Office 2007 - Business Contact Manager 2007 for Outlook 2007

Business Contact Manager 2007 (BCM) was finally released on the MSDN subscriber download site this week. As a consultant I have been missing it for the last 3 or so weeks after the release of Office 2007 which did not include of BCM. The only issue I had with the installation was that I needed to un-install the Office Small Business Connectivity components.

An error message with a good explanation. I am assuming these components were installed with Office Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA). As a consultant BCM provides great integration with SBA to track your billable time which then feeds into the creation of invoices. You can use this feature with calendar appointments. BCM also allows you to create projects and associated tasks which can feed into SBA's time entry feature. The integration is excellent for any small business interested in keeping track of employee time against both billable and non-billable projects and tasks.

BCM adds additional buttons (circled in red) to manage time from Outlook 2007.

Comments

[RR]

Hi,

I enjoyed reading your blog. I have a question about SBA 2006 and Tablet PCs. I have an x41 and cannot get SBA2006 to run. The MSDE service will not run. Interestingly, when I install SB2006 on a Virual PC image (XP Pro) everthing works fine. I prefer to use XP Pro native install. Any ideas or suggestions.

I am going to install Office 12 - after I get SBA2006 working.

Thanks in advance

[sskarlatos]

Thanks for your comment, sorry for the delay in responding. I use SQL Server on a different XP workstation and run SBA 2006 in Multi User mode on my X41 Tablet. I had no issues with the installation other than adjusting some settings for my network workgroup since I do not have an Active Directory domain setup.

I would suggest installing SQL Server 2005 express independently (you can download it from here http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/register/default.aspx), making sure the service starts and then installing SBA 2006. Hopefully that should get you going. The integration with Office 2007 is great. SBA 2007, when it is released should offer even more integration.

[myspace design]

Thanks for this great post. Very informative, indeed.