BCM inferior product for sales

[Guest]

I purchased Office 2003 because of the promise of a sleek, integrated into Outlook, business contact manager/sales opportunity manager. Here are my gripes so far

1. The software is slow as the dickens. I have a 1 ghz PIII with 256 Megs of RAM and 3 gigs free disk space. I don't know what's going on under the hood, but switching, for instance, from the Inbox to the BCM Business Contacts folders takes forever.

2. You cannot modify any of the standard forms

3. Unless you want to screw around with code and settings in your computer's registry (and even then it may not work), you cannot use custom forms as your default forms

4. No summaries or totals in the Opportunities folder

5. You have to jump through hoops to access your html email templates

6. No integration between email templates and contacts, i.e. you can't have fields in your email automatically populated with data from the contact you're sending it to.

I should have known better than to buy a version 1.0 product from Microsoft. What can I say, I was convinced by your marketing materials at microsoft.com that you had a really sophisticated sales tool here.

 

[Prilosec]

Too late now (unless you are within the MS 30 day refund period), but in the
future check here (or other Outlook groups) first. All your problems have
been enumerated repeatedly here for months. Plus--there are many more than
you listed! BCM is not a good CRM in its present form. They had some good
ideas, but way too many oversights and even diminshed function from "plain"
Outook (no way to synch "journal" or "history" with a PDA, for example).
This is really very limited CRM software, designed to use "as is" on one
standalone desktop computer by one person. If that's you, then you are
lucky, but it's not me.

I purchased Office 2003 because of the promise of a sleek, integrated into

Outlook, business contact manager/sales opportunity manager. Here are my
gripes so far:

1. The software is slow as the dickens. I have a 1 ghz PIII with 256 Megs

of RAM and 3 gigs free disk space. I don't know what's going on under the
hood, but switching, for instance, from the Inbox to the BCM Business
Contacts folders takes forever.

2. You cannot modify any of the standard forms.

3. Unless you want to screw around with code and settings in your

computer's registry (and even then it may not work), you cannot use custom
forms as your default forms.

4. No summaries or totals in the Opportunities folder.

5. You have to jump through hoops to access your html email templates.

6. No integration between email templates and contacts, i.e. you can't

have fields in your email automatically populated with data from the contact
you're sending it to.

I should have known better than to buy a version 1.0 product from

Microsoft. What can I say, I was convinced by your marketing materials at
microsoft.com that you had a really sophisticated sales tool here.