Sub-folders in BCM

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Guest

Good Afternoon,

We are running Office Small Business (as we are a small three man office),
and we love our BCM. It works great with vista and It works great with our
little network, althrough, two things:

One; Is there ANY way to share a calander like a database? This is KILLING
us as we need to be able to use one calander of three computers but can't.

Two: Is there ANY way to create folders or sub folders in BCM, i've been
asked to look into loading invoices from 2006 in the system, and we just
create a contact and attach the invoice as a file. BUT I need to have a
seperate file for 2006, as the information might be overwhelming to my little
group of plumbers.

Thanks for all of your help in advance, and anxiously awaiting your answer.

-Dallas
 
Dallas,

I am not a tech expert but I believe your best solution may of course involve
the use of an Exchange server networked among your small office users.
Exchange can be in use for sharing your standard native Outlook data items
via public folders. The Outlook client configured within an Exhange
environment is allowed to co-exist with the use of the BCM db add-in.
Exchange does not share any of the BCM data though. If the costs for setting
up an Exchange server are too high you could also consider a hosted Exchange
service for a monthly fee.

If you are like me, Exchange might seem like overkill. There is good news
however. Slipstick Systems is an Outlook resource website and they have
links to several non-exchange alternative Outlook solutions. Go to:
http://slipstick.com/calendar/scheduleall.htm. Scroll down along the right
side. I have heard good things about the Calendar Browser solution. There
are several options there to research and try out.

Best wishes,

-THP
 
Ya, thanks that sounds great! i'll try that, and idea on the folders?? that's
the killing me part :(...

-Dallas
 
As far as I know I believe that you are out of luck with your wish to create
sub-folders in BCM. The BCM add-in data is stored in a separate db from the
rest of the native Outlook data. BCM shares the same UI with Outlook and
appears to be one and the same app however, the functioning structure of this
app as designed has some built in, shall we say..."limitations." It was
possibly thought that this type of design element would be too complicated
for the average small business user to handle. :)

-THP
 
Additional thought:

If you are networked in a peer to peer configuration you should be able to
just enable permissions for the others to access a 2006 invoice folder on
your windows directory without trying to have it be "inside" of either
Outlook or BCM. This invoice file size sounds quite large. The links to
this type of outside data file are all that can be stored within the BCM db
anyway which of course you already know of from your original post.

-THP
 
Dallas:

I wonder if you could use Search Folders to show all the invoices you've
attached to contacts. It allows you to specify History items as the source
of a folder and depending on how you've named or located the files, this
might work.

Another idea is integrate with MS Office Accounting and make them real
invoices, then you can access all them from within a business contact.

HTH,
Lon

___________________________________________________________
Lon Orenstein
pinpointtools, llc
(e-mail address removed)
Author of Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies
Author of the eBook: Moving from ACT! to Business Contact Manager
800.238.0560 x6104 Toll Free (U.S. only) +1 214.905.0401 x6104
www.pinpointtools.com
 
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