Outlook with Business Contact Manager

[Saodavi]

Okay, sorry to bring this back up again. My Treo kicked the bucket and it looks like I'm going to be giving in to the dark side (Microsoft Outlook w/Pocket PC Phones). Based on a previous thread, I've decided to go with Outlook (over Act, Goldmine, Top Producer, pen and paper, etc.). This is largely because it's free with Office and due to its popularity, has lots of support. Plus, it should work well with my Pocket PC.

I've been using Outlook for a little while. It seems to get the job done. But I've been hearing about the free Business Contact Manager add-on for Outlook. I've done some research and I can't seem to find out any useful information about it.

For those of you who use it, can you please explain its advantages over Outlook w/o BCM? Is it worth installing BCM and does it have features that you need and use?

If it matters, we'd like to have multiple people sharing the contact database and appointments on their PC's and Phones. We don't have an Exchange Server ... just a peer-to-peer network.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[drewnick]

It lets you keep better notes about your contacts. I'm really hoping to get away from Top Producer and am considering Outlook BCM but so far nothing gets close to Top Producer for managing real estate contacts.

[Dan Connolly]

I like it but I never used the basic Outlook, I went straight from TP to Outlook BCM. I haven't gotten it to work with multiple computers, I have heard that the newest version does it and tech support told me you can use the remote palm type devices to synch it (which I don't have, I have a tablet PC). The other quirk is that it doesn't really have a good ability to store information about couples (separate work numbers etc) each client is unique, so when I am sending out mailings it was difficult to get a mailing lable that goes to MR and MRS XYZ. I finally solved it but it was a pain in the @ss.

[Saodavi]

I know what you mean about the Couples. The way we're doing it is...

First Name: Joe and Susan
Last Name: Smith

Then you can just do "Dear [firstname]" or "Dear [lastname] Family" and it seems to work. If you have unmarried (or gay) couples, it becomes more difficult. If you only have a single person on file it's also hard because you can't use the prefix "Mr. and Mrs." or "Smith Family". It's still a kludge though and I've had this problem with every contact manager I've tried.

[Dan Connolly]

That's what I did, TP would merge them together on the addresses, so I had to go through my database and set up a new addresses on each client so they would print addresses correctly. It was a pain in the neck but now that's that is fixed I don't have any complaints.

[mutu26]

It lets you keep better notes about your contacts. I'm really hoping to get away from Top Producer and am considering Outlook BCM but so far nothing gets close to Top Producer for managing real estate contacts.

My wife has a lot of pen-friends. But once she almost cried, because her data was lost. Accidentally I came upon an one utility on the Inet and she thanked me a lot, perhaps it would be usable in this issue just like for her - download troubleshooting of outlook .pst.