Customer Reviews

Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is a very good resource to have on hand for anyone new to Outlook's Business Contact Manager. The layout is clear, important concepts are covered and there are a fair amount of screen shots. It is easy to jump to what you need. However, for something intended for "dummies," or those of us brand new to the program, they do not spend enough time on just getting started. For example, at the beginning they tell you how to create a database (yup, I need to know that). Then they jump right into importing to it from Excel or other sources (bam! huh?). After I created my database I couldn't tell if it was there since my view in Outlook didn't change! More step by step screen shots at this point were needed. Now, how about a simple example of how to manually enter a new contact? I have a pile of business cards on my desk to input (in addition to a bunch more in Excel). A few lines on how to get one contact into my new database so I could see what's happening would have been very helpful. Start simple, right? They forgot to do so.

However, the program is quite extensive and a book simply can't give someone the knowledge a class could. The book was well worth the money as a reference tool, but I'm still looking for a class because nothing beats hands on learning.

This book is a good intro document for Outlook BCM. It covers all the basics well. Due to some shortcomings of Outlook and BCM - which are not mentioned in the book or by Microsoft - importing some data is not straightforward.

For those of us that have a very complex set of many thousands of contacts with long histories in each record the book and Outlook BCM failed to deliver.
After days of following the book exporting data from various other programs into several file types; I gave up trying to import data using the book's directions.
A few hours searching on the web provided several missing pieces that explained factors relevant to other data structures and provided work arounds. Even then some records became garbled after importing but at least there were only a couple hundred garbled and not thousands. It was a number that could be fixed manually in a few hours.
The major fault regarding import lies with limitations of Outlook - BCM.
I would fault the book only slightly for not mentioning Outlook - BCMs faults and limits.

I was put in charge of figuring out Business Contact Manager in our office. I got this book after many fruitless attempts at the HELP tab. The first thing I tried to find out was target marketing out of Business Contact Manager and there it was, in this book. It has made the transition from ACT way easier for us.

This is and exelent book. Everyone who is having trouble figuring out Outlook 2007 should buy this book. It's simple to understand, helps in the "dummiest" questions that we could have and in the "dummiest" problems that we could ecounter.

This book was recommended to me by the chairman of our monthly business networking group. Since Lon Orenstein (the author) lives in Dallas, TX, the chairman invited him to present at our meeting on Saturday, May 22. He did an amazing job and I expect you will be receiving orders from other members of the group. BCM is now driving practically everything I do on line due to the understanding I have gained about it thanks to Lon's book and presentation.

This is a great book on the merits of Outlook 2007 BCM. Keeps it simple with a bit of humor thrown in.

What would make it better?
1. Don't assume that the reader knows everything about Outlook 2007. For example, when the book is talking about backing up the BCM database, they said NOTHING about backing up your other Outlook data files. Without backing up those datafiles, all your LINKS to that data will be gone... along with the data itself. (Kinda major oversight in my opinion.)

2. Setting up archiving within Outlook and how to do it. Before changing to Outlook 2007, I didn't archive anything because a COPY of the email would be archived in Act! I didn't have the feature turned on. Now, I did figure it out for archiving and also that if you LINK an email to a contact, you didn't COPY that email to the contact. So, if it's worth linking, it's worth KEEPING and ARCHIVING. Show us how to archive. (It IS a "dummies" book after all.)

Everything else is great. Perhaps I should've bought an Outlook 2007 for Dummies book as well for reference... but I would've thought that all the important parts of BCM would be incorporated in this book - even if it's not DIRECTLY related to BCM.

I used ACT! in the past and of course had a copy of ACT! for Dummies. This does a good job of walking you through the program. This is a lot different program then I expected so it was good to have this as a guide.