Excellent business management software | Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager

Outlook 2007 | Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager

software:


	• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager Windows \| Microsoft Software, 2008 average customer review:based on 47 reviews view larger image
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Meet or beat the recommended HW minimums

I installed Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager on a Windows XP machine with a 1.6GHz processor and probably the minimum RAM recommended. The rest of my Windows Office suite is Office 2000. We used Outlook Express before installing this upgrade. I've only just begun to work with the contact manager aspect of the software since I'm wary of it. In the past I've hated ACT and QuickBooks Customer Manager, so I'm feeling very hesitant to invest time and effort importing data.

Pluses: I found the installation to be straight-forward and reasonable in time length. I was very impressed that Outlook imported not only our Outlook Express address book directly (didn't have to export from Express and then import), but also flawlessly imported the mail messages and the folders that were existing in Express. This had been a major concern, and there was no problem whatsoever.

Minuses: Outlook 2007 is a resource hog. Not only does it run slowly, but other programs chug or crash. I've had quite a few Word 2000 crashes when Outlook 2007 was closing or loading. Learning curve for the new interface is pretty steep when moving from an Office 2000 Outlook Express to 2007 Outlook. This is to be expected, but should still be a consideration when deciding whether to install this on your computer. For example, the other person who shares this computer is a senior citizen and has been very frusted that she can't find things like saving attachments because the interface is different. We've also had quite a bit of trouble with the account setup process. On the day I installed Outlook, I successfully created the two email accounts (ISP plus web domain email at a different company) and successfully sent and received mail. The next day, we could receive find but not send and the software refused to store the correct password...kept asking for the password every few seconds as it tried over and over to send an outgoing email. It took me about 45 mintues to find a work around, but we'll see if it still works tomorrow.

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Excellent business management software

Since I do not have a Vista machine, I got help from an expert at Microsoft.

It's easy to install if you have Windows Vista. Otherwise, don't use Outlook 2007.

When I installed mine, I have email accounts on yahoo, comcast, other places that my friend Outlook goes out and gets the email so I can manage it all from one place. Great feature.

So Outlook is one stop shopping for many email accounts, but it also helps you keep track of client information, phone calls...all touches.

So in my internal "sales" role, I can see where people are at a glance in the commitment cycle. And I can do marketing campaigns directly from Outlook but I haven't used that feature.

Dislikes... sometimes it's a bit slow to load. I think that's more of Vista problem than anything.

I've been a strong advocate for Outlook. Great program, mature, plays well with other MSFT programs life Office and is the standard throughout businessland.

Sounds like this is stable and ready to use right out of the box -- and that says a lot for any new program

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Outlook 2007

I'm not exactly sure why Microsoft sells this product on it's own. I prefer to buy the entire Microsoft Office bundle; outlook is the office program I use least (except for email). Like others, I find this version of Outlook to be a bit slow. Sometimes I have to wait 20-30 seconds for my email, over an extremely fast internet connection.

However some of the new features are very good, such as exchange server and sharepoint 3.0. At work, sharepoint is used effectively to connect our large work team (consisting of over 150 employees) by posting events, information, honors, and opinions. Another great feature is the ability to share your calender schedule through emails. Another good new feature is the auto-assitant feature, which allows you to send an automated message to people trying to email you when you're out. This feature was available in the previous edition, but now you can program the assistant to come on automatically at certain times (in case you forget to turn it on).

Graphically the layout of Outlook is better in this version, Unfortunately most users won't notice these new features right away, because they are not as obvious as Outlooks pretty new layout.

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Essential tool

Outlook goes from your email to your contact management, allowing them to work seamlessly. But it also has a prioritization feature that lets you set up to-do lists and reminders. The data is easily exported to other Microsoft products. My favorite function, however, is the calendar. This is an essential tool to keep multiple tasks on track.

The addition of the ability to track sales campaigns, add customer ticklers and to-dos, and view a sales pipeline with PROBABILITY is awesome. (I used to do this by hand on a spreadsheet and I had a probability system I worked out that was very helpful to tell my management what sales were going to happen when.) Now, with this software, you can standardize this for your entire salesforce. This can save time on phonecalls to the sales force and all that work of going to each person and getting their updated forecast. One can also assign tasks. Just use Outlook and make sure each salesperson keeps their forecast up to date and standardized along your own forecasting lines of what is probable in what timeframe. You also have the ability to prioritize activities.

For the small business owner who is both salesforce and back office, you can send info to billing software (like Microsoft Accounting.)

All in all, this is a worthy competitor to programs like ACT! and very nice that it meshes with other Microsoft software. I can't think of a better program in this class. An essential.

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An incomplete review

This is going to be an unsatisfactory review, because despite repeated attempts and the assistance of tech support, I was not able to get this new version of Microsoft Outlook to work with my business email server. It worked fine with the previous version of Outlook, but this time around it was a no go.

The program itself seemed okay. But one big drawback is that it appears you need to be running Office 2007 in order to get full functionality out of this program. And I don't care for Office 2007. I'm still running Office 2003 because I much prefer that suite of programs.

So mixed results for me. Not all of them are presumably the fault of the product. But ultimately this wasn't an upgrade that it felt it necessary to make.

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