If you work in a small company of 25 users or less and need a customer relationship management solution, you may want to install Outlook’s Business Contact Manager. BCM is a Microsoft Office 2007 add-on available in the Small Business, Professional, and Ultimate versions of Office 2007. It can also be purchased as a separate product.

BCM works within the Outlook user experience and shows the potential of using Microsoft Outlook as a development platform for business intelligence applications with the ability to access and present data in a useful manner. It has its own drop down menu options and a placeholder in the folder view that renders customer, account and project data from a SQL database.

What are the extra features BCM adds to Outlook?

STORE AND CONNECT BUSINESS INFO:

The companies or organizations that you work with are called Account records in BCM, while the people you sell to at the companies or work with are your Business Contact records.

You can track potential opportunities, which must be linked to Account or Business Contact records. Use the Opportunity record to list the products or services that interest the customer.

BCM can automatically track and story your communication history with your customers such as e-mail messages, business notes, appointments, and phone logs. These history items are then linked to Account, Busines

s Contact, Opportunity, and Business Project records.

You can use BCM to keep a record of your marketing efforts in Marketing Campaigns. Create newsletters or other direct mail for your customers, by preparing the letter in Microsoft Office Word or PowerPoint. Then link the file to a Marketing Campaign record where you select the names and addresses you want to send the information to, and then track the responses.

BCM acts as a sort of mega-task manager where you can track and connect project tasks that are related to an Account or Business Contact

SHARE BUSINESS DATA WITH YOUR TEAM

You can share your business data with your co-workers so that you each of has a complete and in-sync list of your customers and linked communication history items. All the information in Business Contact Manager for Outlook is available to everyone with whom you share the data.

Simply share the database on one computer, and then grant access to anyone who needs it.

TAKE BUSINESS DATA WITH YOU

If you, or members of your team, frequently work away from the office, you can take your business data with you on a portable computer or on a mobile device such as a Windows Mobile-based smartphone or Pocket PC.

To take the data with you on a portable computer, you create a copy of the data on the portable computer, work offline on the portable computer, and then synchronize any changes when you return to the office.

To take a subset of data with you on your mobile device, you must install Business Contacts for the device.

In this way, even if your team members are on the road, you know when they connect, you all have up-to-date information.

CUSTOMIZE BUSINESS CONTACT MANAGER FORMS

You can customize Business Contact Manager forms by adding fields (known as user-defined fields) or items to lists so that you can include data that is unique to your business. The fields can be added directly to the form, on the General, Details, and History pages, or you can add the fields to the User-Defined Fields page.

CREATE AND TRACK MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

To keep in touch with your customers or attract new ones, you need to let them know about your products or services, and any sales or discounts that you offer. You need to market your business.

A Marketing Campaign lets you select the customers you want to contact and choose the medium, such as Direct Mail Print, by which to contact the customers. You can also identify the customers who respond to the campaign, and then track the number of responses in the Marketing Campaign.

TRACK YOUR BUSINESS AND CREATE REPORTS

You can run reports and then modify them to contain just the information you want. After you have run a report with all your Business Contacts, you can then sort by specific information in the report, and also filter the report to show selected Business Contacts. You can add a header and footer to your report and save it as an Excel* (.xls) file.

Create Business Projects and related tasks to stay on top of the activities that help you take the best care of your customers and run your business. Link Business Projects to an Account or Business Contact record to help you track the work items and due dates. The Business Project and individual tasks can be assigned to different members of your team.

VIEW FINANCIAL DATA FROM YOUR ACCOUNTING SYSTEM

If your copy of Business Contact Manager for Outlook is integrated with an accounting system, you can view your customers’ financial history and financial summary from their Account records.  You can then edit individual transaction records which can be updated in your accounting system.

Create quotes, sales orders, and invoices that you can send to your accounting system.  You can also create time entries from phone logs, Calendar appointments, and tasks, so that you can pay your employees or invoice your customers.

Currently, supported accounting programs include Microsoft Office Accounting 2008, Accounting 2007, and Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006.

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