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Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager [Old Version]

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Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager [Old Version]

(70 customer reviews)

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DHMSCD58190WI

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Microsoft Outlook w Business Contact Mgr 2007 Win32 English CD

List Price:	$149.95
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Product Details

Product Length:	7.9 inches
Product Width:	5.4 inches
Product Height:	2.0 inches
Product Weight:	0.55 pounds
Package Length:	7.5 inches
Package Width:	5.4 inches
Package Height:	1.5 inches
Package Weight:	0.55 pounds
Average Customer Rating:	based on 70 reviews

System Requirements

Platform:	Windows Vista / Windows XP / Windows XP Professional / Windows XP Home Edition
Media:	CD-ROM
Item Quantity:	1

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

Average Customer Review: 3.0

( 70 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 found the following review helpful:

Excellent Upgrade, but could be even better Mar 12, 2008 By Mary Jo Sminkey "dog trainer and web programmer"
I'm a longtime user of Office 2003 with Outlook and was eager to try out this upgrade for Outlook as it's the application I use the most (other than Access which I use for my software development projects routinely). I really didn't have any need to upgrade the other applications, so this stand-alone was perfect for me. I actually don't use Outlook for email generally, preferring to use the standalone email open source product Thunderbird which gives me a lot more ability to customize and add other features to (and since I don't have to connect to an Exchange server or anything else that specifically forces me to use Outlook.) So I personally was not put off by the fact that things like spell check will not work if you use Outlook 2007 with the rest of the Office 2003 suite. That's been well documented here by other reviewers, so I won't go into it.

Putting those issues aside, this is a really nice upgrade. A lot of upgrades are sort of "so what", but this one really impressed me. First, the look and feel of it is much more polished. It's more than just a pretty face, I find the items on my calendar for instance much more striking and easier to see what I have coming up at a glance. While the install itself seemed endless, the final product does seem to run plenty fast enough on my machine (it's fairly high end, 8 GHz, 3 gig of RAM) older machines may have more problems. Outlook 2007 uses a different style of toolbar than older versions, I really like the new toolbar, with the tabbed panels and fancier icons, it's just a matter of getting used to it. Here are some highlights from the different sections of Outlook, things that I specifically like or don't like. Please note that in some cases, I may be mentioning things that are possible to do with customization...however, they are not things that are easy for the average user to figure out, particularly since the product comes with basically no documentation at all, other than typical Microsoft Help.

1. Email - as mentioned, I don't really use this much, but it *does* include a really nice RSS reader with a large list of feeds you can add immediately. Ironically, the one for Outlook 2007 is wrong, it adds the Outlook 2003 feed, I went to the Microsoft site to find the link for the correct one. One thing I also noticed is that when you are in Email, or any other area of Outlook other than the Calendar, there is a new "To Do" bar that displays all your upcoming appointments and tasks, and a field to create new tasks. Really great new feature.

2. Calendar - I really like the way appointments look as mentioned. Also there are now very clear Day - Week - Month buttons at the top, these were not as easily found in the previous version. I do find it funny that there is still no Year view. I can do this with calendar apps on my tiny Pocket PC, it seems ridiculous that I can't see a yearly overview, or at least a 3 month overview on my desktop. Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to customize the number of lines for appointments on the monthly calendar. If you don't have large numbers of appointments, it'd be nice to show 2 lines so you can read the whole appointment, as you can on the weekly view. In particular, this would be nice when printing calendars, rather than holidays and birthdays that are all chopped off. I did notice that I have spell check available when creating appointments, so clearly it's available for at least some functions. I also though ran into issues with Outlook not wanting to save my appointment when I was editing it and trying different options...but it didn't give me any really detail as to why, just kind of a random thing.

3. Contacts - In additional to the new interface, you've got all kinds of new stuff you can add and link with contacts. There's some neat new options, such as a link to go to the address on MSN maps, open their webpage in your browser, total customization of the business card for the contact, etc. You can add images to their contact notes, as well as a variety of other things like charts and graphs if you have the rest of Office 2007. I did notice as well that I can now sort my contacts by category. This drove me nuts in the 2003 version, that it would not sort by category, so very glad to have it now!

4. Tasks - Fairly similar to the changes with contacts, lots of additional things you can link to the task, I like being able to paste in the business card of the contact for the task, for instance. You can also link the task over to an account in the Business Contact Manager

5. Notes are still a bit more basic than I care for, but I use OneNote so only use these rarely now. It's definitely easier now to group them into categories, color code them, sort them, etc. but very basic functionality. OneNote is so superior in every way, but unfortunately is still sold as a separate product. Kind of a side note here...but I really wish that with many of these parts of Outlook you could add drawings as you can in OneNote, for those of us that have a tablet.

