Check email activity during and outside business hours

A new option that is intended to improve the separation between business and non-business hours has been added to the Tools menu of Promodag Reports v.11: Calendars. In this article we will attempt to show you how to make the best of it through two examples:

1. You manage a medium Exchange organization whose users work in different locations and do completely different jobs. Some of them work in a factory on day and night shifts, others in an office from 9 AM to 5 PM.
2. You manage a big Exchange organization whose users are scattered all over the planet. You are based in North America and your Promodag database and reports use your local time, but many of your users are located in Great Britain, Germany, China our Australia and they all have different bank holidays or business hours.

Such situations makes it difficult to produce accurate email activity reports taking into account your users' different work schedules and time zones.

The default calendar takes the regional options of the computer into account by automatically setting the public holidays of your alleged country.
You can also set working days and working hours.

Example 1: Set calendars for different teams or Departments

In this first scenario, you will create as many custom calendars as there are teams in your company: Factory (day shift, night shift), Office.

Then, associate each calendar to a team using an AD attribute - for example Department, or a Custom Attribute.

Example 2: Set custom regional calendars

In this second case, you will create different custom calendars based on your users' different time zones and different sets of public holidays. For example, you will create a calendar for your British users (EMEA), another for the Japanese (APAC) and a third one for the Americans (US). You will set a time zone, set of public holidays and working hours for each of them.

Then, select each regional calendar in the drop-down list, and the Select button to link it to each group of users based on an attribute – for example Country:

Integrate calendars in your Exchange reporting

If you now start the new Message Traffic Based on Working Hours report (Mailbox Traffic category), you will see a Use calendars option as an alternative to Work schedules in the Period tab:

• First scenario: If you select all mailboxes in your Exchange organization, the report will reflect the work schedule of each team and accordingly measure their email activity.
• Second scenario: If you have selected users located in the US, EMEA and APAC zones, the report will take into account the work schedule, public holidays and time zones set in each calendar and calculate accurately the percentage of messages sent during and outside working hours.

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