Roll Call

Roll Call is an employee in and out board and a secure instant messaging system. Roll Call is an very useful employee in and out board and a secure instant messaging system.

The main fallacy of in and out boards is people forget to change their status. With Roll Call, you only need to remember to change it when you leave your desk, not when you return. When you click your mouse or type on your keyboard for the first time after being away from your desk, Roll Call will automatically change your status to "desk". If you happen to leave your desk and forget to change your status, Roll Call will change it to "idle" after a given amount of time.

When you remember to change your status, Roll Call makes it easy by allowing you to type a hotkey or select from a popup menu that is presented when Roll Call's tray icon is right-clicked. For instance, you can define a hotkey to change your status to "lunch", another for "home", etc. No matter what the
forefront application is, you can enter a key sequence to change your status. Roll Call's tray icon also graphically represents what your current status is.

When you change your status, Roll Call saves you time by defaulting to a reasonable return time. If "lunch" or "break", the current time plus the typical amount of time you take for lunch or a break respectively. If "home", the next business day at your typical arrival time. The calculation of the next business day considers company holidays that you provide and weekends.

Roll Call provides additional information. Associated with each employee record is a notes section, group list, email address and a phone list. The notes section can be used to advise others of your future plans to be out of the office or away from your desk. Groups are useful because the employee list can be filtered to only show those associated with a particular group. Therefore, when a potential customer calls, the receptionist can use Roll Call to quickly determine which sales person is available.

Roll Call is also an instant messaging system. To begin a chat session with another employee, just double click on their row.

Roll Call can initiate a new out going message in MAPI compliant mail programs with the recipients prefilled with employees and groups of employees that you have selected.

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