Search results matching tag 'Business Contact Manager'

Import and export business data in Business Contact Manager 2007 - Outlook with Business Contact Manager - Microsoft Office Online

doverton — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:07:38 GMT

Again, something I have been asked before - how to get data into and out of BCM - have a look at Import and export business data in Business Contact Manager 2007 - Outlook with Business Contact Manager - Microsoft Office Online

Import and export business data in Business Contact Manager 2007

You can use the Business Data Import and Export wizard to import (import: To bring information from one system or program into another. The system or program receiving the data must somehow support the internal format or structure of the data.) data into or export (export: To copy your Business Contact Manager for Outlook business data to a file of a different format for use in a database, a spreadsheet, or another program.) data from Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007.
What do you want to do?

Import data

Export data

Use the wizard to update an existing database with information from another database

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, BCM, Business Contact Manager, Office 2007, Office System, CRM, Small Business

Business Contact Manager Team Blog - good information, including SQL and VBA tools, Smartphone and product information

doverton — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:59:00 GMT

I was hunting for an answer to a questions someone asked me and I came across this the BCM Team Blog. Below are some of the recent posts. It is worth adding to your RSS feed list.

Troubleshooting BCM for Pocket PC/Smartphone
Get Business Contact Manager with Outlook Standalone
How to Change BCM Polling Interval?
Happy Holidays
Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007 SP1 is Live

Business Contact Manager Team Blog

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, BCM, Business Contact Manager, Office 2007, Office System, CRM, Small Business

Where to get lots and lots of information on BCM (Business Contact Manager) 2007

doverton — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:01:38 GMT

I found this blog and realised several things. 1) The Brelsford family (no, they are not related) are very good in the small business space. 2) I now have a BCM 2007 hero.

Who am I talking about? Bill Brelsford - http://blog.rebarbusinessbuilders.com/about.html - who says "For the past 20 years, I have been working with and for small businesses in a variety of roles."

I love BCM and here are some of the things he has written about BCM. It is worth noting that Bill does not just write about BCM, but many things including marketing and many other issues that a small business would face.

BCM:

It has to be worth a look.

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: Business Contact Manager, BCM, Small Business

Business Contact Manage 2007 (BCM) with LinkedIn and/or Windows Mobile

doverton — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:54:02 GMT

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

Technorati Tags: BCM, Business Contact Manager, Windows Mobile, LinkedIn

Business Contact Manager (BCM) on Office 2007 error and the .Net framework

doverton — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:07:55 GMT

I got an e-mail a few week back that showed a customer getting the following error with BCM:

"Business Contact Manager failed to load".
"Business Contact Manager failed to initialize Common Language Runtime Class not registered

I was not able to respond timely, but I did get feedback that the issue was caused by a problem with the installation of the .Net framework. Updating and re-installing the framework fixed the problem. The partner that solved the problem was Pat Summers of PCS Enterprises in the US :-)

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: Business Contact Manager, BCM, error, .Net

Recent Business Contact Manager Questions and Answers

doverton — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:04:08 GMT

I was just writing this e-mail back to someone who e-mailed me and I decided to blog it.

- Is there a way to timestamp notes in Outlook by itself, or is the only way to get Business Contacts Manager?
Everything in outlook has a timestamp, but obviously BCM has better facilities. You could write a short piece of VBA to add a time stamp button to the Notes form
- Are the contacts stored in Outlook 2007 the same as those contacts stored in BCM or are they stored completely differently?
Outlook contacts are stored in a PST file while BCM contacts are stored in a SQL database. To see the differences between the fields in contacts in BCM and Outlook, have a look at http://uksbsguy.com/blogs/doverton/archive/2007/05/04/what-is-the-difference-between-an-outlook-contact-and-a-business-contact-manager-bcm-in-office-2007-contact.aspx
- If the contacts are different, will other third party programs like Plaxo be able to update files based on BCM or only the Outlook contacts?
It depends on how they are accessed – you would need to talk to the 3^rd party vendor
- Are there any good sources of training on BCM 2007 from MS or from third parties like the BCM for Dummies or BCM for idiots? Other sources of good info?
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-9623379-7360062?initialSearch=1&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=business+contact+manager
- And finally if I migrate 3500 contacts from ACT to BCM are there problems with the import or can third party programs assist? I heard there were issues like only 800 contacts can be imported and all the timestamps in ACT will be lost when history records are imported?
I think this is not true, but I’ve not got ACT to find out. The import can hit problems if you are not based in the US as time records get screwed up, but exporting to CSV file, loading in Excel and then importing seems to work.

