Business Contact Manager Team Blog

PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/2008/07/frequently-asked-questions-for-business-contacts/

I am trying to post to this site with questions on BCM as I am reviewing the software for my department.

Can you tell me:

I am trying to set up a telemarketing campaign but I am unable to import my list so there would be no reporting on the results of the campaign....? Workaround?

Also, how can I import Global address book into the project management portion of the software so that I can delegate tasks etc....

Sorry forgot my email.....regarding the previous post on bcm relating to telemarketing campaign

hobsont@superiorpropane.com

After working on importing our 18000+ contacts for the last few weeks, there is one important question that I think is missing from this list.

If you have your accounts and contacts in separate Excel files (they were provided to us from an outside source), how do we link the contacts to the accounts on import?

I have been trying to figure out how to do this on import, through Access and even through SQL (my Access and SQL knowledge is not that strong) but with no luck.

Is there any insight you can offer?  We want to go live with this in the next couple of weeks but if I can't find a way to do the linking, it will take longer than that for me to do it manually.

I have not found much on the newsgroups, either through searches or postings.

HELP!!!! Please.

Hi Vinit,

I do not have any duplicate account names although some of the contacts have the same Full Name and Company Name.

I have an Excel spreadsheet with a column for the parent account, I can import this into a custom field on the contact if that will make it easier.

Thanks again,

Nancy

Hi - I'm training a company on BCM and they had a few questions for me that I don't know the answers to. They are sharing their BCM databases.

If a contact or account is deleted - where does the deleted record go in case it needs to be retrieved?

Is there any tracking on who modified/deleted a record?

Do you need to set some permissions to ensure that important information is not deleted? If so, how?

Can you turn an opportunity into a project?

Does BCM work at all with Microsoft Project?

Any help you can give me would be appreciated. Thank you...

Julie

Thank you for the speedy response Vinit.

I have 07 bus manager on XP Pro.  I have a new problem... The Business Contact Manager Home Screen (the page that has the 4 tabs.) is now blank.  I can click on the 4 tabs, but there is nothing on any of them...  Please help.

I would like to be able to amend the fields that are visable when I open a business contact.  I do not need the business card visable, for exmple.  Is it possible to amend/remove fields in this view?

That is unfortunate but many thanks for your prompt reply!

Is there functionality in BCM to run reports on communication history across multiple contacts (with sorting/filtering) vs just one contact?

I still need help with my issue.  

I am on BCM 2007.

I am trying to customize, but need more than 40 user-defined fields. So I am trying to customize using the developer tab. When I go to publish my new form, I get the following message, "Cannot publish the form because of a MAPI error. Could not complete the operation because the service provider does not support it."

I only added one text field, so I'm not doing anything fancy. I even backed out then restarted all, and opened up a form, then hit publish without changing anything, and I still get the error message. So it's not what I'm adding, it's something native before I even start customizing.

Hi Vinit,

Have you had a chance to look at that SQL code?

I'm not sure if this will help or not but I needed to walk some of our users through BCM so as a temporary way to have the account viewable, I imported the account name into a custom field on the Details screen.

I appreciate you taking the time to look at this.

Nancy

I am on BCM 2007.

I am able to create a task linked to a contact, and can view the task via communications history.

My challenge is that even though I have the start date, status and priority fields showing on the view, they are blank, even though there is info in these fields when I open the task.

Also, for some reason, all the tasks show up as created today at 12:00 am, no matter what time I create them. This is the "created/due" field.

1. In the reporting function - users have the ability to enter their company name in the header - is there a way to default to their company name so they don't have to type it in each time?

2. In the reporting function - Can the page number location or format be changed?

3. In the filter function - I'm confused as to how the grouping () works on the Advanced filter screen.  Is that only necessary if you use the And Or?

4.  Why would you save a filter, wouldn't you just save the report?

5. In the simple filter screen, is there a way to remove the checks for all options, for example Source of Lead, or do you have to check them individually?

Unspecified doesn't seem to do anything.

Sorry for all the questions - thank you in advance for your help.

