Project Numbers

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bert
  • Start date Start date
B

Bert

I would like to seee an indexed, key field for project numbers in the main
group. Just trying to move from Goldmine to BCM. I realise I can create a
user field for this. But it won't get the same treatment as a key field. I
have been managing projects for a very long time. AEC design construction
field. Project number plus project name is the only way to identify unique
projects. Any idea how many George Washington High Schools there are in the
US? How many projects did I do there, in What year. Project number solves a
lot of issues. Thank for listining.

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Bert,

I couldn't agree more. I am a structural engineer in Brantford, Ontario,
Canada. Everything I work on is referenced to a project number. As a new
year's resolution, I decided to figure out BCM and use it for my projects.
My main goal was to elegantly group my emails by project for searching and
archiving purposes. So far, my impression is that the program is designed to
easily reference everything to an Account rather than a Project - for
instance the auto-linking feature. As far as I can tell, the auto-linking
feature won't work for you or me because we may have umpteen projects from
each client. I need my emails linked to the specific project - not a
specific client! Given that I'm just beginning my investigation into BCM, I
have some questions for you if you have a moment: What has been your
experience using BCM for a project-oriented business like yours? Have you
developed some work-arounds? Are there add-ons available? Or am I barking
up the wrong tree? Should I just give up? Or is there a better program out
there that you're aware of?

Like I said, I'm still early in the process, so I haven't invested too much
time yet. I'm just wondering if I'm trying to force a square peg into a
round hole. Any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated. If
you think a phone call would be faster, please let me know and I'll contact
you via phone. Thanks...

Dave
 
Hi Bert,
You can create a custom text field called projectNumber. Then, when you need
to look up for it, you can go to instant search and search by <value>.

Thanks
Vinit [MSFT]
 
Hi David,
You can link an email to a Business Project using Email Auto Linking. let me
know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Vinit [MSFT]
 
Vinit,

I would agree with you in the strictest, technical sense. However, this
would only be practical if each email address corresponded to exactly one
project. In reality, I have numerous projects with each client. A single
client could email me in the morning about one project and then in the
afternoon about another. How would email auto-linking help me in this
instance? I realized early on that email auto-linking was just not going to
cut it for categorizing my emails by project. So I resolved that I would
have to do it manually...

However, it seems to me that this is severely hampered by two major
shortcomings:

1. The inability to do a batch assign. In other words, why can't I go into
my inbox, quickly select a whole bunch of email messages and then batch
assign them to a single project? This would speed up the process immensely
over assigning one email at a time.

2. The inability to have BCM identify for me those emails that I have not
yet linked to any project. In other words, I would like to be able to
sort/filter/group the messages in my email inbox by the corresponding
project(s) that the emails are linked to. Or at the very least, I'd like to
group them into two groups: those emails that are linked to a project versus
those that are not. It's very important to me that every single
project-related email be linked to its corresponding project. How can I make
sure that none were overlooked without doing very tedious checks? I've tried
every approach I can think of and I simply cannot find an email field that
contains the information I need. Is there not a "linked to" field or
something that can be used to sort/filter/group by? If this functionality is
truly missing, then I'll have to abandon BCM and try another product.

Maybe I'm just missing something. Any assistance you could provide with
this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you...

Dave

Vinit said:
Hi David,
You can link an email to a Business Project using Email Auto Linking. let me
know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Vinit [MSFT]

David Coon said:
Bert,

I couldn't agree more. I am a structural engineer in Brantford, Ontario,
Canada. Everything I work on is referenced to a project number. As a new
year's resolution, I decided to figure out BCM and use it for my projects.
My main goal was to elegantly group my emails by project for searching and
archiving purposes. So far, my impression is that the program is designed to
easily reference everything to an Account rather than a Project - for
instance the auto-linking feature. As far as I can tell, the auto-linking
feature won't work for you or me because we may have umpteen projects from
each client. I need my emails linked to the specific project - not a
specific client! Given that I'm just beginning my investigation into BCM, I
have some questions for you if you have a moment: What has been your
experience using BCM for a project-oriented business like yours? Have you
developed some work-arounds? Are there add-ons available? Or am I barking
up the wrong tree? Should I just give up? Or is there a better program out
there that you're aware of?

Like I said, I'm still early in the process, so I haven't invested too much
time yet. I'm just wondering if I'm trying to force a square peg into a
round hole. Any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated. If
you think a phone call would be faster, please let me know and I'll contact
you via phone. Thanks...

Dave
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
David, when you open an email and select E-mail Auto Link, you can select a
specific project to link that conversation thread to. There are two tabs in
the box that opens, one linking by email address where it automatically links
the conversation to all people it was sent to, but the second tab shows all
your projects and you can link the email to one or more of those. It will
link all emails that come in or go out that have the same subject, including
RE or Fwd ones.

Hope this helps with part of your problem anyway.

Deb Borys
 
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