10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Simplistic cheerleading, April 26, 2009
This review is from: Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies (Paperback)
This book is a cheerleader for BCM. It completely omits numerous areas of discussion, most notably the serious performance issues with BCM (and of the required SQL Server Express database service).
There is no discussion of the tradeoffs of BCM versus other methods of CRM (other add-ons to Outlook, either free or commercial; stand-alone applications; and the many web-based solutions, both free and commercial).
The discussion of importing and exporting data is very superficial. For example, if you've been keeping your contact data in Outlook, it's essentially in a single table. When you import it into BCM, should you import it into Accounts, into Business Contacts, or into Opportunities? Really, you probably want some of it in each of those three tables -- yet there's absolutely no guidance in this area. How does one take what's essentially a large flat-file database and get it into what's a multi-table database? There's no good way that I can discern. I ended up importing everything twice: once into Business Contacts and once into Accounts -- then spending days fixing all the issues that resulted. (To start with, there were no links between these.) Don't even get me started about using Opportunities....
In fact, BCM has NO way to import into the Opportunities records (from Outlook) ... you can import only into Accounts or Business Contacts. So you have to enter all your Opportunities by hand (unless you were previously using ACT, the only outside application supported in a non-trivial way).
Plus, there's no warning that when you import into Business Contacts and/or Accounts, you often lose most or all of your notes formatting (not to mention that long notes get truncated).
What about the various ways in which different businesses, from single-person to medium-sized, might profitably use (or choose NOT to use) Accounts, Opportunities, and Projects -- all of which are optional? These are some important early decisions for a user to make, having huge effects (later) on a user's time allocation, data entry requirements, and daily workflow -- but these issues are pretty much ignored here.
Bottom line: in this book, there's a huge vacuum of guidance in many important areas. Really, the book just scratches the surface of this topic and wastes most of its space either giving you beginner-level information about each feature or attempting lame humor.
I have bought other "For Dummies" books and found them quite detailed and helpful (i.e., really for non-dummies), but this time I'm quite disappointed. Buy this book for a very shallow tour of BCM's features. If you're starting from scratch (i.e., you don't have data to import from anything other than ACT), it may be helpful. But if your needs are any deeper or more complex, look elsewhere.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If You're Jumping Ship from ACT!, this is for you !, August 28, 2007
This review is from: Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies (Paperback)
Lon Ornstein might have co-authored a Dummies' book, but he's no dummy. His company is a well-known third-party developer of CRM enhancments - first with the ACT! product line and now Outlook 2007/BCM. Like all Dummies' books, this one is easy to read and understand, and gets right to the "meat" of using BCM. Highly recommended if you're trying to make the switch from ACT!, or if you need to extend the capabilities of Outlook 2007 for a small-midsize business.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gets you up and running, December 11, 2007
This review is from: Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies (Paperback)
I needed a book that would transition me from not using Business Contact Manager at all to using it in my every day routine. This book worked. The information was appropriate and presented in a logical fashion. The book was short enough that I could read it cover to cover. A good pick.
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