Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies at Dominant Systems Book Store

Keep track of customers, coordinate projects, and implement initiatives

The fun and easy way(r) to put BCM to work and make more money in less time

Looking to make the most of Business Contact Manager? This nuts-and-bolts guide gets you up and running with this powerful software in no time. You'll take advantage of the latest features -- from customizing fields to integrating with Office Accounting -- to keep your business operating smoothly. Create quotes, orders, and invoices in a flash so you can focus on sales!

Discover how to:

* Create and manage a database
*

Organize your day
*

Share data among multiple users
*

Synchronize laptop data with a master database
*

Improve your customer relationships

Customer Reviews & Comments
This book is a cheerleader for BCM. It completely omits numerous areas of discussion, most notably the serious performance issues with BCM (and of the required SQL Server Express database service). There is no discussion of the tradeoffs of BCM versus other methods of CRM (other add-ons to Outlook, either free or commercial; stand-alone applications; and the many web-based solutions, both free and commercial). The discussion of importing and exporting data is very superficial. For example, if you've been keeping your contact data in Outlook, it's essentially in a single table. When you import it into BCM, should you import it into Accounts, into Business Contacts, or into Opportunities? Really, you probably want some of it in each of those three tables -- yet there's absolutely no guidance in this area. How does one take what's essentially a large flat-file database and get it into what's a multi-table database? There's no good way that I can discern. I ended up importing everything twice: once into Business Contacts and once into Accounts -- then spending days fixing all the issues that resulted. (To start with, there were no links between these.) Don't even get me started about using Opportunities.... In fact, BCM has NO way to import into the Opportunities records (from Outlook) ... you can import only into Accounts or Business Contacts. So you have to enter all your Opportunities by hand (unless you were previously using ACT, the only outside application supported in a non-trivial way). Plus, there's no warning that when you import into Business Contacts and/or Accounts, you often lose most or all of your notes formatting (not to mention that long notes get truncated). What about the various ways in which different businesses, from single-person to medium-sized, might profitably use (or choose NOT to use) Accounts, Opportunities, and Projects -- all of which are optional? These are some important early decisions for a user to make, having huge effects (later) on a user's time allocation, data entry requirements, and daily workflow -- but these issues are pretty much ignored here. Bottom line: in this book, there's a huge vacuum of guidance in many important areas. Really, the book just scratches the surface of this topic and wastes most of its space either giving you beginner-level information about each feature or attempting lame humor. I have bought other "For Dummies" books and found them quite detailed and helpful (i.e., really for non-dummies), but this time I'm quite disappointed. Buy this book for a very shallow tour of BCM's features. If you're starting from scratch (i.e., you don't have data to import from anything other than ACT), it may be helpful. But if your needs are any deeper or more complex, look elsewhere.

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