Export microsoft business contact manager to crm

#Export microsoft business contact manager to crm install#
#Export microsoft business contact manager to crm Offline#

So far I have avoided deploying it on a large scale for our clients, mainly because I donвЂ™t want to have to support it in the field. IвЂ™m hoping for some major improvements in this product by next yearвЂ™s release. What about when they are going to be in the office for a week or two? Kind of a pain. Not to mention the fact that activities scheduled in the web client wonвЂ™t show up in Outlook unless the user goes offline.

#Export microsoft business contact manager to crm Offline#

There seem to be too many steps to go through to go offline and synch up, leaving questions in the userвЂ™s mind about whether he got all the right data or not. Even though MS released some refinements to the synching process a few months ago, its major problem (aside from whether it actually works) is that it is not at all intuitive for the average salesperson. This has been a buggy process in need of much improvement. This brings up another problem with CRMвЂ™s Outlook client: synchronization. I understand that part, but it would be nice to have the end-user experience in CRM Sales For Outlook as simple and clean as the BCM experience. This is because it has to catch the email as it enters Exchange and decide what to do with it there. While CRM has similar functionality, it relies on the ugly and problematic GUID in the subject line. Any email that comes in from the same address, or goes out to the same address, will be linked to the account or contact automatically. The email then shows up in the accountвЂ™s or contactвЂ™s history.

Basically you can select an email in your inbox and click the auto-link button and choose an account or contact to link the email to. One of the nicest features it has is the auto-linking button. Something for the guys at Microsoft to think aboutвЂ¦ДЄnyway, BCM is pretty easy to use. But ACTвЂ™s databases can sit on a server just fine and the client machines can log into multiple databases, both locally and network-wide. I guess they are going after the market of non-networked SMBs or peer-to-peer networks that donвЂ™t have larger SQL capabilities. It kind of baffles me that this isnвЂ™t an option already.

If they could tie it into SQL so it could live on the server and just have Outlook as the client, it would give ACT a pretty good run for the money for companies that are looking for contact management but arenвЂ™t in need of (or ready for) a CRM solution. So I have been using BCM for about three weeks now. I had to remove it because BCM installs a MSDE on the local machine and Outlook apparently canвЂ™t be integrated with more than one MSDE at a time First, I had to uninstall the CRM Sales For Outlook client, which I was glad to do since I have never used it very much, and frankly it is quite flaky and works only when it wants to. I had never played with this before, so I was interested to see how MSвЂ™s team for BCM approached some of the problems that the CRM team came up against.

#Export microsoft business contact manager to crm install#

I have been beta-testing a new Microsoft product that required me to install Business Contact Manager.