I was reading the Small Business Building Blocks blog and noticed this handy time for BCM and LinkedIn.  As many of you know BCM is a favourite product of mine and one that providing the machine has the grunt is an excellent productivity tool.

I've been playing around with the LinkedIn toolbar for Outlook. One of the issues that I constantly run into with tools like this is that they are made to work with Outlook contacts but don't always work with Business Contact Manager (BCM). I've had better luck with this add-in than others, so I thought I would post a little about what I have found. If anyone has figured out a better way to address these issues, I'd love to hear from you.

The LinkedIn toolbar has a couple of ways to create contacts. One is from the LinkedIn dashboard, when it recognizes a contact in LinkedIn or your e-mail folders that is not set up as a contact. A second way is to use the "grab" button to create a contact from text or an e-mail signature.

When LinkedIn creates a contact, it creates an Outlook contact and saves it in an Outlook folder called "Collected Contacts". I want to create Business Contacts, not Outlook Contacts. One way to accomplish this is to 1) Create the contact and then 2) drag the newly created contact from the Collected Contacts folder to the Business Contacts folder. Once you have done this, you can open the contact and add any Business Contact fields that you need to.

Another option is to change the folder that the LinkedIn toolbar uses to the contacts that it creates.

For more information see the rest of the article at http://blog.rebarbusinessbuilders.com/rebar/2007/10/using-the-linke.html.

Then I noticed Chris's post at http://www.chrisrue.com/funcave/2007/08/sync-bcm-and-public-folder-items-to-your-windows-mobile-device.html that talks about how to get almost anything sync'd to a Windows Mobile device, so if you want you can add better syncing between BCM and Windows Mobile over and above the MS app to do this.

ttfn

David