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Business Contact Manager for Microsoft Outlook 2010 Technical Preview Released

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You have probably seen Office 2010 Technical Preview announcements in the press. Microsoft released a preview of Office 2010 yesterday to a limited number of users. Technical Preview is invitation only program. Office 2010 also comes with a brand new version of the Business Contact Manager. If you have received Technical Preview invitation, we highly recommend that you install new version of the Business Contact Manager, try new features, and give us feedback. You can download and install the Business Contact Manager from Microsoft Connect site (it's listed along with Office 2010 Tech Preview download)

Here is a list of some of the top features. We will be writing more about these and many other features in the coming weeks.

1. New User Interface: BCM features a completely redesigned user interface. The new UI is task oriented, and features activity dashboards, business metric gadgets, configurable tabbed views, and customizable preview panes. The User Interface is fully customizable and allows end-users to select the view elements that fit their business needs. The new UI also integrates with the Office Ribbon and the BackStage.

2. Dashboard: BCM offers a fully featured dashboard that enables users to manage their entire business and daily activities. The dashboard is fully customizable and can include a large number of sales, marketing, project management and utility gadgets. The dashboard will help users get a high level picture of their business and manage their priorities and tasks.

3. New Form Designer: BCM provides a new visual form designer that allows users to completely modify all BCM forms. Users can add up to 300 custom fields, remove fields (including default form fields) and add pages to forms. Customizations can be exported, imported, and shared across the organization.

4. Custom Entities: With BCM 2010 users can better model their business processes by defining custom “contact” and “account” type entities. For instance, healthcare companies will be able to create “doctors”, “patients”, “practices”, etc. The custom entities benefit from all business functions such as aggregating communication history, reporting, and so forth.

5. Sales Management: Business Contact Manager will allow users to define and track sales processes in an easy and straightforward manner. Users will be able to define multiple sales activities in multiple sales stages. Execution of sales activities is tracked directly on the opportunity and various dashboard gadgets and reports provide comprehensive analysis of sales status.

6. Lead Management: Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2010 helps users track their business leads and the process of converting those leads into contacts and/or business opportunities. Leads in BCM are lightweight (customizable) contacts that also include a lead score which is either manually assigned or calculated based on a set of scoring criteria. Users can set scoring criteria that makes sense in their business, helping track the quality of the lead and optimizing the sales process

7. Call List: With Business Contact Manager 2010, users will be able to manage the process of calling multiple contacts. This feature offers an easy to use user interface that takes the hassle out of tracking the calling process and analyzing its results. Call List will also provide the ability to define a call script that can be used when conducting the call, guiding the caller and providing a template for capturing responses.

8. Improved Reporting: Business Contact Manager will include enhanced business reporting. Reports will offer improved customization, sorting, and filtering, and custom reports can be defined and shared across the organization.

9. Performance & Reliability: Business Contact Manager comes with significant performance improvements.

 

You can also follow the Office 2010 buzz @ the social community of your choice:

Visit this blog often as we will write more about Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2010.

Thanks,

Mukesh

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2009
    What is the upgrade option/path for BCM 2007 to 2010 when the database is remote? It appears there is not one (the tool only presents a new option).

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2009
    Well - I am too impatient to wait for an answer...and I did find a fairly simple resolution. By using the new database tool I simply backed up my current DB and then restored it. When the restore process began it informed me it was going to upgrade the DB which it did. Once that was complete my Outlook client was able to connect just fine.

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2009
    Thank you for the information on the new/improved features for BCM 2010. Any idea of timing for release of BCM 2010? Thanks, Malcolm

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2009
    We are using BCM 2007 with Outlook 2007 and have integrated it with Accounting 2009 which works really well. However one thing we cannot seem to do is view quotes created in accounting within BCM, so if I create an oppurtunity and then convert this to a quote it allows me to do everything but once done there is no way to view the quotes you have to go into accounting. It also does not update the oppurtunity amount from the quote which is a right pain. Any help or advice much appreciated.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2010
    Call Lists is doing strange things. When I try to save a record in another file (Business Contacts), it calls up a blank record with my name on it and sends the entire call list into the Deleted file! When I restore the call list the settings have changed - the calling script has disappeared, the selected views have changed, and I have to start again from scratch. I tried this three times and the same thing happened.