6. Business Contact Manager - So here's the real jewel in this product. I really didn't use the one that came with Office 2003 and only now see how much I was missing! First, to use this it will install SQL Server Express on your machine. I run standard SQL Server from a separate box, so it would have been nice to be given the option to specify a SQL location to use instead of forcing a new install of the server on me. But at least it only starts up when you try to access this section of Outlook, so that reduces the load at least somewhat on your machine. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how much this does, the name really doesn't do it justice. I'm really putting some time into getting my current accounts, contacts and projects loaded into this, as it basically does the same sort of things that I was using a different project management program to do. Now, this is hardly going to replace a full-fledged, multi-user project management software application. But for a sole proprietor like myself, it does the basics well enough to be useful. I can create projects, enter tasks for the project, add notes and hours worked, view custom reports on my projects, etc. I don't do much sales and marketing at the moment, but that's all in there as well. I really just wish it did even more. I'd like to be able to link files and documents to my tasks, for instance, or at least, include better integration with OneNote, which is ideal for project documents and notes. I found it particularly strange for instance, that in my regular Contacts, I had a link to OneNote to create custom notes for that contact...but I did not have the same button in the Business Contacts (which is where it is *really* needed.) Better integration with OneNote would really be a huge boon to those of us that are using both of these products.

Just as an additional side note, I was glad to see the upgrade did not break my ActiveSync with my SmartPhone, everything still works fine and syncs properly. I did notice that the contacts in the Business Contact Manager do not sync with the PPC, but that's to be expected (just something to be aware of). There's also still a big problem with Outlook and that is the issue of alarms not going off if the program isn't up and running. I always like to have them synced to my phone so I am less likely to miss them just because the program isn't open.

Overall, this is an excellent upgrade, as long as you have a machine that can handle it and are not effected or bothered by the various issues with using it along with the Office 2003 suite. Some improvements to some functions would make it even better, but it is certainly still worth a look.

29 of 32 found the following review helpful:

Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager - The Most Improved 2007 Suite Product Feb 26, 2008 By Mark "Technology, Music and Movies"
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager

For those of us that are very heavy Outlook users, I think it's safe to say we are not all in the target audience for this update. Business Content Manager adds a medium sized business CRM type tool to Outlook. This is kind of a mix of products, for those familiar with GoldMine and ACT. And if you are in the market for such a tool, WOW! Microsoft has knocked this one out of the park.

It's impossible to talk about any Office 2007 product without mentioning the dreaded "ribbon" makeover. Word and Excel have new xml based file formats that in and of themselves wouldn't be an issue. The problem is the way MS removed the menu structure it took everybody forever to learn!

Outlook 2007 is way better than the other programs in terms of look and feel. (I'm holding my breath. lol)

It should be fairly simple for you to import your archives and access your settings in ways that are familiar. If you're a Windows Vista user, you can also import all those weird new calendar formats into this guy too. :)

This product is included with a few suites, including Office Standard, Office Professional and Office Ultimate. It is not included in the Office Home, which is why many will buy it here. Alternatively, you can buy Outlook as a stand-alone application.
Microsoft Office Standard 2007 FULL VERSION
Microsoft Office Professional 2007 FULL VERSION
Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 FULL VERSION [DVD]
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
Microsoft Outlook 2007

The Business Contact Manager piece adds some key new feature integrations with Outlook here. Outlook has always been great at creating calendar items and task lists. Now with BCM, those who have follow up routines for client calls can set them up and get reminders for every new client. Having those common "thank you" and "next steps" messages set up automatically is a nice time saver.

You can also do some basic graphs and charts for marketing management. This is a nice to have and will be necessary for all those running small and medium businesses using this product.

There are some decent help pages and tutorials included too. Those come in handy for learning some of the BCM functionality not everybody is used to.

As for Outlook, some users have complained about missing functionality when this product is installed without other Office products, like Word. Luckily (or unluckily) I already had Office Home on my machine. However, if you don't have Word already on your machine, you will want to investigate that.

The main issue with CRM type software has always been stability. Once you get your customer database to a large size, you can see which products are better. Most products have a point where you start to get corruption and / or break-downs. Only time and experience can tell you that.

Still, this is a great entry into this arena for Microsoft. With this product they added more than they took away. I only wish basic Outlook was included with the Home version of Office!

Check this one out! Enjoy!

61 of 72 found the following review helpful:

Pretty packaging hides serious shortcomings Feb 28, 2008 By I. Peters
I was looking forward to trying MS Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager but after a few days of playing around with it, I am thoroughly disappointed and frustrated. But first things first.

Before upgrading to OL 2007 I ran MS Office 2003. After the upgrade, everything else continued to be 2003 with the exception of Outlook of course. Installation was tedious and took a long time, but that's nothing new with Microsoft products these days - going through that process is like attempting to own Fort Knox!