I am wondering if it is possible to build in a confirmation before allowing a user to delete contacts.  On two occasions, one of my users has hit delete when he (unwittingly) had many contacts selected.  There was no confirmation message and all of a sudden, 100+ contacts vanished!

A notification saying 'Are you sure you want to delete 1,000,000 contacts?' or similar, would save me a huge amount of time trying to restore the shared database.

I have run into kind of the same problem as nrickard mentioned some posts ago although I have the Account and Contacts in the same spreadsheet but on different tabs.

You would think that if you specify an Account name for Accounts and assign the same data to the Parent Account Name for Business Contacts the relationship between Accounts and Business Contacts would be imported - but nope!

I have tried to map names as strings to the Account name and Parent Account Name as well as unique ID numbers but nothing seems to work. What am I doing wrong?

There is some info on this site http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP011135001033.aspx  (second last question) but it is not the same issue. Both Accounts and BCs get imported but the relationship between them does not even if they are all located in one xlsx file.

Help please

I would like to move by database from my laptop to a separate computer so that multiple users can share the database if I'm not in the office.

What is the best way to move the database?

How do I switch my BCM from the original database on my laptop to using the shared version on the other computer?

There is a whitepaper mentioned a couple places that may have some of these answers, but the links do not seem to work.

Thanks for the help

I have been using BCM for about 6 months and works very well.

However, if I am in an Account, and want to add a Contact, with I click on the ADD button, I only get one entry to choose from.  There is also only one Folder to choose, "Business Contacts".  I know there are at least 50 Contacts in my database.  Why aren't they showing up???

I've compared the file for the one Contact that consistantly shows up, with the others, and I see nothing different.

I'm at a loss.

Hi scoolex,

I haven't had any luck doing this through SQL although I've tried many many times.  I know Vinit was going to see what he could come up with but I'm not sure he's had the chance to yet.

What I have done is imported the account name into a custom field then setup a custom view to sort all of the contacts by this field.

I've also put on a filter to hide any where they have a linked account or where my custom account field is empty.

This is ugly as I still have to manually link each one but it's the fastest way I could come up with ... I was getting tired of beating my head on a wall.

I hope this helps and if anyone does sort out how to work around this in SQL, I would be bery interested in knowing how in case this ever comes up again.

I have exported a BCM database file from one computer and imported it to another computer.  The computer I imported it to will serve as my "server" which my team members will access the database.  Two questions:

a.  Is it possible to preserve the "created on" date?  All reports I run have the "created on" date as the date in which I imported the database.

b.  Is it possible for me to access the shared database if I were at my house and not the office...I'm outside of the network.  How do I go about accessing the database instead of "working offline"

I am using BCM/MS Accounting in my home office, but travel alot with my Smartphone (6.0).  I'm thinking the best way leverage the available applications is to synchronize my BCM contacts BACK to my Outlook contact folder regularly, then use the Outlook/Office tools for the Smartphone.

One problem this overcomes is the callerID issue if I only use the BCM plugin for the smartphone, inbound calls are not recognized.

Thoughts?

Some additional questions:

1.  Do BCM and Outlook use the same calendar?  (If I take this approach will calendar be up to date?)

2.  Will I have to worry about creating dupes back in my Outlook Contacts if I take this approach?

3.  Is there a better way to meet the needs of having email/contacts/calendar available through my Motorola Q?

Thanks!

I have just upgraded my Mobile phone which is a HTC TouchPro.  It has a high res display.  BCM for mobile does not display properly.  Is there a way of changing the display settings?

Hi

Is there a way that i call pull a report purely based on phone logs

My sales team have a set of KPI's which include a certain amount of phone calls per day.

I would like the ability to go through this with them through BCM if possible.

Thanks

Thanks Vinit, I didn't think of that.

Works a charm.

I have another question.

I really like BCM as it is very intuitive and simple to use.

However I would like to put some restrictions on my sales staff in regards to what they can and can't do to the database.

Other CRM programs have this feature using different 'access rights" etc.

Is there a way of doing this in BCM and if not will there be?

I ask as I was looking at the Microsoft Dynamics CRM which seems more powerful but with power comes complexity that I would like to avoid!.