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: BCM, Business Contact Manager

Business Contact Manager 2007 (BCM) is NOT supported on Windows Terminal Server, but a little hack will make it work

doverton — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 14:54:00 GMT

[updated on 28th July]

Hi,

I've pinged this around a bit internally and the answer I got back is that this is not supported and will not work. I have not tried it myself, but don't expect it to work. If you need this sort of functionality you need to look at MS-CRM I am afraid.

History:

You need a Volume License of Office 2007 to run in Terminal Services. You can get BCM with Volume Licensing of Office 2007 as noted at http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/suites/FX101635841033.aspx
Outlook running in Terminal Services does not run in cached mode - http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/ba930d00-dc38-4564-ad00-8304d74f1d8c1033.mspx?mfr=true
3) BCM requires Outlook to run in cached mode (Office 2003 note in a KB about this - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831747/en-us and I have had PSS confirm this is still the case with BCM and Office 2007)

Wish this was not the case, but better to say up front rather than pretend.

Now, updated, if you look at How to enable cached mode for Outlook when used inside Terminal Server (which means that BCM can work too) then you can see how to enable cached mode, so providing you have a Volume License you can use BCM inside Terminal Services

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: BCM, Business Contact Manager, Office 2007, Small Business

Why should a small business use Office 2007

doverton — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 06:46:00 GMT

Once again I thought I would put pen to e-paper on the top reasons I give people to move to Office 2007. I don't think there are many businesses out there that use a PC and don't use some form of office productivity suite and while most use Microsoft Office XX (where XX could be 97, 2000, XP or 2003), some use other products that in my opinion just don't compare for a business that wants to look great and work efficiently.

With Office offering a massive choice of products and features, these are the headlines I use when talking to people.

For those with a version of Microsoft Office, but not 2007

More Professional and Impressive documents and materials
- Use Microsoft Publisher 2007 to build sales and marketing materials that look agency made, but are actually in-house work
- The updated Microsoft Word 2007 has many features to ensure your documents have a professional, consistent look and feel throughout the whole document conforming to your brand goals (no matter how big or small they might be). The readability tests will also share with you how easy it is for someone to understand the document.
- Writing can be so unengaging, yet pictures are often very time consuming to get right. Using the new text features, features such as subtle shading or reflections or glowing words are a click away and can make text dazzle. For the words that can be better communicated in a picture the impressive Smart Art feature can take a simple list and turn it into a process diagram, or an organisation chart and all with any of the new professional style schemes to be sure to enhance the impact.
- Most people can recognise an "old" Excel charts - the colours are bland and the charts often quite flat. For this very reason the charts in Office 2007 have been given a significant facelift to ensure they look professional, while still conveying the information they are supposed to.
- While sending an Office document to someone is very common, sometimes you want to be able to send something they can't edit, such as a price list or quote. Every application in the Office 2007 suite can now save your documents in Adobe PDF format without you having to buy expensive "authoring" software - its free as part of Office.
Customer Management
- Business Contact Manager (BCM), which is part of Office 2007 Small Business Edition (and Professional and Ultimate), enables you to track customer correspondence, e-mails and sales opportunities. This has been improved so that e-mail sent or received by one person in your business can be see in the account management screens by everyone. Likewise the new reports enable you to instantly see the status of your accounts and sales opportunities.
- You can now also run targeted marketing campaigns to a group of customers, where BCM will allow this to be via e-mail based campaigns with tracking information or by producing the materials for a paper based campaigns. You can then follow up on the people who have and have not responded as needed
- Finding information at the right time is hard, but using the built in search in Microsoft Outlook 2007 you can find any e-mail by what is in the e-mail, by a date range or a particular sender or recipient in less than a second. This means that even when on the phone you can be super responsive to that e-mail you sent them 9 weeks ago and they want to talk about it!
Mobile access to information

If you like using Microsoft Outlook 2007 when in the office you can now use all the features of Outlook when out of the Office. It automatically carries all of your e-mail, calendar and contact information with you, even the calendars of your colleagues to give you the same experience when you are not connected. Now, if you have an internet connection at home or in an internet cafe, without any cumbersome remote access tools you can continue to access these services online too and it will make a special web connection for you without any special RAS or dialing tools
If you don't want to take a notebook out with you, but you want your customer Information then using a Windows Mobile device you can now take your BCM customer data with you to reference while out.