However, once installed, I was pleasantly surprised and really appreciated the improved functionality of the ribbon with all the functions that before were somewhat hidden in conventional drop-down menus. I also really like the new To-Do Bar that can be expanded and collapsed and another of my favorite things is the new and improved color coding by category and flag. So far so good.

Just as I began to enjoy the new OL 2007, I had to realize that with this stand-alone product the devil is in the detail:

My biggest aggravation is that Outlook 2007 as a stand-alone version has limited functionality. After searching the internet high and low for why all of a sudden my spell checker did not work anymore (I frequently switch between two languages when writing emails and very much depend on this), I finally found a White Paper MS published with a neat list of what all does not work in Outlook 2007 when Word 2007 is not installed. They call the chapter "Experience without Word 2007 installed". Amongst the functions not available are:
- No auto-formatting for bullets and numbers;
- No support for inserting and working with tables
- No background spell-checking
- No Thesaurus
- No grammar checker
- No auto-text (so where before, my name auto-completed when typing it, it now does not anymore)

Wow! A product that they sell for well over one hundred dollars works significantly worse than the older version I had previously installed! In order to get the full functionality, I am now forced to upgrade my entire Office 2003 to the 2007 version - at least another $120, depending on what version of Office I need. Or attempt to uninstall OL 2007 and go back to OL 2003... This quite upsets me, I must say.

Other things that I noticed:
- Sending and receiving email frequently does not work; out of the blue I get send/receive errors. The thing to do then is to go into the Accounts function and use the new "Repair..." button. So far I had to use this three times in about the same amount of days. Apparently in this version, there was indeed a great need for a Repair function that before was not present...
- Another weird behavior: Frequently, the program seems to independently change which email account it uses for sending, even when replying. For example, when I receive an email at my default account, then hit Reply, all of a sudden this mail is then being sent from another account. Very, very strange.
- And lastly a minor observation: The program seems slightly slower, not too much but noticeable on occasion.

As to the Business Contact Manager, I must admit I have not gotten around to trying it - I was far too busy with all the things mentioned above and will probably uninstall Outlook 2007 soon.

In summary in my opinion, this whole thing is an aggravating marketing gimmick by Microsoft - sell Outlook 2007 as stand-alone, but basically force the user to upgrade to Office 2007 if he/she wants functionality that was previously available in Outlook 2003.

Bad, really, really bad.

15 of 15 found the following review helpful:

They could have done much better Jun 09, 2009 By Stephen E. Covell
I have been running Outlook 2007 with BCM for about 6 months for a law practice and financial advisor practice. At first, it was great.

The only problems you really notice at the beginning are the fact that the BCM portion of Contact is cobbled on to Outlook. It is not at all integrated or done well. The next thing you notice is that having to install and run Microsoft SQL is a resource hog and probably gross overkill for most users. There are also horrible problems getting the database shared with other users on a network. If you have Vista and XP machines trying to use the database, you might as well give up.

But here is the kicker, and the reason I went back to using Outlook alone: nothing is compatible with the SQL files generated by BCM. Once I got an iPhone and wanted to use all the nifty apps that let you do automatic updating with Outlook, it became painfully obvious that I could never have any integration since nothing syncs with the SQL files. All of these programs sync with the standard Outlook PST files.

So, I eventually had to import the BCM database into regular Outlook format (losing a lot of info along the way) so that I had something standard that nearly every other program can sync to. Another example of how BCM is cobbled on to Outlook. The SQL files and PST files are not even compatible within Outlook in any meaningful way! You just sort of have to choose which you are going to use.

I think most people are going to discover at some point that the cobbled-on, resource hog, non-compatible with anything, that is BCM is a losing proposition. Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit of time and energy to discover this.

14 of 14 found the following review helpful:

Outlook and BCM do not share contact information Nov 11, 2008 By W. Linstrom
Outlook with Business Contact Manager is a misnomer. BCM is in reality a bolt-on application that works alongside Outlook with a similar file structure. This would be a fine arrangement except that Outlook and BCM do not integrate together. For example, contacts with the same name in both Outlook and BCM are different contacts and do not share information nor do they synchronize in any way. I use a hosted Outlook Exchange service that keeps my desk and mobile email and contacts synchronized. When I moved a contact from Outlook to BCM I lost visibility of that contact through Exchange and the contact became visible only through my desktop. This is an unacceptable backward step. I just wasted the hundred bucks I spent on the Outlook with BCM application. As best I can tell, the best contact manager/CRM systems are now the web 2.0/hosted applications such as Salesforce, Zoho, Sugar, etc. I suggest using one of them. Good luck.

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