Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007

It's been awhile since I posted. I've been spending all my time looking for a new nanny, but I think I've found someone who will last for awhile. (More on that in my other blog).

At work I've been busy learning Business Contact Manager for Outlook. It came with my free copy of Office and since I already had it, I decided to give it a try for contact management.

My process so far: Every time someone registers on my website, I get an e-mail notification with their contact details. I then use anagram (a very cool tool by Textual to create new Outlook items like contacts and calendar events from highlighted text) to create a new Outlook contact from the information. Then I go to my website to see what programs that user has downloaded and then set categories on the contact to indicated which of the 2 free programs they have downloaded, and another category to indicate whether they have indicated they want to receive notifications of updates and new product offerings. I've had well over 200 people register on the site that I've created contacts for, so the contacts are quickly adding up. (There is also a backlog of registrations I haven't added.)

This process has a couple of limitations. One is that I cannot easily find all of the people who downloaded product X AND want to receive product updates. There is also no way to add new fields for storing things like the username they created for the site (that data just goes in the comments field) and there is no way to track sales once I get to that point.

This is where Business Contact Manager (BCM) comes in. It's nice because I already use Outlook and it is built right in. I bought myself a book to learn more about it - Business Contact Manager for Dummies. I have found it very helpful for looking up things I need to learn, rather than sitting down and reading right through it.

So far, I have customized my contact form by adding checkboxes to indicate if someone wants product updates and whether or not they have downloaded the free products. Then I added a number field for tracking the number of licenses they buy of my first product (hopefully coming out in a couple of months). I also added a text field for their username.

The next step was to drag all of my regular Outlook contacts into my Business Contacts folder. This turns them into business contacts with all of the extra information that comes with BCM, plus my custom fields. I also was able to set up anagram so that new contacts I create will automatically be created as business contacts.

Now, I need to go through all of those existing contacts and set the new fields based on the categories I had set. So if the Update category was set, I need to check the box for wanting product update notifications. I also need to take the username from the comments box and put it in the new text box. And there are a few other fields I need to set.

I have already created custom searches so once my contacts are set up correctly I can quickly find everyone who wants update notifications AND has downloaded product X. So when the paid version of product X comes out, I can quickly find those contacts and send an e-mail announcement to them. (I think this also might be what is called a "marketing campaign" - something BCM can help manage).

The next problem is that I have so much to do, I haven't found the time to go through all those contacts to set the new fields and I've had nearly 100 new users register in the past 6 weeks that I haven't even created new contacts for. So I've been trying to figure out how to share my BCM database so I can find someone to help me out (my niece or nephew perhaps?) Although I'm hoping that I can share the database over a VPN connection (so someone can work from home, or a dorm room), I first tested it out with my old laptop. My Dummies book came in handy, but I followed the directions there and when I went to connect to the shared database from my old laptop, I got a message that it couldn't connect to the database.

So I searched online and found lots of suggestions about making sure my BCM computer was online (duh!), making sure my Windows Firewall settings were set properly, and several other things that did not help.

Finally, I wondered if it was just using the default login for that computer to try to connect (I had to add specific users to BCM when I set it up to be shared). I have Liz as a user on my computer and my login on the old laptop was Liz. But I didn't have a password on the laptop and I did have a password set for user Liz on my computer. So in desperation, I went to my Control Panel on the old laptop and changed the password for my Liz login. Lo and Behold! Now I was able to connect to the shared BCM database. How is it that no one has come across this simple problem before?