But as a growing company this is the reality that I will have to upgrade.

It also seems that Dynamics is virtually impossible to import ALL data from BCM in one go.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

Vinit,

Can you expand on upgrade please.

I.E do you mean if you have BCM now then there will be a charge to get a software upgrade to Dynamics.

Or will there be better support for migration to Dynamics from BCM .

Thanks

Hi Team,

I am trying to generate custom reports for my business  contacts and I can't seem to find a way to create a report that includes information that is stored in the "comments" field on the details page. If there is a way to do this, I would greatly appreciate the help.

Thanks,

Arthur

Some of my customers are reporting this error dialog:

Title: Business Contact Manager failed to load

Message: An outgoing call cannot be made since the application is dispatching an input-synchronous call. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8001010D

(RPC_E_CANTCALLOUT_ININPUTSYNCCALL))

I believe this is related to Vista/Outlook2007/BCM. Why is this error occurring, and how can it be corrected?

f spafford at chapura dot com

Desktop. I have seen customer screenshots where Outlook is open in the background or Windows Mobile Device Center is open in the background.

Need to set up recurring automatic system of renewals for subscription service, and I don't know whether to code BCM or Accounting 2008 to do it. Thanks, Susan

Vinit,

Can you expand on upgrade please.

I.E do you mean if you have BCM now then there will be a charge to get a software upgrade to Dynamics.

Or will there be better support for migration to Dynamics from BCM .

Thanks

HI Vinit

Yeah I knew that it does but there are many deficiencies with the way it handles this.

I was after any information regarding your update comment.

I will try CRM blog as well

Cheers

Hi - I'm using Outlook 2003 with BCM.

I'm trying to customize a view with a filter showing any appointments made for the coming week.  But looking at the drop down list of fields under Appointments, it lists every field on the Appointment screen except StartTime and EndTime.  I've tried adding this as a custom field, but no luck and can't find any references to this problem on this site.  Anyone have any suggestions?  

We have five users using Outlook 2007 with BCM, all connected to the DB and working fine. Everything is updated to the latest version. The problem is that we cannot successfully export reports to Excel. None of us.

We see a progress bar and then the popup "There was an error generating the XML document."

Not a particularly helpful message.

I am not a developer and have no idea where to look for error logs or whatever.

I have searched high and low and cannot find anyone with a similar problem or solution.

Thoughts?

Thanks

We are big fans of Business Contact Manager and use it for managing all our projects.  Our projects involve about 30 individual tasks. Can you tell me if there is a way that we can set up a template to enter all of these tasks at once?  Thanks

A group of around 5 to 6 people in my office have been using BCM with Outlook 2007 for around a year now.  Randomly every 3 to 6 weeks all the contacts/companies will show up as reminders when a user opens up their Outlook client.  It doesn't affect everyone as a whole at the same time, just individual instances that appear to be random.

I have done numerous things to try to fix the problem:  moved the BCM data into a separate SQL Server 2005 Express database outside of my Outlook profile, dismissed all of the reminders when they've come up, gone through and marked every BCM contact/company's followup flag as complete, ran "outlook.exe /cleanreminders", disabled every unneeded add-in in COM Add-Ins and Exchange Client Extensions, and also uninstalled and then reinstalled Office and also BCM on every person's computer.

The problem continually comes back and I have no clue what is causing it or how to fix it.  I have found numerous similar posts on forums where people have had the identical problem.  Can the BCMTeam provide any insight into how to fix this problem plaguing are installations?

My company is currently in the process of migrating from Maximizer 9 to Outlook 2007 BCM. So far we like what we've seen with BCM there is only 1 issue i need to figure out though. In maximizer, we have thousands of notes attached to contacts and opportunities. Is there any way to import those notes into BCM either through the BCM interface or through the database back-end. We don't want to lose these notes!

Thanks

Hi Yi [MSFT]

We currently set up 30 individual tasks as soon as we get a new project.  We number them so that we can get them to appear in order in the Project screen.  We then work through these, allocating them to the appropriate person as each step/task becomes due.  It works really well... just very time consuming setting each project up (and we can be setting up up to 10 per week).  I hope this is the info that you need.  I have looked for other project management software, but nothing else is as good as BCM, except for this one aspect.

