How do I keep attachments in Business Contact Manager?

[Guest]

After I link email messages in Outlook to a Contact or Account in Business
Contact Manager I want to delete them in Outlook. Otherwise I will have an
unlimited number of messages. When I do that, any attachments to the message
are deleted in BCM. How can I keep the attachments in BCM without keeping
the message in Outlook?

 

[Luther]

The short answer is you can't. BCM does not support attachments.

 

[mrtimpeterson via OfficeKB.com]

The longer answer is that linked items can be "attached" to BCM records but
you have to do a few things manually to acheive this. It helps to remember
that BCM is an add-in to the native Outlook app and these 2 programs have
separate data stores. Because they are designed to share a common interface
and appear as one program, this can be confusing. An email is a native
Outlook item and is stored along with any attachments within the pst file.
When you delete the email from the Outlook pst BCM does an automatic rewrite
of the email message body text only into a Business Activity Note record
where it is now stored within the BCM MSDE db instead of the pst. This newly
rewritten BCM item appears similar to the old pst email item but it does not
include the rewrite of any attachments into the BCM db.

Going back to your stated example where you want to delete old emails that
have attached documents would involve the following:

-Before you delete an email from Outlook, remove the document that is
attached to the email first and save it in your windows folder structure.
-Manually create a new link between this former email attachment now saved in
your windows folder and whatever BCM record you wish to attach it to. Use
the BCM document link facility to do this.

Only the link will be maintained "inside" the BCM db to the document which
still resides "outside" of the db.

It is too bad that there is not more clear instructional guidance provided
for users to understand how and why this works with respect to this common
email situation that you have originally posted about.

-THP