Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Outlook Business Contact Manager (BCM) Custom Import Tool

BCM is a great tool provided by Microsoft to manage business contacts and vendors. It can be used as a sales tool or to keep track of approved vendors. Most of you probably have this data stored within an ACT! database, an Access database, an Excel spreadsheet or some other format. If you have ever tried to import this data into BCM you'll quickly find that it's not as customizable as it should be.

Now I don't know what version BCM is, I know it was at least around with Office 2003, but it could be improved dramatically. One improvement could be the import tool. My requirement was to import an Access database into BCM into custom fields. The Microsoft import tool did not fit my needs to I wrote my own import tool to do this. I can see from the newsgroup and complaints that a custom import tool may be desired by a lot of people.

If this is the case for you, please drop me a line. I'm more than happy to release the tool I've created so that it may help you. It is easy to custom to fit your needs with a little bit of development.

6 comments:

Denny said...

I am helping a small legal firm migrate from ACT 4.0 (dbf file format) to BCM 2007. They are using a Contact in ACT! to record information that relates to a specific matter (for example, a real development project, or a divorce case). The BCM import tool allows you to import information into Accounts or Contacts, but they want to import information into Projects (matter=project). I am very interested in the import tool that you created, as it appears that it could be of help to me in migrating the firm's data.

Luther Blissett said...

You can find the version of your BCM, and many other applications, in their About dialog box.

Brad said...

I will provide most of the code from my import tool in the coming days. Probably today or tomorrow, I need to take out some customer specific information but will leave in all the important code for you.

Brad

Tightscot said...

sorry to wake up such an old post!

Do you have any ideas as to how i can link business contacts to existing accounts - as part of the import process?

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