Let me know if there is anything else that you need.

Thanks

Chez

I am a "lite" user ie single user.

Using hotmail accounts with "outlook connector"

Outgoing mails are saved to the sent folder, but not linked to the contact, only incomming are linked.

Any ideas?

Hi Yi

Please tell Alex that he is an absolute marvel!!  I have just tried setting up a template.  It worked! and it will save us heaps of time.  Thanks so much!!

Now another question for you.  Is there a way that we can archive completed projects, so that they no longer appear in our Projects list, but so that we can still access them in the future if we need to refer back to them?  We currently have about 400 projects in the Projects list.

Thanks very much

Chez

Is there anyone out there that can help me with scripting some VBA to work with my BCM database? I have been making little progress on this as i try to figure it out for myself.

Ever since i loaded the bcm - outlook 2007 and added contacts - i get 115 reminders going off every day -

how do i stop this?  part of them are from the names that got loaded with the program - the others are the contacts i put in myself - i don't remember setting a follow up reminder for any of them.

how do i turn the reminder OFF?

thanks,

BRion

fyi: i have tried dismissing them & snoozing them - they just come back..

Brion

I have the same problem as seagull1, except i'm using IMAP accounts.

The received email is shown on the contact history, but sent emails doesn't show up.

I'm using a shared DB from another PC, and all records have email link selected.

Is there a list somewhere of all the userproperties associated with BCM objects? I need to know how to reference certain properties such as the "Initiated By" field and others. Thanks.

When working in VBA i can display the EntryID of a contact just fine (eg. 00000000557E48D98E440B42AC8FD4FE67DF75380200000013579B70288E1C8B4E86F2A2D1E99AC2D4)

When going through SQL Server, if i find that same Contact in the "ContactFullView" i don't find an EntryID but rather an EntryGUID (eg. 28709B57-1C8E-4E8B-86F2-A2D1E99AC2D4).

I am trying to loop through a table of contact names and link them to specific accounts on the "referredby" field, but this field relies on the ReferredEntryID value which is the EntryGUID.

So how do i go from the EntryID to the EntryGUID? and why is the db and Outlook MAPI using two different unique values for what appears to be the same person?

Hi,

i currently use the bcm-tool on my smartphone with windows mobile 6 and it's working fine. Now I will order a windows mobile 6.1 phone and will need my bcm-contcts on this one too. Is 6.1 supported by the actual version?

Thanks

I have two questions for the group:

1. For a user to have admin rights on the BCM database (eg. customize forms and user fields), can i just add the domain user account to the local admin group on the server that hosts the BCM database?

2. My BCM add-on freezes constantly when i try to do anything in the software. When i change views, open an account/contact, scroll down in a view. What causes this and how do i fix it? I have installed all updates. I have uninstalled/reinstalled BCM. I used to have SQL Server 2005 installed on my machine, i removed that and reinstalled BCM so that i only have Express installed. That didn't help. My other users don't experience the amount of hang-ups i have, though they experience some. Any ideas?

Thanks

Hi, I'm late to upgrading from BCM 2003 to BCM 2007, and the conversion has not gone well.  After restarting Outlook:

a) Get "finalizing configuration" clock

b) Receive error: "BCM cannot save this item because it does not recognize some of properties"

c) Outlook opens, and BCM folder is shown

d) Clicking BCM folder adds BCM to menu items and opens BCM home page

e) Switching to view Accounts, lists all the accounts by name with address, etc.

f) Clicking on an Account brings up error: "Could not load some objects because they are not available on this machine"

g) Once account opens...no data is shown.

Can anyone provide ideas on how to rescue this upgrade so that all of my data is brought together in the 2007 version?  Thanks!

Thanks Vinit, Ok, I created a dummy profile in Outlook without e-mail (since I have an exchange server account), and the installation of BCM worked.  Now, what do you suggest that I do to correct the issue in my regular Outlook profile to bring the BCM data and Outlook data together?  thanks for any feedback.  Cheers, Myles

Vinit, thanks for the response. Adding my user to the local admin group worked. Thanks.

