Ok, normally my reviews aren’t this in depth, but this is just necessary

I want to first give you a quick reader’s digest background.  I volunteered to help my son’s school get an email campaign started.  That was before school started..in early August.  It’s taken us this long to get the students, cross reference email address with siblings, as well as put into an action a campaign of saving paper so that we don’t waste any more paper than we have to by sending the same note home to one family 4 or 5 times because of the number of children in school.  So, more cross referencing.

And, then, I was introduced to Microsoft Office Live and I can’t even imagine the doors it would open up for a business to make use of Microsoft’s Office Small Business online tools.  There were a few quick registration bits of information, I was ready.  I then took each child, email address, grade, teacher, siblings and I made contact documents for each teacher.  And, yes, again, that was time consuming but it didn’t have to be.  I chose to do “contact documents” when I could have chosen to use excel documents and imported the work I had done previously.  However, because I”m not real good with reading directions, I missed that.  But, who cares. 

Now, it’s all neat and clean and cross referenced more times than you could ever possibly think to cross reference a school of 450 kids.  And, then, with the click of a button, I hit share and I send the documents to all the teachers via email.  So, all they must do at this point is go through the lists, check out the ones with email addresses and have those to use themselves if need be, they have the names of the children who will be receiving paper copies of all newsletters and that is the students who are either the only child in the family in our school or the youngest of a sibling group. 

So, parents get their information via email if they have an email address.  That’s one tree saved.  Then, if they have more than one child in our school, the hard copy of our newsletters or announcements will be found in the youngest child’s backpack.  We chose that because those are the children who are more likely to show their parents the announcements from the school. 

Now, let me tell you,

“I wrote this review while participating in a blog campaign by Mom Central on behalf of Microsoft Office Live. Mom Central sent me a gift card to thank me for taking the time to participate.”
But, if I could get myself close enough to those Mom Central Ladies, I’d be kissing on someone because this has simplified our PTO’s ability to communicate with our families in more ways than you can possible imagine. 

So, if you’ve wanted to help but can’t figure out the best way, and you are reading here, chances are, you are a computer guru.  So, take off to OfficeLive and get yourself all set up.