Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007 has now been in beta for several months and I was just looking at some stats and was delighted to see that it is one of the most downloaded of the apps in the beta program. With the 2007 release, Outlook with business contact manager now has a whole new level of capability that notches up the ability of any small business to manage their sales and marketing processes. Some of the key features that are part of the upcoming release are :

• Ability to customize forms, lists and reports. Yes, we do listen deeply to the customer feedback. Keep it coming, as you can see the top enhancement in the next release is the number one request from our existing installed base
• Ability to create, launch and manage marketing campaigns. This includes the ability to develop target lists based on data in both BCM and SBA. Yes that is now possible and no app in the industry has this powerful capability.
• Manage projects and tasks in the same way that sales professionals today manage opportunities within BCM. This now even further enhances the value to the service base organizations like consultation, legal etc
• Offline the data of BCM with a laptop just as users could previously do with pocket PCs. This features allows rich roaming on any portable device or PC
• Ability to differentiate business contacts and accounts from leads so specific actions and tasks can be created for each category of customer

All the other rich capabilities of BCM (contact, account, opportunity, 360 views of  all history, integrations with SBA etc) continue to shine within Outlook and adopt the new look and feel of office 2007 and have even deeper integration between the components eg a change in customer field in BCM now immediately flows into SBA. Previously the link was from SBA to BCM only. This addresses another usage scenario that emerged as the current versions got deployed by our small business customers. Other enhancements include richer reporting with more then 50 default report types. The new reporting engine is also more powerful and shares the same technical infrastructure with SBA i.e. ability to drill down, modify and filter reports.

We are now in the final fit and finish process and are super excited as we prepare to launch the software with the Office 2007 family.

Thanks for the great feedback on our last two versions. Please keep the dialog going and continue to tell us how you use the product and the capabilities that you would like to see in the future as new scenarios become possible in your businesses.