I knew for some time what Business Contact Manager was; well, that it existed anyways…but had never used it.  When our sales started picking up, no one wanted to find themselves relegated to “excel-hell” via duplicate lists and outdated data- so we researched and integrated BCM.

To use Business Contact Manager, you need to have someone capable of getting it installed.  I’ll tell you now that it was not an easy task to get implemented between eight Vista workstations; some in need of an offline SQL database that synchronizes upon reconnect to the office network.

Once you get it installed, you must share the database from a machine that preferably stays in the building all of the time ( we use our front desk machine).  To share it, one must create the database from the list of “business contacts”, and then go through the database sharing menu of BCM to add users and issue remote passwords.

Once shared all around, I found the hard way that BCM causes errors with some Microsoft Office Suite applications.  “Office application verion does not match”…it’s almost enough to make you give up.

Some quick work led me to find this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935569 which issues an update for BCM that fixes the error.

I will keep this up to date since we got past our testing period and are in the initial month of actual use by sales staff.

-Clifton Gilchrist - Operations Director / IT

Tags: "Office application version does not match", BCM, Business Contact Manager, Outlook 2007