What Is Business Contact Manager?

If you are part of a small business with independent users, a sales professional, or an entrepreneur, you might be quite interested in a new add-on for Outlook 2003: Business Contact Manager (BCM). Business Contact Manager is included with Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition, Professional Enterprise Edition, and Small Business Edition. Business Contact Manager contains forms, reports, and views that can help you manage your customers, accounts, leads, prospects, and activities in one central location within Outlook.

Business Contact Manager isn't designed for everyone. This first release is designed for the single user who needs to manage his contacts, accounts, product lists, and opportunities. There is neither native PDA support nor integrated sharing capabilities in the first version. However, BCM will be a consistently evolving product, and information sharing will likely be supported in future versions.

Why Use Business Contact Manager?

Add-ins for Outlook are rather popular because users are already working within Outlook using their email. If you have to go to only one place to read your email and manage your business contacts, you're probably more likely to keep the contact management up to date. If you must constantly switch between Outlook and another program, you're probably less likely to keep the other contact management program up to date. Other contact management programs, such as ACT!, don't provide native Outlook integration. If you want to enter your contacts in Outlook to be able to use them for sending email or scheduling meetings, you must either export them to the other application or re-enter them. Then there's the issue of PDAs. If you keep all of your contacts in Outlook and sync them with your PDAs, you don't want to have to repeatedly transfer information between Outlook and your contact management program. Although Business Contact Manager data isn't synchronized directly with your PDA, several third-party programs can help you synchronize BCM data with your native Outlook contact data.

NOTE

BCM data is stored in an MSDE database on your local computer. However, the information is accessed through what looks and acts like a Personal Folders file. When looking for programs to help synchronize data between BCM and a PDA, look for products that provide the ability to synchronize contacts stored in multiple Contacts folders. These types of programs will likely help you synchronize at least some of the BCM data to your PDA. Also keep an eye out for programs that work natively with BCM to provide PDA synchronization. I expect that some will be released within six months of the product launch.

How Does BCM Work?

When you load BCM, you'll see a new entry in your folder list for Business Contact Manager that looks just like a Personal Folders file. Business Contact Manager runs within Outlook, but it does not store its data within an Outlook Personal Folders file. All data in Business Contact Manager is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) database that's installed locally on your machine. The installation and configuration of this database are completely handled by the Business Contact Manager installation program.

TIP

Even though no native support for sharing of information with others is included in BCM, because BCM data is stored in MSDE, you can use a variety of methods to access that data for export or sharing with others. Although these methods currently are not documented or supported by Microsoft, I anticipate a number of third-party tools will emerge quickly to help users access and share BCM data.

NOTE

If you have an existing SQL Server within your network or have another instance of MSDE on your desktop machine, you might want to configure Business Contact Manager to use your existing database.

Unfortunately that's not supported. There's currently no way to use an existing database for BCM's source. You need to use the MSDE instance created by the BCM installation program.

Business Contact Manager is a COM add-in for Outlook. It is, in fact, one of the first commercially available COM add-ins for Outlook written completely in the .NET Framework. All the BCM menus, linking, and other program logic are handled within the MSDE database and the COM add-in code. BCM uses custom forms to display the data stored in the MSDE database. Because the logic for BCM forms isn't stored within the form itself, you can actually customize the BCM forms to better meet your needs with little risk of harming the functionality of the BCM program. Information on customizing BCM forms is provided later in this chapter. Some of the customizations you might want to make include changing the various drop-down values to better meet the specific needs of your business and changing the labels of certain fields to reflect your own business culture.

Business Contact Manager is made up of several components: accounts, business contacts, opportunities, and products. Each of these components can be linked to at least one other component. For example, an account can have multiple business contacts. A business contact can be linked to an account and to multiple opportunities. Multiple products can be linked to multiple Opportunities. In addition to the linking between other BCM data, you can also link other Outlook items to a variety of BCM items. You can link tasks, email messages, notes, journal entries, meetings, and documents to accounts, business contacts, and opportunities.

One of the most useful features of Business Contact Manager is its capability to automatically link email messages you send and receive to their respective accounts or contacts. For example, if you create a business contact for Karen Archer and enter her email address as >[e-mail], any email you send to or receive from [e-mail] will be automatically linked to Karen's business contact record.

When you open her business contact record, all of those emails will appear in the Contact History field included on the form.

Business Contact Manager contains a number of built-in reports that are displayed using the runtime version of Crystal Reports. Because the reports are written and displayed in Crystal, they can be customized to a certain degree to meet your needs. Although you can't change some of the basic information included in the report, you can filter the data being displayed, change the sort order, and add specific headers or footers to any BCM report. You can also export your reports to Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word for further customization or analysis. You can't create new reports directly in Business Contact Manager, but you can link a Microsoft Access database to the MSDE database that stores BCM data and produce your own custom reports. You can even place this Access database on a network share to provide some limited sharing of BCM information.

As mentioned previously, BCM is a new product. This is the first version of the product that's been released. Even though it's currently very functional and will already meet the needs of a certain segment of the marketplace very well, there are major improvements planned for future versions. One of the features likely to make it into the next version of BCM is the capability to share data with other BCM users. For example, this capability means that a sales manager could have his sales representatives use BCM to manage their individual accounts, contacts, and opportunities and report their progress to the sales manager through some sort of sharing mechanism. Microsoft is very interested in user feedback on Business Contact Manager. As you go through this chapter and begin to use the product, make a note of those features you would like to see. Send your feedback to Microsoft so that it can make future versions as functional as possible. The best way to improve Business Contact Manager is to send suggestions and comments to [e-mail].