Consolidated issues

[Ian]

Firstly, please don’t get me wrong here. I really want BCM to work for us as
I think the concept is great. I have been running and using BCM every day for
a year or so.

I run a business and I can’t seem to achieve some fundamentals that I hoped
I could. A few of the issues I have (in no particular order) are;

1. Follow up flags don’t seem to function as I would hope (dates, calendar
integration colour coding etc).

2. Adding data in large doses seems very difficult e.g. I currently have to
import accounts, and then import contacts, then manually go into each account
to associate each contact. At 1500 or more of each, this is very inefficient.

3. We have remotely working people and want to be able to merge the data.
Currently we can only overwrite it, thus negating the updates of others.

4. We need to be able to allocate account managers to each account and then
sort the accounts by account manager, priority, interests, requirments etc.

Has anyone experienced these issues or have any ideas if these are likely to
be addressed and if so, when?

Alternatively, is there a way to export all BCM data, accounts, contacts
(retaining the association) and importantly, all contact history notes?

I haven’t gone into detail on each issue but I will gladly do so for each
point in the hope of finding a resolution. As I said, I DO want to make this
work so any advice is much appreciated.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance.

 

[Luther]

Alternatively, is there a way to export all BCM data, accounts, contacts

(retaining the association) and importantly, all contact history notes?

The BCM v2 beta exports and imports all BCM data. It also only imports
an entity if the entity in the import file is more recent than the same
entity inside BCM. This may allow you to update your remote workers
more effectively.

Re #4. Have you tried adding a Category for each manager?

 

[Ian]

Hi Luther,

Thanks for the quick reply. I guess the same old question comes up re. V2, -
timeframes etc?....Any news here?

Re. point 4, I have separated my accounts using categories already in the
following ways:

a) by vertical industry (e.g. software house, finance, retail etc).
b) by their status with our company e.g. “prospectâ€, “customerâ€, “partner
companyâ€.

Many accounts therefore have more than one type of category applied to them.
When I look at a list of accounts viewed by category, many accounts naturally
appear twice as they are in more than one category. If I then add another
category for account manager, this will add another element to the sorting
issue.

I guess what would be ideal is to have 3 or 4 customisable fields by which
you can search and sort, similar to having say, 3 or 4 category type drop
downs, This way we could say “show me all of Dave’s prospects in X industry
with an interest in Yâ€. – and view the list easily.

I hope I’m making sense?

 

[Luther]

Categories are not an ideal solution, and BCM has no improvements over
Outlook.

I suggested they add an Assigned To field in the next release, but I
don't know what will come of that.

I received a CD with gold release of v2 last month (it was delayed
while an MSDE service pack was finalized) and to the best of my
knowledge there were no ship stoppers with build. It's probably gone to
manufacturing. Someone told me it would be downloadable by registered
users and if that's the case, it should be available real soon now. Of
course, that's all speculation on my part, but I really believe that
the people saying it won't be available until the fall are confusing it
with the combined accounting package that Microsoft has been talking
about.

 

[Ian]

I have download and installed V2.
I chose to install as a fresh database.
I can’t seem to import the .bcm file which was my backed up data.
I just get a message saying “Some errors occurred while your data was being
importedâ€. “Error importing dataâ€

Any ideas?