Greater Efficiency

Have you every wanted to do something in Office, but not known how to? Well the new Ribbon Bar in Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 makes it simple to find what you were looking for and do new things quickly. No longer do you need lots of toolbars as extra tabs appear on the ribbon bar when you need them. Click on a table and the table tab appears to do all the things you need to do to enhance a table, such as putting in totals or changing the appearance
In Microsoft Outlook 2007 the To-Do Bar instantly shows you your next appointments and outstanding tasks easily so you don't need to open your calendar or task lists. It will also show you all of your flagged e-mails that you need to respond to.
Today Junk mail can be a huge burden to filter, but the improved filters in Outlook 2007 will place your junk in the junk folder and regular updates to the filter means that as the junk mailers improve their mails to not look like junk they still get caught and handled. Since looking at junk mail can tell them about you we also prevent connections back to their site meaning you drop off their spam list.
With Microsoft Outlook 2007 you can see several peoples diaries laid on top of one another to simply see the gaps for appointments and meetings, speeding diary management
When you are working in a document making a change and clicking OK to see the results takes time and required overcoming a little fear as to what it will do. Office 2007 now includes Live previews of changes before you click - simply move your mouse over a feature and you will be shown what it will look like, move your mouse away and the change preview disappears leaving your document as it always was.

Understand information better

Conditional formatting in Microsoft Excel 2007 means that you instantly see which numbers are large or small in a spreadsheet reducing the time it takes to understand them. You can use colour coding (red is bad and green is good on a sliding colour scale), icons (such as arrows or traffic lights) or even bars that fill the cell to show you large and small.
BCM can now produce a number of custom reports about the status of customers through a sales pipeline, marketing campaign or purchase history. You can also create any number of custom reports using any of the data you have input, even custom data fields you have created
For me, grammar is not my best skill and the inline Grammar Checker will put a blue squiggle under words that it suspects the grammar is wrong for. This means it will pick up when you use "their" instead of "they are" or "can not" instead of "cannot" and many more.

For those without a version of Microsoft Office

All of the above, plus

Document compatibility - never have a document screwed up because it was generated in Microsoft Office
Suite that has tools for 21st century that perform with 21st century performance, features and enables you to efficiently produce documents and interact with other systems to automate data retrieval from other systems
Access to thousands of applications that plug into the Office platform

OK, that is my brain dump on this subject - there are soooo many more things that Office 2007 can do to help you, but these are the ones I would talk about above everything else.

thanks

David

Technorati Tags: Office 2007, Office System, Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, PowerPoint, Why upgrade, Why buy

How to add a trade-in line item (i.e. give cash back to discount a deal) to BCM 2007

doverton — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 23:31:36 GMT

Someone asked me how to do this and I discovered that you can't have a negative discount percentage, negative quantity or negative price. So this makes it impossible to do... well, no, but it is not quite as easy as we would like. To make it work you need to create a Product and Service csv file to import to make it work. Here are the step by step instructions on installing it and using it.

Installing the trade-in items

Go to the BCM menu and select the Product and Services menu item
Press the import button at the bottom of the dialog to get the screen shown on the left
Create a csv file on your desktop called tradein.csv (start / run "notepad %homepath%\tradein.csv")
Copy and paste the text below into the text file and save

Trade In (10000), Trade in, -10000
Trade In (1000), Trade in, -1000
Trade In (100), Trade in, -100
Trade In (10), Trade in, -10
Trade In (1), Trade in, -1

browse the csv file on your desktop and press import
Job done

Using the trade-in items in an opportunity

Now we have these line items, all you do is select them in an opportunity and use % discounts to make them fit. For example, if you wanted to give £2,000 discount, simply add the trade in (1000) qty 2 to the opportunity. You can add a higher number and then discount down, so for example if you want to add a trade in of £39,000 then you would discount by 2.5% and have a qty of 4 for trade in (10000) - see the picture on the left.

Hopefully this little kludge will enable you to do trade-ins.

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: BCM, Business Contact Manager, Office 2007, Trade Ins, Discounts, How to

How to customize Business Contact Manager 2007 forms in Outlook 2007

doverton — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:15:15 GMT

I found this on the Office Website when someone asked me about form customisation for BCM. I thought I would share it.

Demo: Customize Business Contact Manager forms

You can customize Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager forms by adding fields and list items (drop-down lists) that are unique to your business.
You can customize the following types of forms:

Account
Business Contact
Opportunity
Business Project

You can customize drop-down lists by clicking Edit this list and then adding your item to the list.
Watch this short demo to see how to customize a Business Contact Manager for Outlook form.
How to do it (text version)

Customize your Business Contact Manager forms through user-defined fields
Customize drop-down lists on Business Contact Manager forms

Demo: Customize Business Contact Manager forms - Outlook - Microsoft Office Online

ttfn

David

Technorati Tags: Business Contact Manager, BCM, Customise, Customize