We have a customer who uses Microsoft’s Business Contact Manager (BCM) to help her keep track of her prospects and clients.   BCM is aimed at small businesses and links with Outlook, so that your contacts, emails, calendar and tasks are all interlinked.

The customer expressed an interest in our Exchange Mailboxes.  This is a service which brings the power of Microsoft Exchange to smaller businesses. Normally you’d have to install an Exchange Server, and pay for the setup costs – the whole bill coming to around £4000 – to get access to the advanced features Exchange offers.  However, we’re able to rent you a mailbox for a small monthly fee.

The trouble was, Business Contact Manager could not be integrated with an Exchange mailbox.  Find out why and what we had to do…

First of all, what’s so great about Exchange mailboxes anyway?

Well, they allow you much more flexibility.  The Exchange Server holds a copy of your whole mailbox, including contacts, calendar, emails (incoming, outgoing, filed and deleted), tasks and to-dos.  This information is synchronised with your computer so you can use the information from either your regular comuter, multiple computers or online – all without any overlap or loss of data.  The added benefits of this are :

• You can have someone else manage your diary for you
• When logging into Webmail you can see all your emails: inbox, folders, sent, deleted etc
• There is always a backup of your email system online, so your data is more secure
• Emails can also synchronise with your phone (if it’s got Windows mobile installed on it)

To set up an Exchange mailbox on your computer you have to set up a Profile.  This is different to what you do when setting up a standard POP3 account.

The issue with BCM is that it can’t exist in the same profile as an Exchange mailbox.  We found the following statement from the Microsoft website:

“You can’t include BCM in the same Outlook e-mail profile as your Exchange Server mailbox.   However, you can create a second Outlook profile for BCM and easily switch between the two when you need to work with either your Exchange Server mailbox or your BCM data. Although BCM won’t synchronize your contact or e-mail information between the two profiles, you can use Outlook’s Import/Export features to move items between the two profiles.”
Click here to read the full article

We don’t think it’s easy to switch between the two as you have to log out of Outlook and then log back in picking something else from the list.
Click here to read the article we base this on from the Microsoft website.

But this article applies to Outlook 2003, so if you’re using a different version you may find it as ‘simple’ as it says in the extract above!

It sounds to me as if BCM will be separate from your Exchange email.
So, it would be the same as if you were using Act or another CRM solution – and many people cope with this!

So, if you’re prepared to swap between your emails and your BCM data it is possible to benefit from both systems.  And if not, either you will have to remain with a simpler email system or you replace BCM with another customer relationship package.

If you’ve got any experience of these two packages running together, please do share your thoughts with us here by leaving a comment.

Cat Young
www.solve-the-web.co.uk