Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager

Customer Rating:
Summary: Outlook and BCM do not share contact information
Comment: 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.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Lead a stray
Comment: The business contact manager info on your website did NOT give any idea that one would need to buy a subscription to make the business Contact Manager function.

I NEVER would have paid extra for this feature if I knew it would incur additional MONTHLY costs!!!!

Customer Rating:
Summary: Better Off Staying with Older Version
Comment: I've had the new version of Outlook for a few months now and have been quite disappointed in it's entire performance. I purchased the version with the business contact manager in order to sync with my Quickbooks information. It turns out it only works with Microsoft's "Money" application. So I decided to keep using it and take advantage of the few usable features I found in it.
To my further disappointment my Word 2002 began freezing if I had Outlook open. I finally had to upgrade to the Office Suite that included the Outlook 2007 as well.
But my problems did not stop there I tried using the program to receive my Gmail and after downloading my messages and attempting to answer the program freezes. This is using the IMAP format. I've gone over my settings a number of times and checked out my online Gmail settings as well. It turned out that the bug was improved by eliminating my online Gmail folders then sorting the mail into Outlook folders once I received it in Outlook. I run an Home XP OS on my laptop.
In a nutshell, not enough bang for the buck. Best to maintain older 2002 version or buy the entire suite. It may be pretty, but so was my last useless secretary!

Customer Rating:
Summary: It's OK
Comment: If you don't have IT support, this is a hard product to use. For families or small offices, there are easier-to-use and cheaper options.

But this is the industry standard. It's a fine product. Good news, it's Office. Bad news, it's Office.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Features But Web 2.0 Wins The Day for My Needs
Comment: I have been a Microsoft Office (small company) user for years but have never familiarized myself with the Outlook software. I know many satisfied Outlook users so I decided this year to take a investigate what, if anything, I was missing.

I loaded Outlook 2007 and then played with it. Outlook is all that it is advertised to be "you can effectively manage your sales activities and provide better customer service with contact history, source, status, sales amount, closing potential, e-mail messages, phone calls, tasks, appointments, documents and notes, all referenced in one place." It also has what most previous users may find to be a significant improvement - a new Project Tasks feature which allows the user to assign tasks to others and automatically transfer the task information to their task lists, a To-Do Bar and Outlook reminders. And there are many other touted improvements according to the manufacturers description.

Many of Outlook's tools would have been useful to me in the past but, since I have not used this data management tool, I have little invested and am not wedded to it. I am glad. As a mobile executive, I am committed to Web 2.0 and only want to add those data management tools that are hosted. Desktop based software is obsolete. If Outlook were an Internet hosted application, I would be an enthusiastic user. My rating is based Outlook's features which are exceptional. But, I do not intend to become a user.