Share Sales Items between Acct 2007 and Business Contact mgr

[Marc McMillin]

Seems VERY counter intuitive to allow Products and Services to be added to an
Opportunity in Business Contact Manager and then have the ability to convert
to a Quote, Sales Order or Invoice and have then come over as line item
COMMENTS.

This feature would be much better if these Items were part of the shared
database when BCM and Acct 2007 are "integrated"
--
Marc McMillin
McMillin Consulting
(866) 629-5016

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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...-8c8464808d33&dg=microsoft.public.outlook.bcm

 

[Avihai Lifschitz [MSFT]]

Hi Marc.

This is indeed the case for Products and Services that were added thru the
BCM UI to the BCM Products and Services list. We are now looking at
improving this area for the next release and I will add this as a feature
request. Thanks for the feedback!

Please note that you can add products from Microsoft Office Acconting 2007
(under the "Items" list) and then import into BCM from the BCM Products and
Services dialog box. If you use these imported items in your opportunity and
then convert to a Quote, the items are populated as native MOA items and not
as comments.

Avihai.

 

[steve99-]

Hi Avihai,

I share Marc's problem and agree with you solution of syncing the products
from MOA but there is one BIG problem when doing this...

When you add a MOA product or service to an opportunity in BCM it does not
allow editing of DESCRIPTION, UNIT COST or UNIT PRICE...

why are these fields now read only, especially as when you convert that
opportunity to a quote the are editable..

This is the only thing left thats stopping me using BCM and MOA combined as
I can't put the correct pricing into BCM.

Any help will be much appreciated

Kind Regards

Steve

 

[Luther]

Hi Avihai,

I share Marc's problem and agree with you solution of syncing the products
from MOA but there is one BIG problem when doing this...

When you add a MOA product or service to an opportunity in BCM it does not
allow editing of DESCRIPTION, UNIT COST or UNIT PRICE...

why are these fields now read only, especially as when you convert that
opportunity to a quote the are editable..

This is the only thing left thats stopping me using BCM and MOA combined as
I can't put the correct pricing into BCM.

Any help will be much appreciated

Kind Regards

Steve







- Show quoted text -

I think part of the reason for these restrictions is that MOA is very
particular about who has permission to edit what. They're dealing with
money after all. BCM allows any user to edit anything, and MOA allows
any BCM user to edit contact information, but not price information.

There's an impedence in the two apps' permission models.

Outlook is a single user application. You don't configure Outlook with
users and permissions--what user can edit what. BCM as an add-in in
Outlook follows that model. BCM allows a user to share their BCM data
with other users because users asked for that feature. But if you want
to control users' roles and permissions, then you need an application
designed to support that; e.g. MSCRM. There are trade-offs, especially
in ease-of-use. If you have Outlook, you can install BCM and start
using it immediately. To install and use MSCRM you have to read their
manual and plan your deployment.

MOA has roles and permissions; employees can't see or edit each
other's salaries, and so on. So when MOA integrates with BCM, MOA only
allows BCM users to edit certain fields.

Now arguably, if MOA is deployed with a single user, then they could
allow that user to change any field from BCM, or they could write an
Outlook add-in that adheres to their permissions models and lets users
change price information in Outlook, but they haven't done that yet.