Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager

List Price: $149.95 Discount Price: $102.90

Features:

• Manage all your contact, prospect, and customer information in one place
• Manage sales leads and opportunities more effectively
• Easily manage marketing campaigns from concept to delivery
• Forecast sales and analyze data using flexible reports; customize contact, prospect, and customer information
• Share information easily and more securely with multi-user access

Customer Reviews:

Great Product [Posted on 2008-06-13]
I love the way the new interface looks! It works perfectly and is pleasant to look at. My only issue with it is that I am an everyday user of voice dictation software because I have a physical disability and I'm not able to type anyway for some reason when I am dictating an e-mail it does not dictate text in the proper location, I have just copied and pasted e-mails into the documents but it's still kind of annoying!

Awsome Simple Business Contact Manager [Posted on 2008-06-13]
Microsoft has done it again! Outlook with Business Contact Manager 2007 is a very solid, simple, and intuitive small business platform to work from. I have been in sales for over 10 years and have used a variety of solutions, including ACT and I like Business Contact Manager the best so far. If you enjoy actually selling as opposed to updating information continually, this is the solution for you. For instance, ACT has many useless and cumbersome bells and whistles that require input of information multiple times in multiple screens. Microsoft left these out...thankfully. In fact, I spent more time updating information in ACT than actually using it to be productive. Act is also prone to databases corruption. Our data in ACT was corrupted at least 2-3 times in a year. ACT Synchronization is finicky at best. And ACT integration to accounting software is cumbersome and expensive. Microsoft has trimmed the fat and created a very streamlined platform that gets the job done. No corruption of data thus far. Accounting software integration is a breeze-I use Microsoft Accounting 2007-also a very solid small business solution if you don't need automated Payroll-a less expensive option to QuickBooks. Only having to enter information once, simple customization, and seamless 2-way integration with accounting software is why I gave this a 5. It is not perfect but it is the best I have used thus far. Highly recommended. You will not be disappointed.

good product with many benefits if  [Posted on 2008-06-25]
This is a very good product but you need to integrate it with the other Microsoft 2007 products. Microsoft 2007 products are designed to run on powerful PC. If you do not have one, any of the products will run but slowly. These products are designed to be installed as a group usually under Vista. Once more, if you are not doing this, problems are possible. Lastly, with any new product functionality has changed. Microsoft considers it to be improved. What you and I think can be something else. All the functions are there. Some moved and some are in another product. I am relearning Microsoft Office 2007, Outlook 2007 and 64-bit Vista. This can be unpleasant, time consuming and frustrating. If you work through this, you will have the "state of the art" version of the product.
Microsoft 2007 products are designed for ease of use. Outlook 2007 has largely done this. The product requires a learning curve but has rewards for those that spend the time learning the new interface. BCM is not for causal home use but is invaluable for a home based or small business. This is a good product with many benefits if you have the PC, operating system and other 2007 products.

Good tool but not for XP [Posted on 2008-07-02]
I have years of experience with contact management software from ACT to Microsoft CRM. I was excited to try this version as it included many new marketing related tools.

I am running a fast XP machine as I am not ready to undertake the pain necessary to switch to Vista yet. Installation on my machine was simple yet time consuming. It took more than half an hour to install the product. That should have been a clue.

Once installed it configured easily and was very comfortable to use if you are used to working in Outlook. The contact lists and ability to schedule activities worked well. Virtually every aspect of the software worked as expected.

The biggest problem is that it used a huge amount of resources to run. Other applications slowed to a crawl when I would open Outlook. It took forever to load outlook when you opened it. Literally at least 1 minute to load the app each time.

The additional marketing tools worked well but ultimately I had to uninstall this as it was too much of a drain on my system.

I am certain my review would have been different had I been running a Vista machine. However there is noting on the MSFT website nor on the packaging that indicated I would have any issues at all running it on XP. Although there was some very helpful information on the product pages that assisted in setting up and using the contact manager functions.

Bottom line, if you're interested in CRM type functionality in Outlook, and are running Vista, you should take a look at Outlook with Business Contact Manager.

Decent features + Upgrade [Posted on 2008-07-07]
This version is not very different from the current 2003 Outlook that I use. It's better to think of it more as an upgrade. The new features include:

1) Business Contact Manager
2) RSS Feeds

Also, this version is compatible with my older version of MS word so no problems there.

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