate if there is a way to sync Outlook and Tess (on a nightly basis perhaps?) so that everyone always has the most up-to-date email addresses no matter which method they are choosing.
Looking forward to hearing how everyone has solved this conundrum! :)
Unknown said: I'm wondering if any other Tess organizations have done any fancy, fun integrations with Microsoft Outlook. Specifically with syncing contacts between the two.
We wanted to do this, too, and were not able to come up with any sort of fully automated solution. However, along the way we found that it's really easy to copy and paste e-mails from SSRS reports directly into an Outlook 2010 "To" field, or, even better, straight into a new Contact Group.
Now our e.g. Board and Actor contact data that used to live in spreadsheets or numerous personal contact lists are (hopefully all) kept in Tessitura, and e-mails and/or Contact Groups are addressed from custom reports. We encourage frequent refreshes (or recreations) of the CG's to keep data fresh, and since it's not completely automated I'm sure some stale data survives out there from time to time, but overall this strategy is going well for us so far.
I can provide more info offline, if desired.