Category: BCM

Microsoft is now packaging Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager as a stand-alone product. I’m not smart enough to know or explain all the reasons behind this. I imagine this is in response to competitive pressure from salesforce.com, Google Apps, and other on-line products. I thought that I would be using Outlook with BCM on […]

All you Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager folks, get thee to the BCM blog. Two big postings in the past week. First, a link to a new version of the shared database whitepaper that fixes that darn typo, among other things. Second, a link to a new tool that should make the process described […]

Microsoft has published a new document, dated March 21, 2007, with instructions for installing a database for Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager on a remote machine, such as a Small Business Server. The previous version had a typo in it that was bound to frustrate all who tried to follow it. The new version contains […]

A new week, already a new crazy error message. I got this one while trying to link a contact from my Business Contact Manager contacts to one of my Business Contact Manager accounts: When I click Details, I get the text below. I’ve clicked Continue and Close (X) multiple times with no effect. I have […]

Microsoft came out with instructions for installing Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager on a server last September. It’s a great document, but (a) it was written for the Beta version of Outlook 2007 and hasn’t been updated to show that it also applies to the RTM version, and (b) more importantly, it has a […]

This is slightly old news. The FAQ has been up for a week. There’s not much else on the BCM blog yet, but I hope they keep it up. If you’re interested in BCM, you should also check out the microsoft.public.outlook.bcm newsgroup.

When I create my shared Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager database on my Small Business Server 2003, I did so while logged into my server as the domain administrator. That’s because the domain administrator is the only account that has permission to log on locally to the server, and a lot of the setup […]

I wrote earlier about problems I was having configuring Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager to use a database on my server rather than on my own workstation. Even after dealing with the typo in the instructions, I couldn’t get Outlook to detect the presence of my database on the server. I was really confused, […]

If you are using the September 2006 version of this document to install your Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager database on a server, you need to watch out for a couple of critical typos in the sqlcmd statement on page 9. First, you need to understand that the way the document is formatted, it looks […]

Microsoft is trying hard to compete in the CRM (contact/customer relationship management) market. Its entry-level product, designed to compete with software such as ACT! and GoldMine, is the Business Contact Manager add-on for Outlook. I’ll probably have more to say about the actual features and benefits of this software later. This post serves only to […]