Video: Extending Business Contact Manager
Business Contact Manager (BCM) is Microsoft’s attempt to a nice CRM tool to the small and medium-sized business market. It has its pros and cons but overall, I think they succeeded.
Business Contact Manager resides within Microsoft Outlook, which makes perfect sense. Using BCM, users can seamlessly track leads, projects, employees, marketing campaigns and more.
To my developer-eye, just looking at BCM makes me want to tinker with it to figure out how Microsoft built it. There is lots to like…from the custom ribbons….to the customized Outlook forms…to the connection with SQL Express. There are some good ideas in BCM that can provide inspiration for your custom Outlook solutions, which brings me to the point of this introduction.
Users of BCM tend to like it because it gives them a system. However, it doesn't take long form them to discover BCM's shortfalls (e.g. how it doesn't do what they want it to do). This is a great opportunity because, with ADX.NET, you can extend BCM to provide the functionality your users deem to be missing.
This video explains how to create a Microsoft Outlook 2010 add-in that extends Business Contact Manager 2010.
This video was captured in Visual Studio 2010 with Add-in Express for Microsoft Office and .NET.
2 Comments
Dear friend Ty Anderson,
Thank you very much for your informative workout. But these codewritings are difficult for me cause i don’t understand programing. Is there a program writes the codes for me to customize Microsoft BCM forms ? I need more customization. Thank you very much.
By the way, I live in Istanbul/Turkey. If you have sth. to do with Turkey and need help, I will help you if not hard.
Kind Regards,
Nebih Erzorlu
Hi Nebih
I recommend this blog post:
BCM 2010 Customization 101: Form Customization
Ty