For many people, using employee scheduling in Outlook seems to be a popular way to plan tasks and schedule events assigned to one or more employees. Today Microsoft provides users with Outlook capabilities for creating daily calendars, making to-do lists and sharing information between multiple users. For example, you can use Outlook’s Calendar view to make schedules, or you can switch to Tasks tab to set jobs and make task lists.

Employee scheduling in Outlook can really help you with the problem of task & time management. If you are a manager and need to make your subordinates work more efficiently, you can use Outlook calendar that lets display tasks on daily/weekly/monthly calendar and also use the search function to quickly find necessary job items.

Using employee scheduling in Outlook will help you involve your people in collaborative projects and processes. By using Tasks tab and setting up user permissions you can allow your employees to view and edit tasks and folders which are parts of your projects. Outlook software has integrated email functionality that makes it possible to exchange email messages between users.

But there are five disadvantages that make many users choose an alternative to calendar Outlook. Let’s view what makes MS Outlook disadvantageous:

• No tools for setting up customized workflows, projects and processes.
• No flexible permissions system that could allow managing user permissions for tasks and folders.
• No special capability that could allow several users to leave comments on a shared task or project.
• Lack of capabilities for setting supervisors who could get notification reports on task changes.
• Expensiveness of MS Server necessary for using SharePoint.

VIP Task Manager is a great alternative to MS Outlook software. VIP Task Manager features similar functionality yet it has some advanced capabilities that make this software more winning comparing to MS Outlook. For example, VIP Task Manager features Workflow Editor for managing projects with customized task workflows. It allows setting task/folder permissions. In VIP Task Manager, users can leave comments on tasks and projects. The system sends automatic notifications to supervisors. And finally VIP Task Manager is an affordable solution that does not require MS Server.

VIP Organizer is a simple software product for individual task planning and tracking. This single-user program helps create to-do lists and templates for planning daily tasks and tracking their statuses.