As for all the hang ups. I closed the BCM db and readded it. And made sure all e-mail linking and folder linking is disabled but it's still hanging whenever i go to a new view.

One other thing, after doing some searching on the internet about this problem I see lots and lots of posts on different sites about this exact problem with no fixes or any comment by Microsoft. Is MS aware of this problem or just ignoring it?

Trying to use Opportunities to track all our new business...it's good, but I've run into one snag right now.

Why can't I just go to "New History Item" and select mail message like I can if I'm in a contact...that would write the message, send it and link it to the opportunity?

It seems so basic...I have an opportunity and that New History Item should have everything I could do with that Opportunity (email being a biggie). I really wish I could create user defined things for New History Item (though email is the only one that comes to mind right now).

Thanks!

One problem with the current view of Business Contacts at the bottom of the Account General form is inactive Business Contacts.  Even if a Business Contact has the tick removed from the Status / Active field on the Business Contact's General page, as that field is not visible on the General page for the Accounts, you do not know if any of the Business Contacts are inactive without drilling down into the Business Contacts.  

Could the Status / Active field for each Business Contact be displayed at the bottom of the Accounts General form? (I know, it is getting crowded already).  

Alternatives would be to not display inactive Business Contacts in the Accounts General form or to unlink the Business Contact from the Account - both much less preferable options.

Thanks

Andy

Hi,

I hope this question isn't a duplicate - I've tried searching for the exact answer but couldn't find it.

I just set up my PC to send the Business Contacts to my Palm Tungsten T3 via Bluetooth as vcards.  But I am concerned about what will happen when I synch, since the Tungsten will then will copy those contacts into my personal contacts.

Does it create any problems to have some contacts appear both in the personal and business folders?  Does it affect the history, etc.?  And if so, is there a workaround to this?

Thanks in advance!

CM

One more question...

I have two shortcuts to Outlook on my desktop all of the sudden (today is when I did all the bluetooth-type stuff on my PC, handheld, and cell phone).

One shortcut points to C:\Users\Public\Desktop, the other to C:\Users\(my username)\Desktop.  Aside from that difference, the Public\desktop has a user called Interactive with Read & Execute permissions.

Does this seem like a glitch or is it related to bluetooth/synching?  Do I need both shortcuts on the desktop?

Thanks,

CM

Folks,

Do you think there is a way to write SQL security script to have users only display certain types of Accounts or Contacts and not all?

Thank you,

Michael.

Just checking for a update on the sent email linking.

The problem is that sent emails doesent appear in contact history using IMAP accounts.

The received email is shown on the contact history, but sent emails doesn't show up.

I'm using a shared DB from another PC, and all records have email link selected.

Question,

I run a dumby outlook session on my server with BCM and share database to all users. Can I setup another BCM database on Sharepoint 2007 and use the pipeline template to pull records from a BCM database from another outlook sessions database that is syncing with the dumby database that I use as the share? I want to be able to manage the database from a sharepoint template to provide a web based CRM so to speak that is integrated with outlook users who connect to the shared database? please send email if someone has done this.

Alex,

The IMAP account is set to use a IMAP folder like "Sent" no to the Outlook "Sent Items" because if i select the Outlook "Sent Items" the messages sent cant be retrived from another computer.

The problem is that in the BCM Autolinking settings page the IMAP "Sent" is missing, the other folders like Inbox are shown.

I've tryed to change the IMAP out folder to a newly created folder like "OUT", but as i check the new OUT folder in the IMAP account the BCM Autolinking hides it, and start showing the IMAP original Sent folder.

So, the only way to link the emails would be to use the default Outlook Sent Items?

Thanks

I asked a question above on 28 October 2008 re the display of Active / Inactive Business Contacts on the Accounts General form.  If I mention this question again, will the BCM Team respond? <warm smile>

Ta

How can remote salespeople replicate a subset of the business contact database on their systems? They don't need to see each other contacts, but we don't want to set up separate databases for each others' territories.

I know in SQL Server replication, the subscription can be filtered.

How does one setup BCM to do it?