Use Refinder to Plan a Meeting

Part of Refinder is a Microsoft Outlook connector. You can use it to create relations between things in Outlook and also to link other documents to things within Outlook. For example, you can start with a meeting in your Outlook calendar and continue from there on. Find people who may attend the meeting, gather more important information about the meeting, get an overview, and finally have everything ready before you walk the red carpet at the meeting.

Step 1 is to get an account on Refinder: www.getrefinder.com

Step 2 is to download and install both the Microsoft Outlook Connector and the URL Handler. Here is the download page where you get both: http://www.getrefinder.com/account/downloads/.

Install them both and activate the Outlook Connector - it will ask Refinder to authorize you. If you have questions at this point, there is help.

Step 3 is to tell Refinder what information is relevant for you. Within Outlook, you can decide yourself what information you want to organize with Refinder. If you want Refinder to know about your contacts and meetings, you can import them. This is done with one click, and some patience. Select the folder you want to import in Outlook (to the left), click on it with the right mouse button to show the context menu, select "Import Items into Refinder". It will take a while.

select the folder in Outlook and use the context-menu to add the items

Now Refinder knows your meetings from the calendar. You can do the same with your contacts from the address book.

Step 4 Open a meeting and start collecting things which are related to the meeting. To the right of the meeting, Refinder recommends you things that could be related. Here is a meeting next week I have at the WKO Austria:

Refinder looks for relevant things and recommends them to you in the sidebar. I added two recommended people to this meeting. This helped me to stay connected with contacts I already know. I also did not search for them, Refinder did the searching for me. Sometimes I forget to brief myself properly before I go to a meeting, especially then it is good to get some recommendations from Refinder.

Step 5 You can also link websites or other things to a meeting using the Refinder Firefox plugin.

You can use the bookmarklet (get it here) and the firefox plugin (get it here) to add web bookmarks to Refinder.

Now you have an overview on your meeting. You can find your meeting again in Microsoft Outlook or search for it in your recent things on getrefinder.com.

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