Business Contacts and Outlook Contacts

[David]

I have a customer who works mainly away from base on a laptop. Both this and
his base PC are using BCM and I need a way to make his Business Contacts
available on the Laptop offline when he is travelling and cannot establish a
remote desktop link from the laptop to the base PC. The BCM data resides on
the base PC. Added to the complexity is an Ericsson P910i mobile phone which
is used to store and add contacts whilst travelling.

Scenario:

Whilst travelling and with no RDP connection a contact is added to the
mobile phone and synchronised with the laptop contacts (the Erisson PC Suite
willl not synchronise with BCM only with Outlook) or a contact is added
directly to the laptop.

On return he connects the Latop to the base PC and manually copies new
additions from the laptop Outlook contacts to the now synchronised BCM
contacts on the laptop thus updating the base PC. The base PC is backed up
regularly and is ths considered the 'master'.

Clunky and error prone. Is there anyway to either make the BCM contacts
available off line on the laptop thus obviating the need to copy and paste
when connected or to automatically synchronise the Outlook contacts on the
laptop with BCM when the laptop and base PC are connected (either locally or
via RDP) please?

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

I have a customer who works mainly away from base on a laptop. Both this
and
his base PC are using BCM and I need a way to make his Business Contacts
available on the Laptop offline when he is travelling and cannot establish
a
remote desktop link from the laptop to the base PC. The BCM data resides
on
the base PC. Added to the complexity is an Ericsson P910i mobile phone
which
is used to store and add contacts whilst travelling.

Shift the BCM DB to the laptop and sync the PC to that. In other words, make
the laptop the base system.
Upgrade to a Windows Mobile 2003SE device (not 5.0) to keep BCM contacts on
the handheld.

 

[David]

Leonid

Thanks for the prompt response and a good solution too. Just one futher
question if I may: Is there any way to keep the BCM Contacts available on a
disconnected machine. At present when the laptop is disconnected it does not
have access to the BCM Contacts DB.

 

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

Leonid

Thanks for the prompt response and a good solution too. Just one futher
question if I may: Is there any way to keep the BCM Contacts available on
a
disconnected machine. At present when the laptop is disconnected it does
not
have access to the BCM Contacts DB.
--

As I mentioned, you'll want to move the database to the laptop. That would
remove this scenario.

BCM works very independently of regular Outlook.

I will be trying some tricks with it when I get some time. One of those
tricks, for me, is to see what happens if I setup a merge replication
scenario. I love the product, but I have extremely limited time to spend on
fun lab projects due to very rapid business growth in the last quarter. As
soon as one of my paying clients decides they want to try that, I'll
probably magically find the time. ;-)

By the way, CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition does have an offline mode. If you
like BCM, you'll be shocked at CRM 3.0's power.