Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Once upon a time there was a program called ACT! Which was the pre-eminent contact management software, used primarily for sales. Goldmine joined the fray as well around the time the concept of CRM (Customer Relations Management) became big.

So it was just a matter of time until Microsoft would launch its own CRM tool, Business Contact Manager.

If you’re confused about whether you get Business Contact Manager or any other Office 2007 component in a particular version, you’re probably not alone. You can check what’s in the various versions in this link. BCM is in Small Business, Professional and Enterprise.

Although it’s a so-called Add On that works in Outlook, BCM cannot currently be purchased or loaded separately from those three versions of Office 2007. If you purchased another version, and don’t have BCM, you will have to get another full version of Office with the Add On.

BCM is primarily for small businesses that need to:

Create separate panels of information with more complex and specific data for people you do business with.
Track new prospects or potential customers
Create and track business projects or tasks
Create, promote, and track marketing campaigns
Link to communication history items — or basic Outlook information like appointments or email

You can then share all this data with selected team members and obviously it is portable if you’re on a notebook so you can update it as you meet with customers or vendors on the road, and synchronize the information the next time you connect to the main database.

You can also integrate this with an accounting program, presumably the new Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 and Microsoft Office Accounting Express. We’ll take a look at the lighter version (Express) in an upcoming update.

But now let’s take a look at how Business Contact Manager works with Outlook in Office 2007.

The first step is either establishing or connecting to an existing database of business contacts. The difference between these contacts and the ones in Outlook itself (in your personal folder(s)) is that the BCM contacts have the ability to analyze performance and information based on many different fields in the records.

Figure 1234

As you start up the program you are introduced to the main components of Business Contact Manager, which basically becomes a new set of folders within Outlook.

Figure 1235

In the main interface in Outlook sets itself up as a distinct set of folders, and when you click on it, its main components take over the middle panel.

The main four tabs, Home, Sales, Marketing and Projects are the way that BCM breaks down your business functions by default, but you can customize the program to reflect any specific functions that you need to add.

Figure 1236

Note that the fields in a Business Contact are a lot more comprehensive than those in personal contacts. You can also set up new account and phone line as you can in ACT or Goldmine to dial directly out of a contact and make appropriate notes during your conversation.

Figure 1237

Three main elements of BCM basically prompt you to run your business more efficiently and successfully. Besides just the contacts you have the ability to prioritize opportunities, plan and implement projects and tasks within the projects, and assign them, develop marketing campaigns using email and brochures, and maintain a comprehensive historical record of all of these important activities.

Figure 1238

A Business Project has its own set of records including a due date to bug you and a panel for related information and event log with tasks to be done and those that have been completed.

Figure 1239

You can break down and sort your contacts into opportunities and prospects and thereby keep on top of these important accounts and make sure that you close as much new business as possible.

Figure 1240

Besides these features, BCM has some reporting capabilities with built in reports that you can customize to analyze information about your accounts, contacts, sales and campaigns.

There are a couple of final points to keep in mind.

You can’t include BCM in the same Outlook e-mail profile as your Exchange Server mailbox. However, you can create a second Outlook profile for BCM and alternate between them. You can use Outlook’s Import/Export features to move items between the two profiles.

BCM is designed for small businesses. You can’t directly share a single BCM database between different users. By exporting the database information you can make it available to others. Multiple-user support may well be added in a future version of BCM.

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