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2010
    Any idea of when the non beta will be released?   The current version will on install on: en_office_professional_plus_2010_x64_515489 I've been waiting to use this, as a long time user of BCM, and even migrated all of my data from Quickbooks Customer Manager three years ago. Without it, my company is dead in the water unless we roll back to Office 2007, which would NOT bode well for our relationship with Microsoft in the future.

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2010
    Apologies.....it will NOT install on the current version of Office Pro Plus 2010 x64.

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2010
    I have the same issue as SPSteve above.  Any thoughts?

  • Anonymous
    June 20, 2010
    Hi, WE are a Microsoft partner and I am using Office 2010 as we download from our portal. When i attempted to install BCM 2010 from the download file BCMv4-Beta-BCMSetup-x86-en-US it advises: "This version of BCM is not compatible with the installed version of Outlook. Install the correct version of BCM or Outlook. [OK]" Can you please advise the version of BCM i need to install to get this working.. Many thanks, Mark

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2010
    No one knows the answer. I have a csv file with 6000 contacts in 2000 companies that I want import into BCM. I was able to test import into 2007 5 companies and the 20 or so contacts, all as separate entries. But then I had to drag to attach to a company. Waaaay to much work for 6000 contacts and 2000 companies. Will BCM 2010 import 2000 companies, then import and attach 6000 contacts to the companies?

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2010
    I'm a CA [a Canadian CPA]  and I have individual clients as well as corporate clients. I have lawyers and banks that are considered to be contacts to more than one client. -] do I set up an account for each client , individual and business client and then link contacts to each? What the best way to set this kind of situation up?

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2010
    I'm a CA [a Canadian CPA]  and I have individual clients as well as corporate clients. I have lawyers and banks that are considered to be contacts to more than one client. -] do I set up an account for each client , individual and business client and then link contacts to each? What the best way to set this kind of situation up?

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2010
    I have MS Office 2010 enterprise, but I don´t know how work Business Contact Manager. Can you tell me where is it? Thanks a lot. Eduardo Canseco

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2010
    I have MS Office 2010 enterprise, but I don´t know how work Business Contact Manager. Can you tell me where is it? Thanks a lot. Eduardo Canseco eduardo.canseco@gmail.com

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2010
    The migration form Act 6.0 to BCM 2010 is not at all flawless - it only migrated 370+ of our 5600+ contacts. Upon attempting to export from Act to CSV then back up, after much tweaking we are able to migrate all our contacts, but with a great deal of lost data, fields.... If you are going to include migration tools in the software, it should have a little better migration record than 7%. Any help would be appreciated. rmahrling@yahoo.com

  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2010
    I am using office 2010 with business contact manager and every time i open business contact manager, outlook crashes.  any ideas?

  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2010
    I'm looking for a whitepaper, best practices and a little help in selling this product as a solution to a law firm. Where can I find this information?

  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2010
    I'm looking for a whitepaper, best practices and a little help in selling this product as a solution to a law firm. Where can I find this information?

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2010
    The help is write here in the post. Don't sell it.

  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2011
    Using BCM 2010, from the Accounts records list, when I configure columns to show "contacts" it comes up blank.  Shouldnt this show all the contacts linked to this account?   Likewise, when I'm in Contact Management and I configure the columns to show "Account" this always comes up blank.  How can I configure this to show the Account each Contact is linked to ?

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2011
    Have just upgraded to MS Office 2010 from 2007 where BCM was running quite happily. Followed all the instructions product key etc, only one problem, the download via Digital River is in German, not English as requested at the language prompt. Digital River are unable or unwilling to help and I can find nowhere to contact Microsoft about this particular issue. Any ideas?

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2011
    I have been using ACT for years and I am continually frustrated with its slowness and lack of reliable synchronization with Microsoft Outlook.  Is there a resource available which can transfer most of the ACT Contact data over to Microsoft Outlook.  This would include the Notes, Groups etc from ACT? Thanks, sscarlis@msn.com

  • Anonymous
    November 22, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2012
    Why is it that when I want to design the form using "Developer" that as soon as I click on the developer tab the first tab (General) changes completely?  I want to add fields to subsequent tabs but keep the General Tab the way it is.

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2014
    How can i define my own "status" for project tasks?