Evaluating BCM as a Possible Solution

[Epsilon]

I am helping a small organization (12 users) evaluate options to provide a
contact management capability. They currently use Outlook 2003 on a Windows
XP pro platform. They use a hosted Exchange service. A few fundamental
questions:
1) Is BCM compatible with a hosted Exchange server environment?
2) Is there a practical limit to the number of contacts that BCM can manage?
3) They have no server. So I assume that one user would host the "master"
DB and the others would share the data via a Workgroup connection. I assume
that each user would then have a "client" version of the DB resident on their
machine and could operate in an "off line" mode?
4) With 12 users on line, would the updating process cause any significant
degradation to the network?
5) Does the Activity function capture email/communication from all of the
users to the contact? Or just communication from the "master"?

 

[Mukesh Agarwal [MSFT]]

1. As long as Outlook is connected to Exchange in Cached mode, you can use
BCM in Outlook. Note that BCM datastore is seperate from Exchange store and
there is no datasync between two.
2. It's limited by the size of SQL DB. However, if you have large data set
and large number of concurrent users, the client experience will depends on
the hardware and network speed.
3. Yes, that's how BCM 2007 works.
4. Depends on the network speed and hardware. Note that at 12 concurrent
users you are stretching the limit of BCM.
5. Email from all clients are linked. However, when BCM is shared by
multiple users, automatic link is turned off for privacy reason. Every user
has to check the contacts he/she wants to enable for automatic linking. This
list is stored per user.

 

[william.bicknell]

Hi I am really interested in finding out if BCM 2007 will work for us.

We have SQL2005 on a powerful box.
We have 30 users, 15 of these will be looking up contacts all day
long.

I am running it as a test with little data in it and the initial forms
etc. are slow to open but then the speed is acceptable, will this get
worse when more users try to connect?

Will.

 

[Lon Orenstein]

William:

If you've got SQL Standard on a powerful box, that's step 1. Step 2 is
probably a gigabit network (100mps). Step 3 might be 2GB of RAM on each
workstation. Step 4 could be to have each user work Offline and synch once
per hour. There's not a lot of real world examples like this since BCM 2007
is so new...

HTH,
Lon

___________________________________________________________
Lon Orenstein
pinpointtools, llc
(e-mail address removed)
Author of Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies
Author of the eBook: Moving from ACT! to Business Contact Manager
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