Use email address to link message to Business Contact / Account

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Guest

Hi All

I am evaluating BCM to assist our business unit and see BCM having great
potential. We would like to use BCM to track our project business related
email and phonecalls but not for sales purposes. (so not strictly the
intended use).

However, it would appear that messages etc can only be automatically linked
using the email address. This results in a problem where the same message
will appear in two separate accounts if the same business contact (ie their
email address) is associated with two accounts (for example a shipping agent
or associated supplier).

Is there a way of linking using other fields where the business contact has
a unique identifier for each account or maybe have I used the program
incorrectly?

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...-54da9c87463d&dg=microsoft.public.outlook.bcm
 
Business Contacts can only be parented to a single Account, so the
Contact's parent field is your unique identifier for each account.

Automatic linking is done when an email arrives in Outlook inbox. I'm
not sure what you mean by automatic linking by another field, because
the email address is the only identification of the sender you'd expect
to find in legitimate emails.
 
SC,

The only way I can think of that a linked email can appear simultaneously in
2 different Account records is for you to have more than 1 recipient in
either the To or the Cc field. As Luther indicates above, each Business
Contact is limited to only being able to be linked to 1 Account (Parent) in
BCM. These 2 different Business Contacts would obviously thus have separate
Account records that they are linked to so the linked email to both
recipients will display also in their respectively linked Account Records.

It may be helpful to review the section in the BCM Quick Start guide that
outlines how various items are linked to each other when using BCM. Since v1,
BCM for some reason has maintained the limitation of a "1-to-many"
relationship requirement between the Account Record to each Business Contact
Record and I am hoping that this will change soon to accomodate numerous real
world usage scenarios that are so very common to many business relationships.

-THP
 
Given that Business Contacts and Accounts can have 3 email addresses,
if an address is repeated in two Accounts or children Contacts, then
it's possible a single email will get linked to multiple Accounts. I
don't know if BCM links to all items where the email matches, or just
the first it finds.
 
Thanks for everyone's help.

I agree that adding the same 'contact' to two accounts is probably a bit
unusual. We do however use a number of third party providers assisting us to
service a number of our accounts.

I recreated the scenario with Account 1 and 2 and then a single business
contact for each account , business contact 1 and 2. To understand what was
happening I made their name 1 and 2 but have the same email address (of
course in real life the name should be the same).

An email to business contact (say #1) will appear in both account 1 and 2.
When viewing Account number #2 BCM lists the link as being business contact
#2 but when you open the message the email is actually to contact 1.

Sorry a bit hard to explain without screenshots but easy to reproduce.

I will have to trial BCM on a couple of our accounts and see how we go, but
I think we will keep searching for a more robust solution.

Thanks again

SC
 
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