Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007
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Larry, one of our readers, has contacted us with the following suggestion to improve/fix the Office 2007 version of Business Contact Manager (BCM).
Subject: How to speed up Outlook 2007 and BCM
Message: If you could post this it could help everyone.
Outlook with BCM installs SQL Server 2005 express. If left unchecked SQL Server will eat all the memory in the PC. If the Max Memory is set to a reasonable number like 256 to 512MB systems will speed up by not running out of memory. I took another route and upgrade to 4GB and all performance issues disappeared.
BTW your tips on this were most helpful. Thanks.
On behalf of everyone who finds this useful… thanks Larry.
We’d rather leave it uninstalled and use another customer relationship management (CRM) solution, especially when Outlook 2007 struggles enough without loading it up with BCM! This is a real shame as we can see the benefit of using BCM for the small business customer.
How many of you are using BCM and Outlook 2007? Please share your experiences and issues. We’ll feedback any issues and problems to Microsoft if you can supply details on how to reproduce the problems or if you can at least provide detailed info on the symptoms.
Technorati Tags: BCM, business contact manager, CRM, customer relationship management, Microsoft Office, Office 2007, Outlook 2007
October 17th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I installed Outlook 2007 with BCM last week and have been fighting many issues with it. I’m the IT guy over here, and read all the info. on BCM. Sounded great however, it just doesnt deliver sofar. Here’s the issues I’ve encounterd:
-sluggish (alot of disk activity going on) (I have 1GB…maybe I need to bump it up)
-Wont remember “currnet view” of business conacts. After you change the view and exit, it reverts back to the default view.
-Wont record Marketing Campaign tracking for all conctacts using mail merge with Publisher. (work around is to create two Marketing Campaigns , one to print and the other to record the fact (use the 2nd one with WORD not Publisher). This is way too combersome for large contacts lists.
-Randomly uncategorizes contacts (the work around is dont use the built in category, instead create a new field and make your own. Also the built in categories disappear it you change the views, the heading is still there but no color buttons.
-Wont use “Existing list” feature in the Marketing Campaign window, instead it switches to “Custom list” with nobody in it.
-Marketing Campaign reports (by Business Contact) show only headings and no data, even though there are contact receiptients in the Marketing Campaign you’re reporting on.
If you have any light to shed on these probs, please let me know. I’ve spent hours updating, downloading and surfing the web for resolutions.
Thanks
Mick
October 17th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
If it is Vista then you’ll need AT LEAST 2GB to run Microsoft’s latest baby properly.
We’ve not even installed BCM as the previous version was a hog and things are bad enough with Outlook 2007 without adding another “hog” into the mix.
You can have the actually BCM database on a separate computer. Not sure if this is 100% accurate, but you should be able to download SQL 2005 Express and deploy it on a separate machine and then connect to that machine from each instance of Outlook 2007. Remember that SQL 2005 Express has limits to how much data it can store.
The other issues you’ve highlighted sound like bugs. Just like the whole Office 2007 suite, BCM wasn’t ready for general release in our opinion.Perhaps these issues will be fixed in the first service pack, which unfortunately we don’t know the release date of yet. You can try getting additional support from the Microsoft Public Discussion forum for Outlook.
Fix the memory issues first (if applicable) and if this doesn’t fix things then uninstall BCM. We suspect the later will be the “real” fix in the end!
Sorry we can’t help you out any more than that but we’ve no experience of this pile of …. (fill in the blanks for yourself).
June 14th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
BCM seems to have all the functionality for basic usage. With a 4 processor system trimmed to the max, it still has memory problems. What was MS thinking?
June 14th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
We agree with you Messino! As for what they were thinking about… having a product to secure market share. Shame it isn’t a better product.