Creation of forms in Business Contact Manager

[Alan]

I am trying to build a CRM system to manage my contacts and sales cycle in a
small business. I have reviewed the functionality offered by BCM and find
that it meets 99% of my workflow needs. Where it falls short is that it
doesn't enable me to capture all the static data I want on my contact or on
my opportunities.

I have had a look at how you can create user defined fields and associated
forms within Outlook and have found that it meets my data capture needs. Is
there any way in which I can combine the ability

I would like to know if it is possible to blend the flexibility of Outlook
with the workflow capabilities of BCM. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Alan

Alo

 

[Tim P via OfficeKB.com]

Alan,

I have cut and pasted below comments that I posted on a similar topic thread
and thought it may clarify with your comments here. In my opinion, you may
need to (unfortunately) go with the more fully featured Microsoft CRM
application in order to meet that remaining 1% of your "workflow needs" as
you describe them here.

-THP

Old Post:

The non customization of forms within BCM is completely inexcusable for this
application to fully meet the most basic of needs for most users and
unfortunately continues to annoy so many users. While Sue Mosher's link to
Patricia Cardoza's instructions above are well intended to be helpful this
route seems like a risky ride on the Beta experimental work around roller
coaster with a likely guarantee of error messages and subsequent data loss
related headaches. There is probably a good reason why forms customization
is not officially supported and that is simply that this feature (by design)
is not intended to work. Why should end users be left to their own devices
to try to concoct such attempted solutions around such an ill thought out or
intentional oversight?

For anyone still wondering, BCM is a distinctly SEPARATE (though similiar in
appearance) add-in database application to Outlook. It has different and
more limited functionality as compared to using regular Outlook by itself.
Things like contact photo fields and customized forms and fields layout
customization are NOT currently designed to be available in the BCM record
items eventhough they are somewhat available in Outlook. These limitations
are the current state of reality with BCM and it probably serves users best
to remain well aware of this fact so as to proceed accordingly with either
adapting to, or abandoning BCM depending upon what your needs are and the
trade offs with what you can live with in regard to these current limitations.


-THP